Morning all.
Welcome to a brand new week, and the return of football tomorrow. Mikel Arteta will be holding his pre-Fulham press conference this morning, and I imagine one of the main lines of questioning will be the appointment of Andrea Berta as the club’s new Sporting Director.
It’s been common knowledge for some time, but it was officially announced yesterday. The Italian told the official Arsenal website:
I am thrilled to be joining Arsenal in what is a hugely exciting period for the club. I have watched with great interest the way Arsenal has evolved in recent years and I have admired the hard work that has gone into re-establishing the club as a major force in European football with a passionate following around the world.
The club has great values and a rich history, and I am looking forward to playing my part in shaping a successful future with a great team. I cannot wait to get started in my new role and I am really looking forward to experiencing my first game at Emirates Stadium together with our supporters.
I’ve already written a piece about his ‘to-do list’ (although one thing I should have mentioned in that were new deals for Ethan Nwaneri and Myles Lewis-Skelly), so I think we all more or less understand what he’s got on his plate now that he’s in situ. This is a massive summer for the club on many levels, so let’s wish him the very best.
In The Athletic (£), James has a piece about how the deal went down and the club decided on him as the right man for the job. A key line from that article: “Having been involved in the latter stages of the process, the Arsenal manager favoured the hiring of Berta.”
I guess you could look at this in two ways. One is the idea that the Sporting Director should be in some way distinct from the manager. Like players, that role can be more transient than those at executive level, and thus a degree of separation is important. The other, which is the way I’m far more inclined to look at it, is that if we want success and trophies, then these two men need to be able to work together well.
It doesn’t mean the Sporting Director has to just go along with whatever Arteta says or wants. There can still be a challenging environment where decisions and preferences are rigorously discussed, but ultimately there has to be positive collaboration for it to work properly. Arteta will feel he knows what he needs from the transfer market this summer, and that rightly holds plenty of weight, but after working with Diego Simeone for over a decade, Berta won’t be afraid to bring his own ideas to the table too. Hopefully that dynamic brings out the best of both of them, because if it does the team will be good shape.
Perhaps we’re already beginning to see his influence, as James and David Ornstein report (£) on interest in Sporting Lisbon striker Viktor Gyokeres, a player who has been ‘long been admired by Arsenal’s new sporting director Andrea Berta’. You can see how this one might make a lot of sense. If the ideal candidate is his international teammate Alexander Isak, that’s a deal that’s fraught with difficulty and huge expense. Even if Newcastle finish outside the Champions League places, you’re looking at well north of £120m to even get them to the table, and the reality is that Arsenal have other business to do this summer. Isak would be fantastic, but we need more, so that kind of fee would be an impediment to do that – and would likely require a major sale of someone we’d rather not lose to get those other deals done.
Gyokeres would be available for a lot less than Isak, and while you might hold some reservations about him being able to translate that goalscoring form in Portugal to the much tougher environment of the Premier League, it’s one that ticks a lot of boxes when you look at what we need, his age and experience, physical profile etc. Particularly when you look around at the centre-forward market at this moment in time – pickings are relatively slim out there. But, time will tell.
Ultimately, Arsenal have appointed a hugely experienced Sporting Director, and the importance of that in this day and age can’t be underestimated. I think as a club we took our eye off the ball a bit last summer, and the lack of a senior figure in that role in January had to have had an impact on what we didn’t do, so let’s hope Andrea Berta hits the ground running as we look to make up for two below par transfer windows. Not to mention the other stuff he has to attend to regarding new contracts for key players. Buona fortuna!
Right, I will leave it there for now, but as ever we’ll have an Arsecast Extra for you today. We’ve already put out the call for questions on BlueSky @gunnerblog.bsky.social and @arseblog.com with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re an Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
Pod should be out mid-morning. For now, have a good one – and if you want something to listen to in the meantime, our Andrea Berta preview podcast is available on Patreon here.
