Meet Arsenal’s New Sporting Director Andrea Berta – Data Analysis

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The spotlight rightly hovers over players and managers.

They’re who we pay to see.

But the architects of sustainable footballing projects often operate away from the floodlights, even away from press conferences, only lurking for the occasional direct-to-camera spot in a documentary, all while managing the untold complexities of modern football clubs.

We supporters confidently opine about who does what and who is to blame.

But the truth is, we often don’t know.

For starters, so much is dictated by the clarity, financial strength, and top-down cultural thrust of the owner and the club itself.

You don’t have to look further than Old Trafford to see how managers with different systems, philosophies, ages, and energies can all feel similarly powerless against the entrenched atmosphere of A Thing.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, as the saying goes.

Beyond that, it’s hard to parse.

Backroom decisions, responsibility, and blame are all wrapped in obscurity — usually by design.

The beauty of this is that, as the executive’s career winds down, each can write their own tell-all book, taking credit for the successes and distancing themselves from the failures.

It’s a foolproof system.

There is just so much mystery involved.

Few exemplify it more than Arsenal’s new sporting director, Andrea Berta.

He isn’t a club legend, a loudmouth agent, or a significant media presence of any kind.

Who Is Andrea Berta?

In La Liga, where more than a few, uh, vibrant characters operate, he has been regarded as “muy cerrado, no le gustan los escaparates” — reserved, uninterested in attention.

A small detail in The Athletic was particularly telling:

Berta’s reduced role over the past 12 months was not so noticeable given he had always kept a very low profile … Berta rarely, if ever, spoke in public — other Atlético figures had that club spokesperson role.

Berta was contacted by The Athletic for this article but declined to comment.

His tenure at Atlético Madrid was not without fanfare, however.

After joining in 2013, he was formally promoted to sporting director in 2017-18, the same year the club moved into the Metropolitano Stadium—two moves that could serve as joint symbols of the next chapter in Atlético’s sporting evolution.

During his full tenure, Atlético have earnestly challenged the two-party system of Barcelona and Real Madrid, winning:

• Two La Liga titles (2013-14, 2020-21)
• One Supercopa de España (2014)
• One Europa League (2017-18)
• One UEFA Super Cup (2018)

…and making two Champions League finals.

In 2019, Berta was named the Best Sporting Director of the Year at the Globe Soccer Awards.

He is now headed to Arsenal.

James McNicholas reported, Berta was clear with those around him that Arsenal was his priority.”

The Emirates would always be an attractive landing spot for sporting directors.

It’s a project on the rise, a lot of messy business is behind us, and the owners have a track record of sporting success elsewhere.

But the vacancy wasn’t without its complexities.

Mikel Arteta’s success has earned him significant decision-making power, and there are several other key voices with overlap.

Meanwhile, Edu left behind a tenure defined by success, progress, and outward-facing alignment, but the next step is more cut-and-dried: big trophies or bust.

That’s an intimidating standard to meet.

So, let’s put one conclusion right up front: Berta is not Edu.

The latter, the namesake of this newsletter, is an Invincible who oozes outwardly warm charisma.

Every club video seemed to feature him putting an arm around a player, welcoming them into the Arsenal grilling community.

The criticisms of his tenure, generally sparse as they were, were never really about personality or “culture” but about outgoings and perhaps velocity of deal-making.

On the other hand, Berta is a quintessential backroom operator — seemingly utterly confident, experienced, and ruthlessly efficient at getting things done but less concerned with making the public rounds.

He is reportedly still gaining comfort in English as a language.

That contrast makes for a straightforward narrative, but the truth is probably hazier.

(We’re working with partial information, as always.)

Sporting directors operate differently from club to club and individual to individual, but however many voices contribute to a decision, the role remains hugely influential.

That final decision — another £5m for Mudryk or not? Another £5m for Rice or not? — isn’t one for the spreadsheets.

It’s just a human making a decision, knowing they may get it wrong.

As I wrote the last time we talked about the topic:

That sense of weightiness and confidence is important here.

While player searches are “deductive,” the final decision is often “intuitive” — and the sporting director is often the one making that call.

As we turn the page, our story has some open threads.

Edu’s chapter left some plot points dangling.

Where is the final phase? Where are the two biggest trophies? When is the next open-top bus parade?

With those questions in the air, the decision around a chosen successor feels all the more portentous.

