The board have said in public what they had been saying in private. Results between now and the next meeting decide it, and everybody in the building knows the arithmetic.
Nothing has been announced and everybody understands what it means. A board that summons the whole football department on a Tuesday morning is a board that has stopped believing the problem will fix itself.
“The easiest signature of my career.” Josip Mišić and Cibalia agree another 2 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
Squad7 May 2029
Words at Cibalia training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Josip Mišić 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.
Filip Mekić 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.
The manager has re-ordered his thinking and Vito Kovač has come out of it lower. He will be told it is temporary, and the players who have heard that before will avoid his eye.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Cibalia, another week without a signature from Lee Jenkins.
A bad atmosphere can be waited out. A group of people meeting afterwards to decide what to do about it cannot, and everybody in the building knows which stage this is.
Squad19 Mar 2029
David Žabec 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.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say David Bošnjak is on it.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Cibalia know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Cibalia can pretend not to have heard.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Cibalia is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and David Žabec was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Hajduk Split have kept their man, and Cibalia go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Vadim Afanasjev is on it.
There are footballers who have a good season and footballers a season is remembered for, and the second kind get their names read out in a hall in the summer. Cibalia will be quietly delighted and privately nervous.
At 20 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.
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Oleh Liubchenko has, at Cibalia, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Josip Mišić was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Wages have outrun income and the accountants have started attending meetings they used to send apologies to. Ambition comes second in a season like this.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Ante Kuliš signs something — a contract at Cibalia or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
The best deals are the ones the accountants never notice. Jackson Shorrocks arrives at Cibalia with his wages the only cost and something to prove the only clause.