“I am grateful for the games, but I did not become a footballer to be somebody else's spare part.” He wants to be at Toluca, and 4 appearances in 13 say he has earned the hearing.
26 appearances at Pumas UNAM and the goals keep coming. Toluca are watching this more closely than the borrowing club would like.
The dugout10 May 2027
Víctor Guzmán is still being punished for one mistake
Nobody will confirm it and the team sheets confirm it every week. One error has bought him a spell as second choice that is already longer than the error deserved.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Toluca, and both men came out saying it was fine.
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.
A conversation in the manager’s office, and a commitment that came out of it. Promises like that are cheap to make and expensive to break, and Santiago Simón has written the date down.
“Some mornings you wake up and you are still a long way from everything you know.” It is not the football and it never was; Toluca are dealing with a man who wants a different country.
The door stayed shut a long time after the final whistle. What was said in there is between them; whether it worked is between them and Saturday.
Squad8 Mar 2027
Words at Toluca training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Santiago Simón 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 am grateful for the games, but I did not become a footballer to be somebody else's spare part.” He wants to be at Toluca, and 0 appearances in 30 say he has earned the hearing.
“We were not good enough today and I am not going to dress it up.” Kevin Lozano after 0‑3, in the tone of a man who knows the next question and does not intend to answer it.
$33.5M is a serious amount of money and it does not play centre-forward. Everybody in the dressing room knows who used to be looked at when it went wrong.
He is going to RB Leipzig, the club has $33.5M 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.
At 21 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.
The approach was made and the answer came back in a sentence. There is no number on the table because there was no number that would have been enough.
Squad11 Jan 2027
Franco Romero 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.
Diego Barbosa 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 words a physio says slowly. 60 days is what the club will announce and everybody who has heard this diagnosis before knows the number is the least of it: the knee comes back before the player does.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Toluca will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.00 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Toluca can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Alessandro Tagle is 21, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Franco Romero was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
95 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Toluca lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I listened, I thought about it, and I am staying. That is the whole story.” The clubs had agreed a fee. Marcel Ruiz had not agreed to go, which turned out to be the part that mattered.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Toluca will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Boardroom7 Sep 2026
Toluca close the window on a squad of their own making
12 in and 4 out, and no more changes for months. The manager has what he has, the supporters have their opinion of it, and the table will have the last word.
Franco Romero 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.
He used to wear the other shirt. On Saturday he plays against Tijuana in this one, and whatever he says this week about it being just another game will be untrue.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Toluca know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.