FEBravo Bruno G seems like a hell of a bargain too.
Easily one of the best signings of the summer, if not the best, but it happened because of Joorabchian going over the Newcastle executives to talk to the owners direct at their barbecues.
I just mention it because this is the Berta thread.
With that out of the way, I think Berta is doing a solid job. He's moved on Vieira, Jesus and Nelson. He made a sale with Martinelli, and we knew he'd have that role because Edu got to roll in the fun years of big spending.
At Arsenal we've positioned ourselves as the good boys of the PSR regime. When you hear about a big club questioning multi-club structures or fair-valued transfers behind closed doors or whether it's okay to treat Taylor Swift as football revenue, that's us. The KSE logic is that we've got massive underlying incumbency, so we don't want to reward the nouveau riche.
Those are our constraints. We're in there haggling over £80m or £90m for Rogers because we're looking at our PSR headroom and modelling other clubs based on theirs. And to be fair, we should be haggling. That's £117m—a Tzolis on top of £80m, like a juicy Kalamata olive—that Chelsea paid for the player.
That's because Chelsea and City are the bad boys. They're the disruptors pushing eight-year contracts, trading players like cattle at the annual show, heavying every institution through the courts for years, making football administrators wish they didn't have to get up in the morning. The left hand of a man who works for Clearlake Capital buys his dick off his right hand over a coffee in the morning, then flips it back to his right hand at 3.5% profit when markets are closing.
You might look at City or Chelsea and think "Ooh, they signed Anderson, ooh, they signed Rogers, ooh, they signed Bouaddi" and these are fine footballers. But we can't be City or Chelsea and no more can they be Arsenal. We are incumbent in a way they will not become. Arsenal is an inherently big club in a way they're still not, the same way that has City setting up a trophy museum that looks a bit like the palace for Muhammad's relics in Doha, or Chelsea having seven sporting directors who maintain a special secretary whose only job is to card out the cocaine on the travertine boardroom table, but who still appoint Liam Rosenior.
And so you know, we have Andrea Berta, and he's going to be haggling on a few deals, but it's not necessarily just going to be him that's haggling.
