“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Ayacucho have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ayacucho this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
46 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Ayacucho lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
7.95, 1 on the scoresheet, and the specific comedy of a back-four player celebrating like somebody who does this every week. He does not, and that is exactly why the ground reacted the way it did.
He will play here until the summer and then walk out of the door for free, having already signed elsewhere. Supporters will manage the first part of that sentence; it is the second they will struggle with.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Ayacucho this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad1 May 2028
Words at Ayacucho training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Jiries Salem 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.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Ayacucho can pretend not to have heard.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Ayacucho have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Mirko Ladrón de Guevara 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
SquadJiries Salem has become a man the manager trusts
$1.7M. Fees like that buy a footballer and rent a debate: every touch will be measured against the number for a season at least.
The terraces21 Dec 2026
Ayacucho spend $1.7M on the signing the town wanted
It is the rarest sequence in football: supporters ask for something, and the club goes and does it. $1.7M for Miguel Silveira, and for one week nobody is complaining about anything.
Juan Cámara 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.
6 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.
Nobody at Ayacucho 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.
It is the least glamorous business a club does and the reason seasons do not collapse in February. Sergio Leiva is here for the weeks when three men are injured and somebody still has to play.