Not now, not at any price the club was prepared to say out loud. Valencia have kept their man, and Getafe go back to a list with one name crossed off it.
$10.5M was the most the club would pay and Rayo Vallecano 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.
Getafe have gone to Almería with a bid, and the supporters have gone to the internet with an opinion about it. Whether either changes anything is up to the selling club.
Abdelkabir Abqar 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.
Beaten 1‑3, and beaten fairly. The manager kept his words short afterwards, which was probably wise.
The dugout24 Aug 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 1‑3 defeat, delivered by Luka Ramírez to a room that had heard them before.
Somebody else has been better, the manager has said so with a team sheet, and there is no argument to be had. He will get the shirt back the only way it can be got back.
The system has changed and his position has not. A footballer can improve his form; he cannot improve the manager’s formation, and that is the whole of the problem.
Getafe have gone to Rayo Vallecano with a bid, and the supporters have gone to the internet with an opinion about it. Whether either changes anything is up to the selling club.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $11.9M — a club that wants Isi Palazón enough to be asked twice.
It was not about football and everybody who saw it knows that. Two men who have to play together on Saturday said things at Getafe this week that will take longer than a week to unsay.
Every shape has positions in it and this one does not have his. Getafe will either change the shape, change his job, or change his club, and he is waiting to hear which.
He used to wear the other shirt. On Saturday he plays against Real Madrid in this one, and whatever he says this week about it being just another game will be untrue.
A year in and the city has not opened up, the language has not come, and lunch is eaten alone more often than anybody at Getafe would admit. It shows on Saturdays.
A new face in his position and a shirt he thought he owned suddenly up for discussion. Getafe have promised nothing, which is what clubs promise at this stage.
Footballers are asked about their boyhood club so often that nobody listens to the answer. Javi Pérez has just signed for Getafe, and for once the answer mattered.
Nemanja Gudelj 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.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Luken Márquez is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Carlos García has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
Clubs spend fortunes looking for players and occasionally find one down the corridor. Marcos Herrera is that, and the reception he gets on his first appearance will be different in kind from the one any signing receives.
The academy exists for exactly this morning. Oihan Sanz has come through every age group the club runs and has now been handed a senior number, and the people who coached him at twelve will be the proudest in the building.
He is not being dropped. There is simply nowhere in the formation Getafe are playing to put a man who does what he does, which is a harder thing to be told than any team sheet.
The offer from Panserraikos for Sebastián Boselli 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.
“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 Getafe hears a sentence like that exactly as it was built.
It is not a grievance and it is not a demand: he wants to play continental football, and he has stopped hiding it. Whether Getafe can give him that is a question about the club, not about him.
“93 caps is more than I ever expected, and it is time somebody else had them.” At 34 he is finished with his country and nowhere near finished with Getafe.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at Getafe, another week without a signature from David Soria.
Squad3 Aug 2026
7 new faces, and Getafe 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.