The general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Juventude is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Lucas Mineiro and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
Squad8 Nov 2027
Alan Ruschel 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.
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.
42 points from position 4. The title is somebody else’s business and the drop is somebody else’s problem; what is left is the argument about passports.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Juventude. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
He trains hard, says the right things and goes home to an empty flat. Nobody at Juventude has done anything wrong, which is exactly what makes it so difficult to fix.
In brief
The dugoutThe manager plants his flag on Nathan Santos
Jandrei 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Alan Ruschel was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Nobody at Juventude 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.
Position 4, 42 points, and a run-in that decides whether next season has Thursday nights in it. Nobody is calling it a race yet, which is what people say during one.
The last thing about a transfer that is still about the player is his signature on his own terms, and it is there. Juventude have lost him in all but the paperwork.
Juventude and Flamengo have settled on $1.0M. The rest belongs to the player and his agent, and a supporter who has watched one of these before knows not to buy the shirt yet.
5 wins on the spin now, and the question has changed from whether the run ends to who ends it. Confidence like this cannot be bought; it has to be earned exactly this way.
He is going to Internacional, the club has $6.8M it did not have on Friday, and the phone-ins have already decided how they feel about that. Selling well and selling somebody they loved are not the same skill.
Botafogo paid $2.7M and Juventude took it, which is the whole story in one sentence. The longer version involves a wage budget and will be told all season.
Gabriel Taliari and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Juventude, and it is not being withdrawn.
Gabriel Taliari 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.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Words at Juventude training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Diogo Barbosa 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.
“The supporters are entitled to be angry. So am I. We will put it right.” 1‑3, a manager saying the necessary things, and a dressing room that heard a different version of them.
The one version of being left out a player cannot argue with, and the one he takes worst. Somebody else has been better and the team sheet says so, in public, every week until it changes.
Every touch is being weighed now, in print and everywhere else. Some players grow into that and some are quietly ruined by it, and nobody knows which in advance.