Indeed, Arteta mentioned a “big summer” ahead.

“The way we planned the five first summers, they were going to be very big and they were going to have different objectives because the turnaround of players and the objective of those windows was going to be different,” he said.

“But now when you are going to go again, we want to increase the depth of the squad but as well we want to increase the quality and the skills that we need to go to the next step.

It’s going to be a big one and we are very excited about it.”

“It’s a big summer for many things because first of all we have to maintain the good foundations that we have and then obviously how can we improve and evolve the team.”

What does a sporting director do?

Back when the vacancy opened, there was another incredible story in the Athletic outlining original candidates for the position. From that article:

Sporting director is, by its nature, a broad position in which practitioners with varying specialisms can excel.

Some are experts at talent identification, be that through traditional scouting or data analytics.

Others are technically minded, spending their time on the training pitch, in close contact with the manager and coaching staff.

Some are executives, some ex-players, some steely negotiators and others focused on building relationships.

Arsenal must determine what blend will most complement manager Mikel Arteta.

While there seem to be many cooks in the kitchen, it has sometimes sounded like a surplus.

Thanks to Edu, one area that has been dramatically streamlined was the “football intelligence unit.”

This was an overhaul of a setup which had become bloated and had a clear separation of power between the recruitment and analytics departments, which had evolved from the club’s 2012 purchase of data provider StatDNA.

Edu sought to make that line invisible, to bring alignment between analytics and recruitment.

Rather than the two separate processes existing on different wavelengths and producing different findings, they were merged into one entity.

It was known as the football intelligence unit.

It may not generate headlines in the way a mega-signing does, but for the people operating within the new structures Edu created and built over time, it gave them a unified way of working that had been sorely lacking.

All of this has featured active involvement from not only Mikel Arteta but his coaching cadre.

Members of Arsenal’s coaching staff have exerted an increasing influence over first-team recruitment.

That came to a head late this summer, when the club found themselves embroiled in a convoluted deal for Joan Garcia, a goalkeeper at Espanyol in Spain’s La Liga.

In the final 48 hours of the window, an exasperated Edu had to extricate Arsenal from that negotiation and pivot to signing Bournemouth’s Neto on loan.

Some of that unwieldiness shouldn’t be immune to critique, and one hopes that Berta can help clean it up.

Because so many others are involved, a sporting director must be able to build consensus and solve problems quickly.

“The hardest part of the job is the expectation to be everything to everyone,” said Matt Wade, former head of sporting strategy at Feyenoord and current assistant GM at Angel City FC.

“You are the leader of a multi-faceted department that covers everything ranging from guys who code data models to medical, performance, operations, coaching, recruitment and player development.

You are expected to have a level of competency across all these things and develop people.”

Victor Orta’s description? “I feel like a bin.”

A hastily made job description

Last time, we created a sloppy list.

Hear ye.

Big picture:

• Identity: Maintaining and driving the club’s overarching long-term footballing strategy, philosophy, objectives, and results — and how they’re measured and communicated. (The ultimate responsibility lies at the top, while the sporting director can be viewed as a chief steward.)
• Collaboration and Alignment: Working with the ownership, manager, scouts, and board to align on strategy, style, and decisions.Maintaining and growing relationships with the footballing world writ large.

Day-to-day:

• Recruitment and Negotiation: Building the squad by identifying, signing, negotiating, and selling players to meet tactical and financial goals. (Renewals are one of the most critical but undercelebrated parts of the role; Nwaneri and Saliba’s contracts, for example, are two of Edus most pivotal deals in the last few years.)
• Squad Planning: Ensuring balance, depth, and long-term development across all positions.
• Youth and Development: Working with the Academy Manager, overseeing the academy and integrating academy players into the first team.
• Hiring & Operations: Identifying and hiring staff, managing facilities, leading budgeting and infrastructure.

Agreement and alignment

The vision of the project can come from the ownership and board.

The long-term footballing philosophy should come from a stable foundation of patient custodians.

The manager should have an active, though not hegemonic, role in all of this.

All parties should come with perfect alignment, but not perfect agreement.

Why?

A Premier League manager shouldnt be deciding valuations, writing Python scripts, or watching 30 matches of some defensive midfielder in Belgium.

With everything else on their plate, some reasonable boundaries should be acknowledged.

