106 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Piast lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. Piast will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Two or more conceded in each of the last 5 matches. It is not one mistake repeating itself, which would be the easier thing to fix; it is a different one every week.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Rafa De Vicente 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.
“The supporters are entitled to be angry. So am I. We will put it right.” 1‑2, a manager saying the necessary things, and a dressing room that heard a different version of them.
The words a physio says slowly. 114 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.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Piast will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Piast have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
“I have tried. I have really tried, and every day I wake up in the wrong place.” Nobody at Piast can coach that out of a man, and nobody there is pretending to.
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.
$11.8M settles it between the clubs for Juan Brunetta
Tigres have accepted the money. What Mallorca do not yet have is the man, and between here and the photograph is a conversation about wages that both sides are dreading.
The offer from Girona for Pablo Torre was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
Mallorca asked and Orlando City said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
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.
Deportivo La Coruña wanted more than $400.0K and the board would not go there. Walked away, for now, which in a transfer window means until somebody blinks.
At 23 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.
Ask anyone on the way out what separated the sides and you will get one name: Arnau Puigmal. 2‑0 against Espanyol, and the applause at the whistle was mostly his.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Betis have kept their man, and Mallorca go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $434.8K — a club that wants Charlie Patiño enough to be asked twice.
$370.0K on the table at Deportivo La Coruña. The manager wanted him, the board agreed a number, and the only voices still to be heard are the ones at the other club.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mallorca this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
The plan went upstairs and came back down. Nothing about that will make a headline anywhere else, and everybody who works at the training ground will remember it for years.
Espanyol next, and one man in the Mallorca dressing room knows their training ground better than his own. The reception will tell him what they thought of him.
Manu Morlanes has done the arithmetic and does not like the answer. Nothing corrodes a squad faster, and no club has ever solved it by explaining the wage structure to a footballer.
Every touch is being weighed now, in print and everywhere else. Some players grow into that and some are quietly ruined by it, and nobody knows which in advance.