It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Belgrano this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
In brief
SquadWords at Belgrano training over how hard people work
Lucas Zelarayán was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
The oldest argument in any dressing room and the only one that is genuinely about football: one man thinks another is not putting enough in. It is also the row a manager privately does not mind having happened.
Nobody at Belgrano will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Francisco González Metilli trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
There comes a point where a club either backs its own ambition or admits it does not have any. Belgrano have paid $1.0M for Facundo Pons, which is the loudest way there is of saying which one it chose.
The offer from Juventude for Matías Daniele was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
There is no worse way to lose a footballer. Danilo Regali has pre-agreed a move away, which means every appearance between now and June is made by a man the club can no longer sell, and somebody upstairs will be asked why the contract was allowed to get here.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Belgrano is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Lucas Zelarayán was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
In brief
SquadLisandro López falls out with a teammate over standards
At 34 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 7.84 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Belgrano this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad28 Sep 2026
Words at Belgrano training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Nicolás Fernández is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 7 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
Player ratings31 Aug 2026
Agustín Méndez, 20, plays like he has been here for years — 8.41
A mark of 8.41 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 20-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
27 times he got in the way of something. Centre-halves get written about when they make mistakes and ignored when they do not, so an afternoon like this needs saying out loud: he is the reason the scoreline reads as it does.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Belgrano this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The injury that keeps coming back, keeps being rushed back from, and quietly costs more careers than the dramatic ones. 17 days is the estimate; the honest figure depends on whether anybody is patient.
Squad31 Aug 2026
Words at Belgrano training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Franco Vázquez is at the centre of it, and the squad will now find out whether the standard rises or the pair of them simply stop speaking.