Armando Izzo 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.
24 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Avellino lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Armando Izzo 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.
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 manager did not use many words, and he did not need to.” Antonio De Cristofaro has his answer from Avellino; what he does with it is the next window’s story.
The words a physio says slowly. 98 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.
Position 19 and 28 points, and the table gets read bottom-up in this part of town. The calendar has stopped being a schedule and started being a countdown.
Terms are settled between the clubs and the rest is paperwork and a photograph. Around Avellino they have already started talking about him in the past tense.
4 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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Avellino this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Squad10 Apr 2028
Words at Avellino training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alberto Moreno 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.
Day 9 of the vacancy. Candidates have been priced, sounded out and quietly ruled out — and the caretaker’s win ratio is becoming an argument all by itself.
55 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Avellino lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 23 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.
Empoli paid $180.0K and Avellino took it, which is the whole story in one sentence. The longer version involves a wage budget and will be told all season.
“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 Avellino, and it is not being withdrawn.
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Luca D'Andrea is 22, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Squad28 Jun 2027
Words at Avellino training over how hard people work
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Alberto Moreno 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.
Tommaso Biasci 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.
The name of Martin Palumbo has come up in conversations Avellino were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 22 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.
Armando Izzo 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.
Headers, blocks, tackles, interceptions — 23 of them, and not one goal behind him. The sort of performance that never makes a highlight reel and wins football matches.
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.
At 25 the improving is meant to be over. It is not: 3 points better than the mark taken at the start of the year, which is the sort of thing that happens to players who take the boring parts of the job seriously.
Player ratings19 Oct 2026
Dimitris Sounas was on a different afternoon to everybody else
8.25. 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.
8 goals in 8 games at Union Brescia — numbers that travel home faster than he does. Somebody at Avellino updates a spreadsheet every Monday, and it makes better reading each week.