BensGrandad
New member
My view is based on how it appears but I do accept there can be no other way of doing business.
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[Albion] There is ZERO chance of SIGNING anyone today.
- Thread starter Bladders
- Start date
My view is based on how it appears but I do accept there can be no other way of doing business.
Clearly things are happening behind the scenes. Signing youngsters doesn't mean we've given up on first team signings.
severnside gull
Well-known member
We may not be signing anyone today but this article about Soufyan Ahannach sand what it's like to move club and country is quite interesting.
https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/het...hash=307c06fdf90f97a2ffafda210848e289ce48a3ed
Unfortunately I can't provide a translation via my mobile but I'm sure someone who's interested can
https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/het...hash=307c06fdf90f97a2ffafda210848e289ce48a3ed
Unfortunately I can't provide a translation via my mobile but I'm sure someone who's interested can
Johnny RoastBeef
These aren't the players you're looking for.
- Jan 11, 2016
- 3,472
He who squints his eyes a little and looks around, imagines himself in a painting. Large wooden houses stuck randomly against the hills, in the distance a medieval castle. "Look at how beautiful it is here, it's like a film set, sometimes I think: how is it possible that I ended up here?"
The floor is Soufyan Ahannach, a born and raised Amsterdammer from the Kolenkit neighborhood with Moroccan roots. Last summer he moved from Almere City FC to Brighton & Hove Albion. From the meager first division in the Netherlands to, according to many, the best competition in the world. It is a transfer that most footballers can only dream of.
During the tour of the training complex, Ahannach is amazed at what his new club has to offer. Twelve training fields of which five for the first team ("you see that in the Netherlands nowhere"), an indoor training hall ("mandatory for every club in the Premier League") and a refrigerator full of fresh juices after the training ("is made for everyone personally ").
Clay soil
Players are nowhere to be seen mid-afternoon. The training is over, on the lawns an army of material men is busy with the turf for the next practice session. Whether he can also show the dressing room? The club photographer who is walking along is fine, as long as we do not take pictures of the training fields of the first. Those are secret,
The space where players put on their football shoes differs little from a dressing room of an amateur club. Simple wooden benches with clothes hooks above it. Especially the smell - a mixture of sweat, wet grass and worn football shoes - is recognizable. In the corner a plate with dozens of brightly colored soccer shoes - ready to be cleaned. Ahannach points out his own. 'Souf', it says.
It did not matter much if Ahannach had played 'just' on the clay soil of the Flevopolder this season, at Almere City FC in the Jupiler League. Because despite a successful season with eighteen goals and fifteen assists, Dutch clubs were not in line for him. There was interest from the subtop - Ahannach hoped for a switch to FC Utrecht - but it did not come to negotiations. Only NEC made a concrete proposal, a club that, like Almere City, plays in the Jupiler League.
Then there was that phone call from his brother and agent Abderahman. There was concrete interest from England. Of a club from the Premier League still. Ahannach thought his brother was joking. And also: interest does not mean anything in football. "I had in my mind that I first wanted to prove myself at a club in the Dutch premier league, before I could think of a step abroad, and I wanted to live in Amsterdam, close to my family."
However, it turned out that the club in question, Brighton & Hove Albion, which last season promoted to the Premier League, had really set its sights on him. The club even sent him a contract immediately. "Then I knew I had to seize this opportunity, which only comes once."
Attach family
Prior to his transfer, Ahannach had never heard of Brighton, a city with 285,000 inhabitants on the English south coast. In fact, he had never set foot on British soil.
'I pretended it was normal, but inside I grinned'
'I pretended it was normal, but inside I grinned' © Dingena Mol
In the first weeks he had to get used to his new environment. His brother assisted him the first days to guide the business side of the transfer, but then he only slept for weeks in a hotel. Ahannach missed Amsterdam, his friends and family. He comes from a close family with eleven children. Every day he took the plane to be at home.
He married in October so that he could live with his wife. Their apartment in Hove, which is one municipality with Brighton, is located on a busy street near the train station. A conscious choice; Ahannach likes a bit of noise. He does not come from the Kolenkitbuurt for nothing.
Red-haired kitten
The route from the training complex to his apartment leads through a neighborhood with spacious villas. Ahannach could have also lived there, but he chose an apartment with two bedrooms and a relatively small living room. Modest, especially for a football player from the Premier League.
The interior is practical, little frills. Three benches, a side table and a small altar with references to Islam. A light sign in the corner with the names of him and his wife in black letters betrays his marriage. 4ever, is below it. For a little bit of house-keeping, the red-haired kitten takes care of Bibi, who came from the Netherlands. He runs through the house as if her life depends on it.
