Arrivezerbi
Roberto De Zerbi's departure from Brighton & Hove Albion is nothing like the shock that some thought it was when it was first announced.
Brighton’s season probably wasn’t meant to end this way. This time last year the sun was shining on the south coast. The Albion were in sixth place in the Premier League and heading for another new summit; not only a highest-ever league position, but also a first ever season of European football. But as the 2023/24 season draws to a somewhat subdued close, the news that Roberto De Zerbi will be leaving the club following this afternoon’s final league match of the season against Manchester United wasn’t quite the surprise that it might have at first seemed.
It’s been reported that the main cause of friction between club and the manager was something that was never going to be resolved in the manager’s favour. According to Andy Naylor in The Athletic (£), “There are irreconcilable differences between the head coach and owner-chairman Tony Bloom about the way the club should operate in the transfer market.” In other words, De Zerbi wanted the club to jettison the model that had got them to sixth place in the Premier League in the first place.
Getting this past owner Tony Bloom would have been an extremely difficult sell under the best of all possible circumstances, but the truth of the matter is that Brighton’s current position has been far from the best of anything for much of this season. They may be going into their final game against Manchester United in 10th place in the Premier League, but after an explosive start they’ve only won seven of their last 37 league matches, which is substantially more like relegation form than anything that would get them back into Europe.
Their European adventure was a similarly mixed bag. For a club on its first European campaign, the appeal of trips to Athens, Marseille and Amsterdam was obvious, and after a slow start four straight wins was enough to see them through to the second round. But a 4-0 humping in Rome effectively ensured their elimination from the competition before the second leg had even begun.
Coming as it did at a point when speculation was starting to rise concerning where De Zerbi might be going this summer, it was a sobering reminder of the gap between the big, established European clubs and those who would seek to join them. Ultimately, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that De Zerbi’s stock wasn’t quite as high as he seemed to think it was.
This wasn’t just a matter of asking for some more money to be spent; it was telling the club to rip up an entire philosophy, and if you’re going to even attempt anything like that you need to make a pretty compelling case to do so. A form guide that looks like the stripes on the sleeves of a limited edition Ajax shirt never felt like the sort of gun you need to bring to a fight like that.
But where do Brighton go from here? There may be some pining to go back to the future with Graham Potter, but the manner of Potter’s departure from the club in September 2022—and in particular the double-dipping of coming back to denude them of their backroom staff, including Bruno Saltor, a former player of such high repute that there was a mural of him adorning the wall of a building in Brighton town centre for a couple of years—makes it likely that this would go down like a cup of cold sick with the substantial proportion of their supporters who still consider him to be a Turbo-Judas.
The early favourite is the Ipswich Town manager Kieran McKenna, who’s caught a severe bout of flavour-of-the-month-itis as a result of taking his team to two successive promotions from League One to the Premier League. But Brighton would almost certainly face stiff competition for his services were they to decide to try and lure him from Portman Road.
It’s been reported that professional human being breakers Manchester United are also sniffing around the staff entrance there. From the outside, were McKenna to leave you’d think Brighton would be the safer bet for him, but it can hardly be said that up and coming managers have never been tempted by the big shiny thing before, can it?
For all the surprise that was expressed on social media when Brighton made their announcement, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is the right time for manager and club to part ways. It might well be that Roberto De Zerbi goes to Old Trafford or slides straight into the head coach’s position at Bayern Munich and ends next season winning the Bundesliga, but that’s really none of the Albion’s concern any more. The one thing that can be reasonably replied upon by the club’s supporters is that there will be a plan and an entire summer to implement. This, it rather feels, is why the club was never going to accede to his demands in the first place.