“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what NK Osijek can pretend not to have heard.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at NK Osijek this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 21 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Squad17 Jul 2028
Nail Omerović has improved at 25, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
The paperwork is done long before the player is. Zack Stritch has agreed terms to come here when his current deal runs out, which means NK Osijek have spent a summer's transfer budget on a phone call.
Mirko Sušak 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.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Nuno Semedo is 23, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Squad10 Jul 2028
Luka Dajčer has improved at 27, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Squad10 Jul 2028
Gabriel Costa falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
Add another name to the list: Yenisey have asked the question everybody in the game has been asking about Bartosz Żelazowski. The answer from Lokomotiva Zagreb has not changed — yet.
“I have given everything here and I need a new challenge.” The request is formal, and the relationship will never be quite the same again.
Squad7 Jun 2027
Gabriel Costa falls out with a teammate over standards
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.
Mirko Sušak 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.
5 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
104 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Dugopolje lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Dugopolje this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
He looks like a man who lives here now rather than one who is working here. It took most of a season, and at Dugopolje the difference is visible from the back of the stand.