As a manager, Roberto De Zerbi comes with two guarantees. The first is passion. A first-pumping, knee-sliding passion for the matches themselves, and also a passion for improvement and ideas. During his time at Sassuolo, he would sleep with a notepad and pen by his bed, in case he dreamed of a new tactical tweak.
The second guarantee is honesty. “I have only one face,” he told Telegraph Sport last year. The Italian is a man who wears his emotions openly and he says how he feels, whether you like it or not. Or, more importantly, whether his bosses like it or not.
On Thursday night, after De Zerbi’s Brighton were thrashed 4-0 by Roma in the Europa League, he made clear his frustrations. With himself, with his players and – most eye-catchingly – with Tony Bloom, the Brighton owner.
“My opinion is that we are not used to playing in this level of competition,” De Zerbi said. “Today we paid for our mistakes, from the owner to the coach and the players.”
De Zerbi had also alluded to underlying irritations last weekend, when Brighton lost 3-0 at Fulham. “I am starting to explain the future in September, in October, in November, in January – especially in January,” he said at Craven Cottage. “Now we can’t change anything.”
It does not require much investigative work to identify the likely reason for De Zerbi’s annoyance. In December, shortly before the opening of the January transfer window, he publicly declared that he wanted “three or four” signings. His squad has been gutted by injuries this season and the 44-year-old evidently saw January as an appropriate time to strengthen.
His bosses at Brighton, however, have a different view of the winter window. As a club, Brighton usually avoid doing their transfer business in January. And so, despite De Zerbi’s wishes, only one first-team signing was made, and he was a player for the future: Valentin Barco, a 19-year-old left-back from Boca Juniors.
Success in football, for any club, is about finding the right balance between the long-term masterplan and the short-term desire to win. It is a particularly pressing issue at Brighton, perhaps more than any other Premier League club, given the ambition and reputation of their manager and the careful strategies of their owner. If De Zerbi’s approach is fire, then Bloom’s is ice.
De Zerbi’s supporters would argue that the Italian has earned the right to be given a stronger squad now. They would say Brighton have an elite-level coach, but that they have not equipped him with the tools he needs following the sales of Moises Caicedo and Alexis Mac Allister. On the other side, there will be many who point to the club’s successful long-term planning as a primary reason for their growth as a club.
At one point, clearly, there will be a divergence of paths. De Zerbi in one direction, Brighton in another. Vacancies are opening up at Liverpool, Bayern Munich and Barcelona this summer, and De Zerbi will have admirers within those clubs. On Friday, it was reported in the German press that De Zerbi is one of Bayern’s preferred options.
De Zerbi will also know, though, that he cannot afford too many more heavy defeats if he wishes to remain near the top of these shortlists. Brighton’s run of injuries has been brutal, and is a legitimate excuse, but the recent results have not been pretty: they have lost five of their past eight matches, including a 4-0 defeat at Luton Town, the 3-0 defeat at Fulham and Thursday’s 4-0 thrashing in Rome.
Within the Brighton fanbase there has been some low-level grumbling over De Zerbi’s constant rotation (this season, he has made a record number of changes per Premier League game) and there was certainly some dissatisfaction with the team’s defending in Italy. At 2-0 down, Brighton continued to attack and play openly. It proved costly.
None of this is to say that the season has been a bad one, or indeed that De Zerbi has any intention of leaving any time soon. Brighton came into this weekend in ninth place, ahead of Sunday’s meeting with Nottingham Forest, and have reached the knockout stages in the first European competition of their history. It has been a historic campaign.
But there is clearly frustration in the air, and indeed the whirring mind of Brighton’s head coach. After such an impressive first season in England, he hoped for more from this campaign. The loss of so many players to injury – including star winger Kaoru Mitoma – has made the task significantly more difficult than anyone expected, and the challenge now is to prevent this season from meandering towards its end. To keep the fire burning
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