Marked for Johnson Ayaane
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad19 Oct 2026
103 days out for Alberto Eiraldi after a fracture
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Rampla Juniors will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Squad19 Oct 2026
Yamil García 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.
Squad19 Oct 2026
A move Franco Catarozzi would have made for nothing
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Franco Catarozzi is living that version at Rampla Juniors, and it tends to show in the first month.
Squad19 Oct 2026
Johnson Ayaane 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.
The dugout19 Oct 2026
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 dugout19 Oct 2026
He asked about his future and was given an answer with minutes in it. The manager has now made a promise in a building where promises are remembered, and the clock on it has started.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Uneasy
Squad28 Sep 2026
Nicolás Royón 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.
Squad28 Sep 2026
Too much change too quickly at Rampla Juniors
15 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.
Squad28 Sep 2026
Words at Rampla Juniors training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Johnson Ayaane 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.
From our football correspondent
Crisis
Match12 Aug 2026
Out, 1‑4 to Juventud, and the long argument about which of the small moments decided it. The league is all there is now, and everybody knows it.
The terraces17 Aug 2026
A cup hiding at Juventud leaves Rampla Juniors explaining themselves
1-4, and long before the end the away end had switched from encouragement to something considerably more pointed. Nobody rings a phone-in about losing narrowly.
Squad17 Aug 2026
6 saves, and a scoreline the ten men in front of him had no right to. Goalkeepers only get noticed on the bad days; this was one of the other ones.
Player ratings17 Aug 2026
Marked 7.69 at 21, in a side that makes no allowances for age. He did not need any, and he looked the least nervous man on the pitch.
Squad17 Aug 2026
Nicolás Royón and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad17 Aug 2026
Words at Rampla Juniors training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Johnson Ayaane 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.
Boardroom17 Aug 2026
Nobody left the Rampla Juniors dressing room in a hurry
The door stayed shut a long time after the final whistle. What was said in there is between them; whether it worked is between them and Saturday.
Market17 Aug 2026
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Rampla Juniors, another week without a signature from Andrew Teuten.
The dugout17 Aug 2026
The view from the dugout
“We will look at it, we will learn from it, and we go again.” The three sentences every manager keeps for a 1‑4 defeat, delivered by Manuel Araujo to a room that had heard them before.