The clubs have shaken hands with Bologna; the player has not yet. Personal terms are next, and personal terms are where more deals die than anybody prints.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Triestina they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Riccardo Bongelli is 20, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Lorenzo Di Livio 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 Damián Gómez was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Damián Gómez trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Triestina this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad24 May 2027
Words at Triestina training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Damián Gómez 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.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Triestina, and both men came out saying it was fine.
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 Lorenzo Sorrentino has written the date down.
The message was aimed at the stands as much as the dressing room: Alessandro Faggioli plays, and the argument is closed until the manager decides otherwise.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 19 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
The last thing about a transfer that is still about the player is his signature on his own terms, and it is there. Venezia have lost him in all but the paperwork.
1 for Armel Bella-Kotchap, marked 7.69, and a centre-half's name in the part of the report he normally only reaches by mistake. He will not be allowed to forget it in the dressing room for a month.
9 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Venezia will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
“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 Venezia, and it is not being withdrawn.
Sassuolo paid $3.2M and Venezia took it, which is the whole story in one sentence. The longer version involves a wage budget and will be told all season.
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Venezia can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Thierry Rendall Correia was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.