"Today we have appointed a new Sporting Director, a very famous expert, Javier Ribalta. He is a person who can accurately assess our team. He knows our players very well: Javier has been following our friendly matches at the training camps and has watched a lot of games over the past year. There has never been such an expert at Zenit before and we are glad that Javier Ribalta has joined our club. We always set ourselves the highest goals and in order to implement them we needed such an expert."

"His first job is to get acquainted with the team, the club's infrastructure, discuss things with the head coach. Last year, we almost finished the first stage in creating a new, young and promising team and now with the help of Javier, we will accurately construct the team. I believe that this will be our team for many years and Javier will help us with this task."