KV Mechelen offered $4.3M; KAA Gent 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.
Mike Eerdhuijzen 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.
Squad17 Aug 2026
José Marsà 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.
“We keep meeting, and we keep leaving the room with the same numbers we walked in with.” Another round of talks at KV Mechelen, another week without a signature from Amine Bassi.
The dugout17 Aug 2026
The manager has not finished forgetting Benito Raman's mistake
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.
Squad17 Aug 2026
7 new faces, and KV Mechelen 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.
Fee agreed, wages agreed, and Seraing waiting with a shirt. Nobody at KV Mechelen is pretending otherwise, and the supporters have stopped asking whether and started asking when.
Every footballer has an answer to the question about his boyhood club, and most of them never get to act on it. Indy Boonen has, at KV Mechelen, and the first month will show what that does to a man.
Everything agreed with Charleroi, everything agreed with the player; a doctor is the only person left to persuade. The photograph is a day or two away.
The number the board signed off was not enough. It has been asked again and raised its own offer to $190.0K — a club that wants Adrián Palacios enough to be asked twice.
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 11 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
The offer from Heracles for Keano Vanrafelghem 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.
Mike Eerdhuijzen 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 José Marsà was in the middle of it. The one dressing-room argument that is genuinely about football.
The name of Massimo Decoene has come up in conversations KV Mechelen were not part of. Nothing formal, nothing signed — but nothing about it accidental either.