Supporters who sing when it goes badly are supporters. Supporters who gather afterwards are a problem, and everybody inside the building knows which of the two this now is.
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.
Squad12 Jan 2032
Bruno Leite 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.
Nobody will confirm this and nothing else explains the last month of selections. A costly error buys a player a period of being second choice that is always longer than the error was.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. ABC know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
ABC spent the window trying to move Bruno Leite on and nobody came. He trains with a squad that has already told him he is not part of it, and both sides now wait for the next one.
69 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. ABC lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
A bad atmosphere can be waited out. A group of people meeting afterwards to decide what to do about it cannot, and everybody in the building knows which stage this is.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Bruno Leite was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Nobody will confirm this and nothing else explains the last month of selections. A costly error buys a player a period of being second choice that is always longer than the error was.
76 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. ABC lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at ABC this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Bruno Leite 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 manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Rodolfo Castro is on it.
It has been denied twice and printed three times, which is the usual arithmetic. Until Bruno Leite signs something — a contract at ABC or anywhere else — this column belongs to him.
104 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. ABC lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” ABC have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at ABC this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
Nobody at ABC 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.
111 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. ABC lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Ignacio Segovia is living that version at ABC, and it tends to show in the first month.