Morning all.
There’s nothing like doing your back in the week before you’re going on holidays, eh?. Thanks for that muscle gods. Much appreciated. I didn’t even ‘do’ anything. I just bent down to get something from a low shelf in the supermarket and when I tried to stand up it felt like something was going to rip in half. Maybe that’s actually doing something. From now on, only middle shelf items will suffice. Or just do all my shopping online so someone else can do the bending.
ChatGPT – “Please get my usual grocery shopping.”
2 hours later: “Here is your delivery of 8 tons of sheet metal, a zebra, 300 bags of flour, and speedboat.”
I might as well blame crappy AI. Just to be clear, I don’t use ChatGPT, although it’s impossible to avoid having this kind of technology foisted on us. Last week I went to Google and typed in ‘Kieran Tierney signs for Arsenal’ as I just wanted to double check the date he arrived from Celtic. What I got was a load of AI generated stuff about how he was a Gemini, which isn’t exactly the ‘signs’ I was looking for.
Remember when you’d search for something and it’d give you results and you’d pick the one that was best? Now they’re trying to figure out some deeper meaning to search requests, and I don’t think anybody asked for that. If I’d asked for ‘star sign’, sure, but I didn’t, and it still gave me a load of crap. We’re 25 years into Google search and it’s mad that it’s a technology that is getting worse, not better. Imagine if every year cars got less fuel efficient and instead of air-bags they shot exploding darts at your eyes if you were in a crash. It’s mental.
By the way, I just looked up today’s horoscope for Gemini, and it says ‘You might be the most popular person in the room! Venus in your 11th House of Alliances is sextiling bountiful Jupiter in your 1st House of Self-Expression, so everyone is more than ready to see the best in you.’
Which sounds like a transfer update these days. The latest from Fabrizio Romano on Arsenal’s pursuit of Benjamin Sesko is quite something:
Anyway, as per yesterday’s blog and the potential timing of Arsenal transfers this summer, there was an update from James in The Athletic about Martin Zubimendi which said the deal might not happen any time soon because Real Sociedad would prefer it to go through in July for accounting purposes. Even if it is just about crossing the Ts and dotting the Is, that sort of makes sense from a business perspective.
I say that knowing nothing at all about Real Sociedad’s accounting situation, but from what I can see after some very specific searching is that for Spanish clubs June 30th is the end of the accounting year. Therefore, I guess any large influx of money in June would be part of this year’s accounts, and they’d prefer – for tax reasons – to book it in the next financial year. Which seems pretty reasonable to me.
They’ll also pay his salary until the end of June, and in early July it will become ‘official’ and he’ll be an Arsenal player. We have, it seems, developed a decent relationship with Sociedad over the last few years, and I don’t think an aggressive demand to ‘do it now’ just to make some fans a little less anxious is really the right way of operating. I’ve seen some quotes about from Zubimendi about how the summer is long, and about his previous relationship with Xabi Alonso (now at Real Madrid), but I think he’s just doing that thing footballers do by giving polite answers to questions and not ruffling any feathers in the process.
Beyond that, not a lot going on. Jorginho is expected in Brazil by the end of the week to finalise his move to Flamengo, but that’s been ‘done’ for a while so hardly anything new. Let’s see what, if anything, happens today.
Elsewhere, Josimar Football is a website that does its very best to investigate the game we all love. It’s too easy to become inured to the corruption at every level, and they have done some incredible work down the years. They need support to keep going though, and our friend Philippe Auclair has written about that here:
And finally for today, it’s just 10 minutes of your time but Ian Wright meeting Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri (as well as a host of other familiar faces around the training ground) will give you the positive start to your day that you absolutely need.
Till tomorrow.
