Petar Musa 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.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around FC Dallas they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
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.
12 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
“A point is a point and I will take it, but we should have had all three.” James Pepi after the 0‑0 draw, and the sentence every manager in the country said at some stage this weekend.
Nothing is announced when this happens and everybody knows. He is a bigger part of the plan at FC Dallas than he was a month ago, and the training ground worked that out before the team sheet said so.
0‑4 to Seattle Sounders, and it was every bit as bad as the number suggests. There are defeats you argue about and defeats you apologise for; this was the second kind.
Portland Timbers go through and FC Dallas go home, 1‑2 the scoreline that did it. The dressing room will call the league the priority now, because that is what dressing rooms say.
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.
The manager kept them in and said what needed saying. A response is expected on Saturday, and if it does not come the questions move upstairs.
The dugout31 Aug 2026
The manager has not finished forgetting Herman Johansson's mistake
Publicly it is behind everybody. It is not behind the man who picks the team, and the only place that shows is a team sheet. He will get another chance; he will get it in a match that matters less.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Petar Musa was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Sebastien Ibeagha 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 being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.