It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aris Thessaloniki this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Benjamín Garré 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.
A squad rebuilt inside one window pays for it in a currency nobody budgets for. The football is not worse than the sum of the players; it is worse than the sum of the players who have played together before.
“This is not anger. I have thought about it for months, and nothing that has happened lately changed my mind.” The request is on a desk at Aris Thessaloniki, and it is not being withdrawn.
Everything was agreed until it was not, and Migouel Alfarela reports back to Aris Thessaloniki with a summer to forget. Neither club is saying who walked away from the table.
The morning the pathway stops being a brochure and becomes a team sheet. Most of them will not be here in three years; all of them have already done the hard part, which was getting to today.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aris Thessaloniki this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Emmanouil Nikolaou is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Lazaros Mavropanos is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
“The easiest signature of my career.” Fredrik Jensen and Aris Thessaloniki agree another 4 years, and the manager can plan around him rather than about him.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Aris Thessaloniki this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
24 months left and silence from upstairs — no offer, no talks, nothing for his people to answer. Clubs that let a calendar do their negotiating usually end up negotiating with the calendar.
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.