Reminds me of a very recent interview on YT with Butch Harmon (golf)... a guy showed up for a lesson and asked where his launch monitors, cameras, spin assessors etc where, Harmon said 'we have all those'... 'where are they' at which point Harmon pointed at his eyes.
Tony Mowbray will not return to his job as the Birmingham City manager as he concentrates on making a full recovery from illness.
An unnamed club has paid Brighton around £4.3 million as compensation to sign Roberto de Zerbi as their new manager. Everything is already done, but there is "maximum confidentiality" about who the club is. Man United?
I’m gonna guess Bayern. They’re in desperate need of a manager after being rejected from pretty much everyone they’ve approached, including their current coach who they told they wanted him gone in summer but went crawling back when their other targets rejected them lmao.
That does make sense apart from the confidentiality - why would Bayern or DZ insist upon that if it was a done deal? Man Utd still have a manager in place - so the confidentiality would make more sense in that case.
The manager market for the top clubs in Europe isn’t great at the moment. Alonso’s staying at Leverkusen, Nagelsmann and Rangnick have both turned Bayern down to stay with the German and Austrian national teams, respectively.
Could be Chelsea too. Pochettino’s future is massively in doubt according to the tabloids but he’s not formally been sacked yet. Pochettino and Ten Haag are sort of in the same boat.
If the confidentiality part is true then any big club with a manager currently in situ would make sense.
Or is it Barcelona.... Xavi was persuaded to stay on until the ned of his contract in 2025, but then reports came out saying the club had sacked him for discussing the clubs financial plight in a post match interview...
The track record of Brighton - Chelsea hasn’t been great. I mean, Cucarella was probably the best of them and he’s not exactly ripped up any trees for them. Incidentally, and sadly not a transfer to City that’ll happen, but as a fan of defensive midfielders, have you ever watched Marc Bernal play for Barcelona B? I hate the term “wonderkid”, but I was over in Barca visiting my mate a few weeks ago and we took in a game against Lugo (it was like £15 and there were only about 1500 hundred people there, mostly from Lugo). Anyway, at half time we asked the lad next to us (well my mate did, he speaks fluent Spanish and Catalan) who the 6ft odd lad was in the middle. Apparently he’s their best youth product; Marc Bernal is 16, 6ft 3 and he played like he’d already made 200 appearances for the first team. He bulldozed the Lugo midfield, but he is also graceful on the ball, a bit like Zanetti in that Inter side. He’s going to be a hell of a player, I’m calling it now. Barca B’s goalkeeper Astralaga is also fantastic. It’s scary how good their academies are, just shows that playing competitive football instead of reserve games improves development much more than reserve leagues do. The other bloke asked who I supported (in Spanish), he was disappointed when I said Hull City. My friend refused to translate my response.
I have not but from the sounds of it, it seems like La Masia has their Busquets regen Incidentally, I think defensive midfield is Barça’s biggest weakness at the moment. Oriol Romeu just isn’t good enough to play for Barça and Gündoğan isn’t really effective as a sole holding midfielder and he’s wasted there anyway. I think they’ll spend big to sign one this summer.