“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Mirassol can pretend not to have heard.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mirassol this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
The rules permit it and it stings anyway. Riccieli has agreed terms with Internacional for the summer, and until then he pulls on this shirt as a player who has already chosen his next one.
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.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. José Sosa has just signed for Mirassol, and for once the answer mattered.
Sebastián Ramírez 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.
Squad15 Feb 2038
Words at Mirassol training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Antonio Galeano 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.
29 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Mirassol lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Brutal, unambiguous and, for all the horror of the moment, usually less career-shaped than the ligament everybody fears more. 29 days, a clean timeline, and a return date somebody can actually plan around.
Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Manuel Remis will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Mirassol the goodbyes have quietly begun.
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.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 8.13 at 33, and nobody on the pitch was better.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Mirassol have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
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.
8.46. 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.
The words a physio says slowly. 71 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 Mirassol will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Mirassol is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
37 appearances across 12 seasons in one shirt. Nobody builds a career like that on purpose any more; it happens to a certain kind of footballer at a certain kind of club.
There is an age at which every good afternoon gets described as a throwback, which is unfair and also accurate. 7.93 at 35, and nobody on the pitch was better.
“I want to win things, and I would like to do it here.” Nothing has been demanded and nothing has been threatened — but a boardroom at Mirassol hears a sentence like that exactly as it was built.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mirassol this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
8.46. 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.