Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Ba they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Lucas Abarca 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.
Past the limit the bank set, which is the line between a club being financed and a club being in trouble. $9.9M is now the number every conversation about this club will start with.
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 Ba 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.
2 months left, and both sides know what that means: every week without a signature, the fee Ba could ask drops and the wages Marlee Francois can ask rise.
16 wins in a row changes how opponents warm up: quieter, more glances across. Runs end, everybody knows that — but nobody in this dressing room is planning for it.
The words a physio says slowly. 17 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.
A season average of 7.15 at an age when most of his year group are still in the youth team. Ba know what they have, and so, by now, does everybody else.
6 goals in one match, Marlee Francois on the scoresheet, and a scoreline that will look like a misprint. Neutrals could not have asked more of Ba and Suva.
8 without defeat on their own grass. The pitch has not changed; the crowd has — louder earlier, and quicker to sense when the opposition would rather be somewhere else.
24 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Ba lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Ba, and it is not being withdrawn.