The words a physio says slowly. 24 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.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Soroksár they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
This is not rotation. Zalán Debreceni has not been in the manager's plans for some time, and nobody at Soroksár is pretending otherwise.
Squad21 May 2029
Words at Soroksár training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Zsombor Kálnoki-Kis 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 figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
“Nobody here is above being told.” It was not said with a name attached, but the dressing room can count, and so can everybody who was listening.
The dugout21 May 2029
György Bora 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.
Levente Szőr 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.
Squad30 Apr 2029
Words at Soroksár training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Zsombor Kálnoki-Kis 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 Soroksár, and both men came out saying it was fine.
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.
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 Márk Lakatos has written the date down.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Soroksár will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they 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.
Position 13, 15 points, and every result so far reduced to one line. The second half of the season starts with the same squad and a different set of expectations.
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.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Norbert Gálfi will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Soroksár the goodbyes have quietly begun.
The clubs had agreed and the player had not. A snub, and a public one: Ferencvaros keep him, and the supporters here are left wondering what he had heard about the place.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Adam Borkowski has just signed for Soroksár, and for once the answer mattered.
Squad24 Jul 2028
Words at Soroksár training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Branislav Tomić 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.
Soroksár asked and Vasas said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Soroksár are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.