16 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Liberty Professionals lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Yaw Afful and Liberty Professionals agree another 4 years.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Liberty Professionals this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
23 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Liberty Professionals 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 The request is on a desk at Liberty Professionals, and it is not being withdrawn.
30 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Liberty Professionals 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 The request is on a desk at Liberty Professionals, and it is not being withdrawn.
There are footballers who have a good season and footballers a season is remembered for, and the second kind get their names read out in a hall in the summer. Liberty Professionals will be quietly delighted and privately nervous.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Emmanuel Baba will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Liberty Professionals the goodbyes have quietly begun.
Eric Oteng 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.
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.
None of them will be seen by anybody outside the training ground for three years, most of them will never play a senior match, and one of them might change the club. That is the whole proposition, and it is why academies exist.
Market5 Jul 2027
Andrew Mensah returns from a loan that gave him nothing
3 appearances and 0 goals is not a season, it is a year somebody has lost. Whether that is his fault, the borrowing club's or the people who arranged it is the argument the next few weeks will have.
In brief
The terracesThe stands have heard the Kwame Paintsil talk too
37 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Liberty Professionals lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Liberty Professionals can pretend not to have heard.
“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 Liberty Professionals, and it is not being withdrawn.
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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Liberty Professionals this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Emmanuel Baba is 22, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
5 boys move up, and somewhere in the building the people who coached them at twelve are quietly having the best morning of their working year. Nothing about this shows up in a result and it is why the academy exists.
There is a version of this player everybody suspected was in there, and on this evidence it is. 9.04, and no argument anywhere in the ground.
Player ratings7 Sep 2026
Abraham Djiku was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.82. There are performances a supporter describes to somebody who was not there and cannot quite convey; this was one, and the number does not help either.