“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 The request is on a desk at Stars Jeunes Talents, and it is not being withdrawn.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 8 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
Saleh Youssouf and a teammate went at it, and not about football. Training grounds are small places and a long season makes them smaller.
Squad6 Dec 2027
Adam Haroun 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.
At 22 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
“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 The request is on a desk at Stars Jeunes Talents, and it is not being withdrawn.
Saleh Youssouf 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.
At 24 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 4 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
8 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
“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 The request is on a desk at Stars Jeunes Talents, and it is not being withdrawn.
The hardest thing about being 21 in a senior side is that nobody makes allowances. Marius Souleymane did not need any: 8.16, and he looked the most comfortable man on the pitch.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 6 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Ahmat Oumar 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.
“I am grateful for the games, but I did not become a footballer to be somebody else's spare part.” He wants to be at Stars Jeunes Talents, and 0 appearances in 12 say he has earned the hearing.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Saleh Mbaiguedem and Stars Jeunes Talents agree another 3 years.
Level with 91 minutes on the clock, after an afternoon Stars Jeunes Talents had all but put away. Galactik will call it a point earned; the home dressing room will call it two given away, and both of them are right.
1 on the scoresheet on his first appearance and a mark of 7.66 beside it. Most debuts are got through; this one was enjoyed, by him and by everybody watching it.
At 21 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
The morning the pathway stops being a brochure and becomes a team sheet. Most of them will not be here in three years; all of them have already done the hard part, which was getting to today.
Beaten 1‑3, and beaten fairly. The manager kept his words short afterwards, which was probably wise.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Adam Haroun has improved at 27, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Hassan Bechir is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.