De Zerbi replacement lined up by Brighton amid Real Madrid links, reveals club chief

Brighton CEO Paul Barber has revealed that the club is “prepared” for the departure of Roberto De Zerbi, who’s been linked with a host of top European clubs since joining the Seagulls.

De Zerbi replaced Graham Potter, who joined Chelsea, in September 2022 and took Brighton to the Europa League in his debut season at the Amex, earning rave reviews for the attractive football his side plays.

The 44-year-old has been linked with AC Milan and Napoli in Serie A as a result, while he’s also been tipped as a possible replacement for Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid and Pep Guardiola at Man City.

And Barber, in conversation with talkSPORT football correspondent Ben Jacobs at the 2023 Soccerex event in Miami, revealed the challenges of keeping players, coaches and other staff at Brighton, explaining that the club has to always “prepare” for them being poached by bigger clubs.

“Good players and good staff will always be looked at by competitors, and we’re prepared for that, we’re realistic about that and we try to plan for those eventualities,” Barber said.

“When we unfortunately lost Graham Potter to Chelsea it was a difficult period, because you don’t want to lose your head coach one month into the season. We always have a small list of coaches that we would look to move to if we had to, Roberto was top of that list.

“So far things have worked really well, we’re enjoying what Roberto is doing for us and what this squad of players is delivering. Roberto has done a fabulous job and I don’t think anyone in world football hasn’t seen the way he plays and the way we play.

“The biggest conundrum with our model is the better we do, the more vulnerable we become, because people look at what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, the people who are doing it for us, and they want them. We’ve seen that many, many times, whether it’s Alexis Mac Allister to Liverpool, Moises Caicedo and Graham Potter to Chelsea, Yves Bissouma to Tottenham, and staff we’ve lost along the way as well, Dan Ashworth to Newcastle –  it’s on and off the field.

“But I take that as a big complement to the progress we’re making and it’s incumbent on me to make sure we’ve got succession plans in place to manage and overcome those bumps in the road, because at the end of the day every football club will lose players and staff at some point, we just have to make sure we’re ready and prepared for it when it happens to us.”

Asked if Brighton already have a replacement in mind in case a big club comes calling for De Zerbi, Barber said: “Absolutely.

“That’s part and parcel of looking at the top 20 or 25 positions in our club all the time and identifying who’s vulnerable to being taken by somebody else or who may simply just want a change in lifestyle and making sure we know if that happened who would be coming in to replace them. That might be an internal appointment or an external appointment, but the most important thing is that we have an idea who it would be.

“There’s nothing worse than suddenly facing a change and then having a gap because you haven’t done the homework to consider who would replace that person. Preparation is critical.”

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