While we Sevillistas are carrying on with our lives during La Liga’s summer slumber, Sevilla FC is also carrying on with its life: starting training, scheduling friendlies, and building up the plantilla for the coming year. Let’s take a quick summary of the summer thus far, shall we?
The team has begun its training for the ’12-’13 season in Costa Ballena, and at this point I believe everyone who has a contract with the team for next year and wasn’t in the Euro is participating. I have a hard time getting super excited about that, but a bit more exciting is that we’re rapidly approaching Sevilla’s first pre-season game of the year, a July 13 match with UD Roteña. The pre-season schedule as of now is as follows:
- July 13, UD Roteña
- July 21, Arcos CF
- July 25, Girona (Trofeo Costa Brava)
- August 1, Xerez CD
- August 2, San Fernando
- August 4, Borussia Mönchengladbach
- August 8, Deportivo (Trofeo Antonio Puerta)
- August 11, Mainz 05
- August 19, La Liga Match Day 1
Lots of pushovers, as you’d expect, but the matches with the German clubs should be interesting. And we’re almost to the one month countdown to the start of the season, so that’s great as well.
In transfer news, Sevilla has been fairly active, offloading a few players of note (Koné, Kanouté, Caceres) while only actually selling one–Caceres for €8M. On the arrivals side, We’ve also mostly brought in free players, and the most exciting arrival for most Sevillistas will be Bryan Rabello, a promising youngster from Chile who will begin play with the B team. Maybe he and Hiroshi can develop a great partnership this season and terrorize La Liga and Champions next year (oops I think I just got ahead of myself). The team has supposedly come to an agreement for Paraguayan defender Iván Piris for a loan deal plus option to buy for €4.5M. It’s not official yet, but it sounds like a nearly complete deal, and Piris is talking like he’s hoping to stay for several years. Rather than more arrivals, the biggest question marks remaining for the club’s transfer summer are transfer-listed but as yet unpurchased players like Fazio and SQD, and the list of players returning to Sevilla from various loans (whom the club is apparently not planning on reincorporating into the squad): Romaric, Acosta, and Bernardo.
Hopefully you’re all enjoying your summer being outside and not thinking too much about Sevilla–save your strength for the season to come!
Hasta la muerte (hasta agosto)!
will be nice to have real-er things to follow with this team. offseason is so damn boring when you’re not choosing which set of superstars or ballon d’or winners you want to add to fill out your bench.
piris sounds like he might have hit a snag, with roma suddenly jumping into the picture and making a higher offer (again, you should all go to eldesmarque yourselves to see if understood the spanish correctly).
otherwise, i just cant wait to start next season so we’ll have something new to complain about and to wash away the lingering bad taste from last year.
sorry for the negativity of this comment. truth is i actually really am excited about the season starting. not sure what to expect though.
That is my understanding of the Piris situation as well. Probably either Piris is actually interested in Roma (and will thus go) or he still wants to come to us but wants to use this as an opportunity to increase wages…which I don’t see happening bc as has been mentioned from time to time in these parts, we are broke.
And I LEFT Chicago, so I am only enjoying it in my memories, although there’s a decent chance I’ll be back some time after this part of my career is done. I have moved to Omaha, NE, which is actually a really great place to live, so I am enjoying being here as well!
enjoying chicago jeremy? job ok? buy chicago fire season tickets yet?