“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Textilschik can pretend not to have heard.
He won it back and then made something of it, which is two jobs and the reason the scoreline looks the way it does. 15 combined actions and a mark of 7.09, and not one of them will make a highlights package.
Evgeny Tatarinov 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.
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.
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 dugout26 Oct 2026
The manager’s verdict
“I am frustrated, honestly. We did enough to win and we did not win.” Daniil Kobzev was not hiding it after 0‑0, and nobody in the Textilschik dressing room was either.
Somebody watched every match in the division at the weekend and decided he was the best thing in any of them. A small honour, and most careers end without one.
The one version of being left out a player cannot argue with, and the one he takes worst. Somebody else has been better and the team sheet says so, in public, every week until it changes.
“I have given this everything, but my family is not here and neither am I, not really.” A footballer can be coached out of bad form. Nobody has ever been coached out of this, and Textilschik know it.
Maxim Boichenko 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.
There is no fee, no unveiling and no agent on the steps. Eduard Barkov has been at this club since he was a boy and is now, formally, one of the first-team squad — which for a local readership beats any signing of any size.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Pavel Mamonov is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
Nobody at Textilschik 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.
Squad12 Oct 2026
Words at Textilschik training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ahmed Raed 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.
103 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Mouscron lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
The accountants will call it good business and they will be right, which is not the point anybody outside the boardroom is making. Eden Carrasco was one of the reasons people came, and $7.5M does not replace that by itself.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Mouscron can pretend not to have heard.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $140.0K — a club that wants Jerry Afriyie enough to be asked twice.
$140.0K on the table at Racing Genk. The manager wanted him, the board agreed a number, and the only voices still to be heard are the ones at the other club.