Champions League final + Berta’s big summer

Morning.

A quick Saturday round-up for you, starting of course with the big game this evening when Arsenal face Barcelona in the Champions League final in Lisbon. It’s a big challenge, but hopefully one we can rise to. Tim and Jason are out in Portugal covering the build-up and the game itself for Arseblog News.

They caught up with a familiar face yesterday for a quick chat:

And as ever Tim has a full preview of the game on site too. I don’t think it’s unfair to say Barcelona are the favourites, look at how they dispatched Chelsea in the semi-final, but as we saw just a week ago in the FA Cup final, the underdog can find a way. You probably need a special moment or two, a bit of luck along the way as well, but that’s football. Let’s keep everything crossed for Renee Slegers and her team.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes there’s a not particularly surprising departure as Jason Ayto has left the club following the arrival of Andrea Berta as the new Sporting Director. It’s fairly commonplace when you’ve overlooked for a big job to take stock and go in a different direction, especially if the new man has his own ideas and wants to implement them.

Obviously the focus right now is on what the Italian does in the transfer market this summer. The onus is on him to do the right deals and bring in the players that will improve this side, but there’s more to the job than just incomings. He’s got to deal with contracts, retention, sales, and when Edu was in situ he had overall responsibility for the men’s team, women’s team and the academy. It’s unclear yet if Berta’s role is the same, or if he’s primarily the transfer fixer, the wheeler and dealer, for want of a better term. And if it is the latter, who takes up the mantle for all the other stuff?

I have to say, I did find it a bit odd that Ayto caught flak for the January window when clearly he didn’t have the authority to do anything without the approval of those higher up. The bigger issue for me was that we lost our previous Sporting Director mid-season after a somewhat unconvincing summer window, and that destabilisation played a big part in January’s inertia. If there’s blame to be apportioned, it shouldn’t be at the guy filling in who can’t really make anything happen, it should be at executive/board level for not seeing what was coming with Edu and how that might impact us.

I don’t have any real issue with the time it took to replace him, because that’s a process you need to go through properly and with due diligence. They settled on Berta, a hugely experienced guy in the football world, even if there must be some difficulties internally in terms of communication as he works to get his English up to speed. Now, we have to wait and see how that pans out, but I’m sure everyone is hoping he’ll be a real success.

What a summer to start, by the way. He has two transfer windows to operate in. The first begins on June 1st and runs until June 10th, primarily to facilitate the teams playing in that abomination of a tournament, Club World Cup, invented solely to massage the ego of FIFA dictator and soulless, avaricious, power-mad, unctuous moral vacuum – Gianni Infantino. A man who looks like someone brought an evil skeleton to life and had just enough skin to cover it, but if you went around the back there are bits held in place by safety pins made from the bones of ancient sacrificed children which were stolen from a UNESCO heritage site in South America. By him. The prick.

The window then closes for a week or so, no idea why, before it opens again for the rest of the summer. Why not just leave it open? Anyway, it’s all for Andrea Berta to do, but probably the first thing is to copper-fasten the deal for Martin Zubimendi, one which the departing Jason Ayto did all the work on. A tap-in, if you will. Let’s hope he doesn’t Ronnie Rosenthal it.

Ok, time to go about my Saturday business which will include some nothing, a bit more of not very much, a probably a smidgen of very little, before the game the kicks off this evening.

Come on Arsenal!

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