Lights were on late into the night on Monday when president/owner Utz Claassen and director of football Miguel Angel Nadal put the finishing touches to Real Mallorca’s squad for their 2015/16 centennial season. Coach Albert “Chapi” Ferrer was keen to stress after Sunday’s 1-0 win over Ponferradina the need for a creative mid-fielder with muscle, so several names were being bandied about by the local media. As the transfer window deadline drew ever closer, Mallorca opted to sign French-born player of Mali extraction, Abdoul Sissoko, pending a medical yesterday, bringing him in from La Liga side Granada, where he was a team-mate of our midfielder Hector Yuste.
With the squad now complete, Mallorca have managed to offload one of their highest earners and it was “taxi for Agus” as he went back to his first club, Albacete, on a three-year deal.
We are now left with Truyols and Fofo, two players who failed to leave before the transfer window closed and will now stay at Real Mallorca until January. The paperwork regarding stellar signing Rolando Bianchi came through from Italy on Monday, so he’s available to play at Bilbao at noon on Sunday. Monday night also saw 20-year-old David Costas arrive from Celta Vigo. He’s here until June 2016 on loan and looks likely to form the heart of our defence alongside Avaldaño.
We’ve had an overbooking problem with our three Brazilian players. Two of them, Carioca and Lima, will now join Javier Olaizola’s “B” team squad, and promising centre back Hugo Gomes will play his first team football once the club get him a European Union passport which they have now applied for.
At least Mallorca this time around didn’t have all the trials and tribulations of registering players before midnight on a transfer deadline day, then finding out the necessary papers hadn’t been properly processed. That was the main reason we lost coach Michael Laudrup four years ago when players he expected didn’t materialise.