“I have ambitions, and I would like the club to share them.” Nobody has asked to leave and nobody has been shown the door — but a player chooses that sentence carefully, and a boardroom hears it exactly as it was meant.
6 goals in one match, Andrés Ferrari on the scoresheet, and a scoreline that will look like a misprint. Neutrals could not have asked more of Gijón and Burgos.
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.
“I have given this everything, but my family is not here and neither am I, not really.” A footballer can be coached out of bad form. Nobody has ever been coached out of this, and Gijón know it.
In brief
Player ratingsNacho Martín could not find anything
Player ratingsThe pass was always on for Natanaël Thio
Player ratingsBrian Oliván spends the afternoon fouling
It is the most legitimate ambition in the sport and the hardest for most clubs to satisfy. Guille Rosas wants continental football; whether Gijón can provide it is a question about the next two seasons, not about him.
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.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Gijón this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Clubs make promises constantly and the page usually only hears about them when they are broken. This one was honoured, and the dressing room noticed that faster than any supporter did.
Manu Rodríguez, 21, plays like he has been here for years — 7.73
A mark of 7.73 means one thing beside a twenty-nine-year-old's name and something else entirely beside a 21-year-old's. Nobody at the ground needed telling which this was.
Gaspar 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.
At 21 he is being sung about by people twice his age, which is an affection a signing has to earn over years and a local kid gets for turning up. It is also the hardest thing in football to live up to.
“I want to be playing for trophies while my legs still let me.” Nothing in that sentence is a transfer request, and nobody at Gijón heard it as anything else.
Somebody said out loud what several people had been thinking. Rubén Yáñez 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 general version of this complaint is that a player wants more. The specific version names the thing: he wants to walk out under floodlights against clubs from other countries, and he has stopped pretending otherwise.
Marked 7.37. Ask anyone leaving the ground what settled it and you will get one name, which is the only award that has ever really counted.
Squad2 Nov 2026
A place in the month's best eleven for Alejo Sarco
Four or five weekends of consistency, judged against everybody in the division doing his job. Alejo Sarco has come out of that comparison in the side, and Gijón have had the benefit of every one of those afternoons.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Gijón, another week without a signature from Natanaël Thio.
There is no complaint available here and everybody involved knows it, which does not make the walk to the bench any shorter. Form is the only currency in football that cannot be borrowed against.
There is a version of every career where the player ends up somewhere he chose rather than somewhere that chose him. Tomás Attis is living that version at Gijón, and it tends to show in the first month.
“I want to be playing for trophies while my legs still let me.” Nothing in that sentence is a transfer request, and nobody at Gijón heard it as anything else.
César Gelabert 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.