Apparently we’re due to be announcing Andrea Berta soon as our next Sporting Director and, I’ll be honest, I don’t really know much about him other than where he’s been in recent years (Atletico Madrid and then before that Genoa), so I decided to have a look at our new ‘main man in a suit’ and then say some words and thoughts about what he might bring to us.

Firstly, you can’t argue that he’s a guy who job hops much; he’s been at Atletico since 2013 and here we are 12 years later and it’s only now that he’s exiting Atletico Madrid. The first thing I often think about when I think about appointments like this – as well in my own company – is “why are they leaving?”. By the sounds of it, he was marginalised after the arrival of a guy called Carlos Bucero as Atleti’s Director of Football and when you have a situation like that, it’s fairly obvious why he wanted out. What’s the difference between being a Sporting Director and a Director of Football? I’m sure when it happened the Spanish Club were more than happy to make distinctions to the press, but as we saw with Sven Mislintat and Raul Sanllehi, these things rarely work out. If I was to guess from a distance I’d suspect the Atletico Madrid hierarchy fancied a change after 12 years and rather than wait until his contract expired this summer, they went for the less subtle approach of basically giving a guy replacing him the job with a different job title.

If that’s the case you’ve got constructive dismissal written all over it in the business world, but in football things cut differently, so I guess an amicable parting came about and his reputation has enabled him to land another top job without being seeing as a troublemaker.

And he has got a decent reputation to be fair to him. He and Diego Simeone have essentially forced Atleti into the top picture for their combined tenures. I remember being a kid and Atletico Madrid were kind of just one of the mid-range teams in the league. When I was growing up it would of course always be Barca or Real duking it out as always, but then you’d had Valencia for a while, there was Deportivo up there, but you rarely saw Atletico Madrid competing for the title. But in recent year’s – probably the last five to ten – they’ve become the de facto ‘third’ Spanish club. A lot of that is on the consistency of Simeone as the man in charge, but you can’t renew a club over a ten year period without having a half-decent Sporting Director. And he’s brought in players like Griezmann, Rodri, Oblak, Luis Suarez and Julian Alvarez, so clearly he’s got a fair few things right over his time.

And that’s clearly the kind of special sauce that The Arsenal want over here in London. I listened to Charles Watts’ podcast yesterday as I was running and apparently he’s been learning English. That’s a very good – and important – sign and with him having effectively been on gardening leave since the beginning of January, if this deal was done a while back, he’s had plenty of time to get cracking on some mega-sessions of Duolingo, so hopefully by the summer roles around he’ll be more fluent than I am with me German.

He’s Italian, so that’s one key language of negotiation he’ll be fine with and having lived in Spain for well over a decade, that’s a big chunk of the European continent covered. Plus he’ll have amassed plenty of contacts over that time and whilst we know that’s not the be-all-and-end-all (just look at the mess ‘Don Raul’ left us in with his flipping ‘black’ book that seemed to be pages and pages of the same name Kia Joorabchian scribbled in it), it will certainly help as the club look towards a quite definitive summer in the Arteta ‘Process’ timeline. We will need him ready to move and move quickly. I suspect Arsenal are taking their sweet time to announce it even though it’s done is probably more down to the fact they’re looking to craft the right message to the fanbase and waiting media. Sporting Director isn’t just the role of the guy who makes phone calls in the background any more; Edu was front and centre with Mikel and Berta will be given similar levels of prominence. He’ll be expected to set out his vision, he’ll be expected to cultivate a good working relationship with Arteta and he’ll be expected to move swiftly and fast on both incomings and outgoings. If there’s one criticism you could label at Edu it’s that for the vast majority of his tenure we weren’t exactly great at selling. The club will be mindful of that and Berrta will need some ‘quick wins’ in the beginning I think.

I suspect that starts with signings though. Come this summer, we need to not be seeing the club waiting until 31st August to do deadline deals like Sterling. We need to have made our moves early to get the new signings settled in and Berta is going to be an important part in showing he can move swiftly. I have hope he can.

I think this is a good move for Arsenal. He sounds like he has the right profile, the right experience, he’s a man well-known across Europe and supposedly there were half a dozen of the top clubs in Europe after him. Now we just need to see him announced and let him get to work.

Catch you all tomorrow. If you fancy joining us at 11am UK time today we’re doing a Fulham preview and talking other stuff on the Same Old Arsenal here.