$25.4M was the most the club would pay and Mainz 05 were asking for more. Deals like this are revived in the last week of a window roughly half the time, and everybody involved knows it.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. SC Freiburg have kept their man, and Bayer Leverkusen go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
Bayer Leverkusen have gone to Werder Bremen with a bid, and the supporters have gone to the internet with an opinion about it. Whether either changes anything is up to the selling club.
The clubs have settled the fee and he has settled his wages. What remains is a medical and a photograph, and around Bayer Leverkusen people have started saying his name in the past tense.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Bayer Leverkusen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Michael Berger is 16, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Aleix García 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.
Senior shirt numbers handed to boys the coaches have known since they were twelve. Most will not make it and all of them have already done the hard part.
Every run ends on an afternoon somebody had marked down as routine. This one went 16 matches, which is long enough that a town had stopped counting, and short enough that it will remember exactly who stopped it.
Carlos Montes 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.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Nathan De Cat is 19, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
It is the most legitimate ambition in the sport and the hardest for most clubs to satisfy. Facundo Medina wants continental football; whether Bayer Leverkusen can provide it is a question about the next two seasons, not about him.
Squad30 Aug 2027
Loïc Badé 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.
Senior shirt numbers handed to boys the coaches have known since they were twelve. Most will not make it and all of them have already done the hard part.
There is no fee, no unveiling and no agent on the steps. Matthias Wolf 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.
18 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Bayer Leverkusen lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Carlos Montes 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.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Rav van den Berg has just signed for Bayer Leverkusen, and for once the answer mattered.
At 22 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.
“I did not go to VfB Stuttgart to sit and watch. I want to come back to Bayer Leverkusen and fight for my place.” 0 appearances in 5 matches say the rest.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Patrik Schick’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Bayer Leverkusen needing him to play as if none of it matters.