Conversely, a sporting director — or, God forbid, an owner or board member — shouldn’t be tinkering with specific tactics or lineups.

With this different information, context, and relationships, there will often be differing conclusions.

That is fine and expected.

But one hand washes the other; if there is a disagreement, the important thing is to disagree and commit.

I said then that I’d look for a Big Person.

Why?

Now that a compelling direction has been achieved, the next chapter can be written.

In those pages, a healthy push-and-pull is not only to be expected, but desired.

With so much empowerment through the org, a strong leader feels necessary — first, to serve as a shepherd of the club’s identity, then to confidently navigate the aims of all parties involved, eliminating any little decision-making inefficiencies that may have cropped up as individual responsibilities have grown.

With mighty capable forces swirling, and the footballing world only getting murkier and more complicated, the situation seems to call for a leader who is worthy of some deference, not by default, but by merit.

One who has huge aspirations.

How might Andrea Berta fit in?

Meet Andrea Berta

Berta’s journey to becoming one of football’s big behind-the-scenes operators wasn’t entirely conventional.

As we learn in a great profile by the local Giornale di Brescia, he once handled paperwork at the Mairano branch of BCC di Pompiano, a modest bank not far from his hometown of Orzinuovi.

The big break came in 1999 when the amateur club Carpenedolo took a chance on the 27-year-old banker.

The decision, based at least partly on the “young man’s deep football knowledge,” turned out to be inspired.

Carpenedolo rose from obscurity, narrowly missing promotion to Serie C1.

Enrico Viola, the former vice-president at the club, recalls:

“The credit for our rise was mainly his: he understood the needs of the group, and he had a great eye for players characteristics.

Carpenedolo was run by a group of entrepreneurs, and thanks to him, we were able to be both successful and sustainable.”

Carpenedolo’s success caught the eye of entrepreneur Tommaso Ghirardi, who’d just bought crisis-ridden Parma in 2007.

Berta was his first call.

In his debut season, Berta helped secure immediate promotion to Serie A, pulling off what his friend and agent Giovanni Branchini described as “a miracle, given all the challenges.”

Football being football, miracles didnt buy much patience; after a rough spell, Berta exited Parma under fan pressure.

Berta’s next step at Genoa saw him quietly dodge relegation battles, mastering the art of survival with low-key signings.

During this stint, he reportedly cultivated a relationship with super-agent Jorge Mendes.

Some reports suggested Mendes’s recommendation proved crucial in 2013 when Atlético Madrid’s CEO, Miguel Ángel Gil, needed fresh eyes on talent; others attributed his arrival to the recommendation of former Manchester United and Chelsea executive Peter Kenyon.

However, it happened that Berta arrived in Spain as an assistant to sporting director José Luis Pérez Caminero.

By 2017, after absorbing Caminero’s wisdom (and probably some of Diego Simeone’s intensity), Berta became Atlético’s sporting director.

It was a rapid ascent.

The partnership with Simeone blossomed while Ángel Gil loomed large over everything.

Under this arrangement, Atlético entered that aforementioned golden age.

Berta’s approach was methodical, closely matching Simeone’s philosophy of signing players known for grit, tactical discipline, and mental toughness — “Cholo players.” That relationship with an opinionated and powerful manager, which thrived for so many years, had no guarantee of success; in job interviews, Berta assuredly brought it up as an analogy for a future arrangement with Arteta.

As one goes through the transfer lists, one surmises that Berta may have started taking a slightly more expansive view as to what a “Cholo player” was, which could have caused tensions.

One example is Arthur Vermeeren, a young midfielder from Belgium, who was a player I was personally enthusiastic about.

He seemed like a typical Brighton-style signing, acquired from Royal Antwerp in January 2024 for approximately €18 million.

Despite his potential, Simeone gave him limited playing time, totalling only 160 minutes across five matches.

He’s now out the door.

In his farewell, Berta remarked:

“Time passes for everyone, and it has been understood that this is the moment to write separate chapters.”

After 11 eventful years, he asked fans simply to remember him as “one of their own.”

The Athletic hinted at diminished responsibilities during his later reign, suggesting a power shift towards new arrival Carlos Bucero, a Mendes associate tasked with revamping Atléticos structure.

According to Relovo, internal relationships had cooled— his previously strong ties with players had waned, signalling the inevitable end of a fruitful but draining chapter.

Gil Marín sought a new direction.