Fee agreed, wages agreed, and Auckland FC waiting with a shirt. Nobody at Sydney FC is pretending otherwise, and the supporters have stopped asking whether and started asking when.
Sydney FC and Central Coast Mariners have settled on $1.4M. The rest belongs to the player and his agent, and a supporter who has watched one of these before knows not to buy the shirt yet.
The name of Joel King has come up in conversations Sydney FC were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Sydney FC they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
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.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Asante Kotoko have kept their man, and Sydney FC go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
Michael Evans 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.
Nobody at Sydney FC will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Sydney FC they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Everything agreed with AFC Wimbledon, everything agreed with the player; a doctor is the only person left to persuade. The photograph is a day or two away.
Everyone has stopped pretending: Brisbane Roar will make the call about Joel King this week. Sydney FC have a number in mind, and the number is not shy.
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.
Sydney FC asked and Basel said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
It is never announced and it is entirely visible: the biggest afternoons of the season keep containing him. A press box works this out long before anybody at the club confirms a word of it.
A manager forgives a bad Saturday far more readily than a bad Tuesday, because one of them he can explain and the other one he chose. The reports this week have not been good.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Sydney FC they have already started talking about him 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 Sydney FC this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Nobody at Sydney FC will say this on the record and the team sheets have been saying it for weeks. There is a small group in every squad who get picked when the fixture is difficult, and he has joined it.
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at Sydney FC. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.