Position 3, 27 points, and the result everyone checks first is now theirs. The word is still not being said around the ground, which is how you know everyone is thinking it.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.16 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Guilherme Ramos 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.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 22-year-old it feels ownership of. Chen Shuhang has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Romulo was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Half the programme played, position 3, 27 on the board. Doubling it is the sum every supporter has done and the only one nobody at the club will do out loud.
The words a physio says slowly. 111 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Beijing Guoan will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
The clubs have shaken hands with Chengdu Rongcheng; the player has not yet. Personal terms are next, and personal terms are where more deals die than anybody prints.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Beijing Guoan this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Shandong Taishan pay $360.0K, and the deal is done. The number reads well on a balance sheet; whether it reads well on the pitch is next season's question.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Zhejiang FC have kept their man, and Beijing Guoan go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
A year in and the city has not opened up, the language has not come, and lunch is eaten alone more often than anybody at Beijing Guoan would admit. It shows on Saturdays.
It is the most legitimate ambition in the sport and the hardest for most clubs to satisfy. Gustavo wants continental football; whether Beijing Guoan can provide it is a question about the next two seasons, not about him.
Uroš Spajić 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.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Beijing Guoan know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Beijing Guoan. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
In brief
The dugoutThe manager plants his flag on Jiang Wenhao
“I have tried. I have really tried, and every day I wake up in the wrong place.” Nobody at Beijing Guoan can coach that out of a man, and nobody there is pretending to.
Guilherme Ramos 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.
At 22 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
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.
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
The dugout5 Oct 2026
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 0‑1 Zhang Weijie left the room before anybody could ask which.
There is no complaint available here and everybody involved knows it, which does not make the walk to the bench any shorter. Form is the only currency in football that cannot be borrowed against.
In brief
MarketThe clock does Fábio Abreu’s negotiating for him