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. Szeged-Csanád GA will be quietly delighted and privately nervous.
Oleksiy Shchebetun 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 had been thinking. Nikola Radmanovac 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.
Nobody at Szeged-Csanád GA 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.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Szeged-Csanád GA know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Szeged-Csanád GA, and both men came out saying it was fine.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Szeged-Csanád GA. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Nikola Radmanovac was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
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.
The manager has a list and the board has a condition attached to it. That is not a crisis — half of football works this way — but it decides which of the two of them gets his way in August.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Strahinja Čarapić trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
A year in and the city has not opened up, the language has not come, and lunch is eaten alone more often than anybody at Szeged-Csanád GA would admit. It shows on Saturdays.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Szeged-Csanád GA. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
In brief
SquadThe training reports on Zoltán Pesti are not good
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 7 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
The hardest thing about being 20 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Cluver Sambi Mbungu did not need any: 8.09, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
“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 Szeged-Csanád GA, and it is not being withdrawn.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Szeged-Csanád GA is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Vanja Zvekanov 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.
There is a particular warmth a ground reserves for a 22-year-old it feels ownership of. Krisztián László has it now, and everything he does for the rest of his time here will be measured against the goodwill he was handed for free.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Oleksiy Shchebetun provided it, and the 8.23 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Szeged-Csanád GA have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
Bendegúz Lehoczki 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Nikola Radmanovac 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.
Every club in football pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time somebody has tried it.
It needed Oleksiy Shchebetun to find the net to bring anything home at all: 2‑2 against Nyíregyháza, and half the dressing room will call it a point won.
Squad4 Dec 2028
A place in the month's best eleven for Marko Šušnjar
Four or five weekends of consistency, judged against everybody in the division doing his job. Marko Šušnjar has come out of that comparison in the side, and Szeged-Csanád GA have had the benefit of every one of those afternoons.
Bendegúz Lehoczki 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.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Zoltán Szilágyi and Szeged-Csanád GA agree another 3 years.
Marked 9.24 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
“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 Szeged-Csanád GA, and 0 appearances in 21 say he has earned the hearing.
At 21 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.
Every club pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time it has been tried.