19 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Bologna lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
The offer from Lazio for Martin Vitík was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
The offer went to AS Roma this week and it is theirs to answer. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loud the door closes.
$1.3M was the most the club would pay and Como were asking for more. Deals like this are revived in the last week of a window roughly half the time, and everybody involved knows it.
Bologna asked and Parma said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
Boardroom24 Aug 2026
1 academy players handed senior numbers at Bologna
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.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Marco Benedetti is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
27 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Bologna lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
The offer from Lazio for Riccardo Orsolini was heard out and sent back the same day. First bids are rarely meant to succeed; they are meant to find out how loudly the door closes.
“It was not right for me. I am not going to explain why to anybody except the people I owe an explanation to.” A deal agreed between two clubs, and a player who declined to be part of it.
Bologna asked and Venezia said no without discussing a figure. It is the least ambiguous answer in football and the one clubs most often come back to test.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $1.4M — a club that wants Ivan Smolčić enough to be asked twice.
Arthur Theate 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 minutes were not coming at Bologna, so they will be looked for at Girona. A loan out is not a goodbye, but it is always a question: about the player, or about the plan.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Bologna are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.
The words a physio says slowly. 34 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.
“I know what people will say. I know what I want, and it is here.” Dolomiti Bellunesi had the fee agreed and the shirt ready; they did not have the player, and now they will not.
“I want to win things, and I would like to do it here.” Nothing has been demanded and nothing has been threatened — but a boardroom at Bologna hears a sentence like that exactly as it was built.
44 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. Bologna lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
“I want to be playing for trophies while my legs still let me.” Nothing in that sentence is a transfer request, and nobody at Bologna heard it as anything else.
Arthur Theate 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.
Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Southampton have kept their man, and Bologna go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
Add another name to the list: Dolomiti Bellunesi have asked the question everybody in the game has been asking about Massimo Pessina. The answer from Bologna has not changed — yet.
24 months to run and not a word offered. A club that lets the calendar negotiate for it usually ends up losing to the calendar.
Squad3 Aug 2026
7 new faces, and Bologna are still learning each other
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.
In brief
The dugoutJens Odgaard knocks on the manager's door