16 days on the estimate, and a long, private, unglamorous year of a rehabilitation nobody watches. Olympic Charleroi lose a footballer; he loses considerably more than a season.
Adrien Saussez 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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Jonás Ramalho was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
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.
“It had gone on long enough. I would rather have it out than leave it sitting there.” Ten minutes behind a closed door at Olympic Charleroi, and both men came out saying it was fine.
“The manager did not use many words, and he did not need to.” Matthias Van Hecke has his answer from Olympic Charleroi; what he does with it is the next window’s story.
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.
He used to wear the other shirt. On Saturday he plays against Jong Genk in this one, and whatever he says this week about it being just another game will be untrue.
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason Olympic Charleroi will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
There is a figure at which a wage bill stops being ambitious and becomes the reason nothing else is possible, and this club has reached it. Nothing is left over for a transfer, a stand or a rainy afternoon.
Every manager keeps a short list in his head of the men he wants on the pitch when the stakes rise, and it is never published. The team sheets for the big afternoons say Indy Boonen is on it.
Squad15 Feb 2027
Robert Ion falls out with a teammate over standards
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 dugout15 Feb 2027
The manager’s verdict
“I am frustrated, honestly. We did enough to win and we did not win.” Dries Doku was not hiding it after 0‑0, and nobody in the Olympic Charleroi dressing room was either.
Myung-jun Kim, 20, plays like he has been here for years — 7.71
A mark of 7.71 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 20-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
He is 20 and the ground already sings his name, which is a thing that happens to local boys and almost never to signings. Everything from here is measured against an affection he did nothing to earn except be from here.
A 1‑0 win over Francs Borains, earned rather than given, and the sort of afternoon that sends everyone home talking about next week instead of this one.
5 new signings in one window. Every one may be an upgrade and the side can still be worse for a while, which is the part of a rebuild the verdicts never mention.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Robert Ion 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.
Shots: 7. Goals: none. The chances were there and they were good ones, and they went into the stand, the goalkeeper's arms and the side netting in roughly that order.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the team. 8 saves, several of them the sort nobody expects to see stopped, and a scoreline that flatters everybody in front of him.
“Some decisions take a long time. This one took ten minutes, and most of that was finding a pen.” Mamadou Sakho and Olympic Charleroi agree another 2 years.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Olympic Charleroi this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
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.
Somebody said out loud what several people thought about how hard another man trains, and Jonás Ramalho was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
Marked 8.11 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
Level with 89 minutes on the clock, after an afternoon Olympic Charleroi had all but put away. KV Kortrijk will call it a point earned; the home dressing room will call it two given away, and both of them are right.
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 18 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.
Successful dribbles: 20. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Robert Ion 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.
The dugout21 Sep 2026
The view from the dugout
“We will look at it, we will learn from it, and we go again.” The three sentences every manager keeps for a 1‑2 defeat, delivered by Dries Doku to a room that had heard them before.
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.
Olympic Charleroi offered $1.7M; OH Leuven said it was not close. The manager will be told the money is still there for the right player, which is what managers are told.
Thomas Ephestion 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 phone has started ringing about Rayan Berberi again, and this time the name on the line is Beerschot. Olympic Charleroi are listening politely and promising nothing.
He is doing things on a Saturday afternoon that nobody around him can answer, which is flattering for about one season and a problem after that. Olympic Charleroi will not keep him by pretending otherwise.