Fee agreed, terms agreed, medical booked. Billy Gee will be somebody else’s player by the weekend, and around Mjondalen the goodbyes have quietly begun.
“We were not good enough today and I am not going to dress it up.” Ruben Meling after 1‑2, in the tone of a man who knows the next question and does not intend to answer it.
Nobody will confirm this and nothing else explains the last month of selections. A costly error buys a player a period of being second choice that is always longer than the error was.
2‑5 to Lillestrom, and it was every bit as bad as the number suggests. There are defeats you argue about and defeats you apologise for; this was the second kind.
There is a particular kind of quiet from an away end watching one man score twice. Jonas Bruusgaard provided it, and the 8.01 beside his name is if anything generous to everybody else.
Defending was optional and nobody took up the option. 7 goals between Mjondalen and Lillestrom, and not one of the people who paid to be there will ask for the money back.
10 combined actions and 7.07. The job he did is the one that shows up as other people looking good, and the only reliable way to notice it is to watch what happens on the afternoons he is missing.
What was said behind closed doors has now been said in front of a microphone. Everybody at Mjondalen can do the arithmetic, including the man it is aimed at.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Mjondalen they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
Nobody upstairs has said anything, which is the loudest thing they could do. Results buy silence in this game; the account at Mjondalen is running low.
7.95, 1 on the scoresheet, and the specific comedy of a back-four player celebrating like somebody who does this every week. He does not, and that is exactly why the ground reacted the way it did.
Lucas Nicol and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
Every club pays most of what it earns to its players. Paying nearly all of it is a different arrangement, and it has ended the same way every time it has been tried.
The dugout30 Aug 2027
The manager has not finished forgetting Fredrik Holmé's mistake
Publicly it is behind everybody. It is not behind the man who picks the team, and the only place that shows is a team sheet. He will get another chance; he will get it in a match that matters less.
Nobody at Mjondalen 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.
The dugout30 Aug 2027
The view from the dugout
“We did not lose. Some weeks that is all you get, and I would rather have the point than not.” Ruben Meling chose the glass-half-full version of 1‑1; the supporters left with the other one.
9 without a win now, and the ground has developed the special quiet of a crowd that expects the worst. One scrappy 1-0 would cure most of it; that is the maddening part.
100 games in the shirt. Nobody sets out to build a record like that; it happens to a certain kind of player at a certain kind of club, and this town knows what it has.
He won it back and then made something of it, which is two jobs and the reason the scoreline looks the way it does. 9 combined actions and a mark of 6.69, and not one of them will make a highlights package.
“A point is a point and I will take it, but we should have had all three.” Ruben Meling after the 1‑1 draw, and the sentence every manager in the country said at some stage this weekend.
1 for Tobias Flem, marked 7.34, and a centre-half's name in the part of the report he normally only reaches by mistake. He will not be allowed to forget it in the dressing room for a month.
“Things were said to me before I signed. I am not going to repeat them, but I remember all of them.” Mjondalen have not answered, which is an answer of sorts.
“Nobody here is above being told.” It was not said with a name attached, but the dressing room can count, and so can everybody who was listening.
The dugout31 May 2027
The manager’s verdict
“That is on me. I pick the team and I picked wrong.” Managers say that when they mean it and when they need to be seen to, and after 1‑2 Ruben Meling left the room before anybody could ask which.
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.
13 combined actions and 6.82. The job he did is the one that shows up as other people looking good, and the only reliable way to notice it is to watch what happens on the afternoons he is missing.
The new man at Mjondalen has worked with Anders Hiim before and it went well. He arrives with a view of the player already formed, which is worth more than any pre-season.
Ard Ragnar Sundal and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
The dugout26 Apr 2027
The manager’s verdict
“I am frustrated, honestly. We did enough to win and we did not win.” Ruben Meling was not hiding it after 1‑1, and nobody in the Mjondalen dressing room was either.
Mjondalen had done everything except persuade the man himself. He stays at Viking, and the manager goes back to the drawing board with the money still in the bank.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 20 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 deal with Tromso is done in every sense but the one that puts him on the pitch. Nothing goes wrong at this stage, except on the occasions when it does.
The new man at Mjondalen has worked with Anders Hiim before and it went well. He arrives with a view of the player already formed, which is worth more than any pre-season.
Another week, another link, another denial nobody quite believes. Mjondalen know the market decides these things, not the back pages — but the back pages are louder.
“I have done everything asked of me in training and it has not changed a thing on a Saturday.” The most familiar complaint in football, and one Mjondalen will have to answer with minutes or with a transfer.
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.
Kweku Kekeli and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Mjondalen, and both men came out saying it was fine.
The clubs have agreed terms, and what remains is formality: a medical, a photograph, a signature. Nobody at Mjondalen is pretending he will be back in the shirt.
At 18 he is doing things this season that he could not do last season, and doing them every week. Form comes and goes; this has stayed long enough to be called something else.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Mjondalen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Defending was optional and nobody took up the option. 6 goals between Mjondalen and Lillestrom, and not one of the people who paid to be there will ask for the money back.
It happens to all of them and it is still the hardest paragraph a local paper has to write. 34 years old, 3 points down on where he was, and a body that has started charging interest on a career.
24 signings in three months. Every one of them may be an upgrade and the team can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild that never appears in the transfer-window verdicts.
“I have nothing bad to say about this place. I just need to be somewhere else.” It is in writing now, which changes what Mjondalen can pretend not to have heard.
Anders Hiim and a teammate said things this week that will take longer than a week to unsay. It was not about football, and both of them play on Saturday.
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.
Somebody has moved past him. It is not a dropping and it is worse than one, because a dropping is about a Saturday and this is about where he stands.
Squad7 Sep 2026
A place in the month's best eleven for Fallou Sock
Four or five weekends of consistency, judged against everybody in the division doing his job. Fallou Sock has come out of that comparison in the side, and Mjondalen have had the benefit of every one of those afternoons.
“Thirty minutes, door closed, everything said. We shook hands after.” Whatever was in the room stayed in the room, and Storm Strand-Kolbjørnsen trained the next morning like a man with less to carry.
Every squad has one of these fixtures for somebody every season. This one is Nickolay Årsbog’s: the club that knew him first, the supporters who will decide in the first minute whether to applaud, and Mjondalen needing him to play as if none of it matters.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Mikkel Søfeldt is living that version at Mjondalen, and it tends to show in the first month.
“The easiest signature of my career.” Sander Marthinussen and Mjondalen 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 Mjondalen this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
6 goals in one match, Oliver Midtgård on the scoresheet, and a scoreline that will look like a misprint. Neutrals could not have asked more of Mjondalen and Moss.