14 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. VfB Stuttgart lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Bilal El Khannouss is 23, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around VfB Stuttgart they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Nicolò Tresoldi 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.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. VfB Stuttgart know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
21 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. VfB Stuttgart lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Nobody upstairs has said anything, which is the loudest thing they could do. Results buy silence in this game; the account at VfB Stuttgart is running low.
The board have said in public what they had been saying in private. Results between now and the next meeting decide it, and everybody in the building knows the arithmetic.
The general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 17 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at VfB Stuttgart this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad5 Jul 2027
Words at VfB Stuttgart training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alexander Schlager 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.
31 games, 0 goals, and a squad option that has arrived without a fee attached. The interesting question at VfB Stuttgart now is not whether he plays but who he displaces.
The words a physio says slowly. 29 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.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 22 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
The general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
37 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. VfB Stuttgart lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
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.