Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Al-Qadisiyah will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Everything was agreed until it was not, and Julian Weigl reports back to Al-Qadisiyah with a summer to forget. Neither club is saying who walked away from the table.
A mark of 8.02 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
7.82, 1 on the scoresheet, and the specific comedy of a back-four player celebrating like somebody who does this every week. He does not, and that is exactly why the ground reacted the way it did.
Al-Qadisiyah ran out of time with Al-Riyadh. The paperwork was open when the deadline passed, and a transfer that was almost done is now a transfer that never happened.
Squad14 Sep 2026
Talal Haji 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.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Al-Qadisiyah will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Al-Qadisiyah have gone to Al-Riyadh with a bid, and the supporters have gone to the internet with an opinion about it. Whether either changes anything is up to the selling club.
The deadline has passed and the squad is the squad. 11 arrived, 7 left, and everything else printed about this club last month was a rumour that stayed one.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $3.7M — a club that wants Teddy Okou enough to be asked twice.
Squad7 Sep 2026
Words at Al-Qadisiyah training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Gastón Álvarez 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.
5 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.
He used to wear the other shirt. On Saturday he plays against Al-Faisaly in this one, and whatever he says this week about it being just another game will be untrue.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Al-Qadisiyah will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
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 training ground goes quiet for a fortnight. 5 men have gone off to be somebody else’s players, and the manager is left with the ones nobody has called.
The dugout31 Aug 2026
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 0‑1 Mohammed Al-Ghamdi left the room before anybody could ask which.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Al-Qadisiyah will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Tijjani Reijnders provided it, and the 8.27 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
At 33 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.12 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
The phone has started ringing about Julian Weigl again, and this time the name on the line is Bayer Leverkusen. Al-Qadisiyah are listening politely and promising nothing.
Everyone has stopped pretending: Werder Bremen will make the call about Julián Quiñones this week. Al-Qadisiyah have a number in mind, and the number is not shy.
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.