He likes living together, even if it was just as exciting. "We both lived at home first, and I honestly did not know how to live on my own.I did not even know how to turn on a washing machine, so it was nice that I first slept in a hotel. a good transition phase. "
Ahannach can now switch on the washing machine, cooking is now the biggest challenge. "I still do a little bit of exercise, I often do something with chicken or salmon.My last week my mother was with us, she put ten dishes with food in the freezer, I wish she could stay. a mother's child. "
After three months, Ahannach feels at home in East Sussex, the county in which Brighton is part. He has made good use of English customs; he gets cars on the curvy highway on the right as if he had never done anything else. And that the maximum speed is indicated in miles instead of kilometers per hour, he now also knows.
Brothers and sisters often visit or there is contact via FaceTime. In his spare time he reads books about Islam or goes shopping with his wife in the mall. Or to London - that is an hour by train.
From his first salary - he prefers not to say how much he earns - Ahannach went shopping immediately. He could buy everything without looking at the price tags. A Louis Vuitton handbag for men - model toiletry bag, popular among football players - is his first acquisition. "It belongs to the life of a footballer," he says with a wink. But he comes just as sweet with Zara and H & M. "I buy something because I like it, not because it's expensive."
Zinédine Zidane
Ahannach can still be seen on the street in Brighton without being recognized, but privileges already give him his status as a professional footballer. In the Lebanese restaurant he likes, A Taste or Sahara on Western Road in the center, all tables are reserved this evening, but the waiter does not know how fast he should free one when Ahannach arrives with his guests from the Netherlands.
I take advantage of the things I learned in small squares
With a plate of rouz dajaaj (chicken in spicy sauce with rice), Ahannach talks extensively about his youth in the Kolenkit neighborhood. He grew up as the youngest of the family with eleven brothers and sisters. Striking: he never played football with a club as a child, did not even know that it existed. From the professional football career of his brother Alami - he played with Telstar, MVV and FC Emmen between 1992 and 2003 - he did not have much to deal with because of 26 years of age difference.
"Where I grew up, I played football on squares, where I often could join the big boys." With street football tournaments Ahannach was usually Zinédine Zidane, at that time the best footballer in the world. "Everything he did, looked laconical, as a child you dream of becoming a professional football player and playing at Barcelona or Real Madrid."
As a born and bred Amsterdammer, he was never before Ajax. His preference went to PSV, where at that time many players were with a Moroccan background. Ismaïl Aissati, Otman Bakkal, Ibrahim Afellay - boys to whom he could mirror himself.
Golden grip
At the age of 12, Ahannach reported to a football club: VVA / Spartan, at his house around the corner. After two years he wanted to go higher and went to DWS in West that also played against the youth of Ajax. Ahannach had to start his displeasure in the C5, but was soon allowed to go to the selection team. At the age of sixteen he made his debut in the first. A few years later, Almere City FC knocked on the door.
Ahannach's greatest talent: playing in the small space. Finding a way out in the hustle and bustle. Things he learned on the street. "A square is so small, you always have to improvise, I can read the game well and try to be a step ahead every time, I still enjoy the things I've learned there."
In his last year at Almere City, he made furore as left winger and Brighton & Hove Albion got him for that position. Striking: in the juniors, Ahannach preferred to play a defensive role in the midfield.
Only when he was allowed to participate at Jong Almere and all midfield positions were occupied, he was allowed to try out Jack de Gier as left winger. A golden grip: the season he was in the first and he finished with eighteen goals and fifteen assists in the top three most productive players of the Jupiler League.
De Gier made him the player he is now, but also former international Peter van Vossen, his trainer with the A-juniors, played an important role. "He was the first to say that I was able to reach the international top, and that for a seventeen-year-old boy at Almere, he was very strict at first, and I did not even have the first matches at the selection. matches at last, I made two goals and gave two assists. "
"He texted me that he was expecting me more, I did not understand it As a young boy you want to play football without being constantly being talked in. Only later did I hear from others that he only did it because he was saw. "
Unreliable
With his education at the ROC in Zuid he had already stopped: he decided to fill his career as a professional footballer. The fact that the step higher up took a while, made Ahannach uncertain. "The top 5 best players of the Jupiler League had already gone to other clubs, except me, I was a bit panicked, because you never know if you will play well for another year."
Before Brighton came, there were also offers from abroad. Several clubs in Turkey and the Middle East wanted him, and he could earn millions. But according to colleagues he asked for advice, clubs from those countries are unreliable with payment and fulfillment of appointments. And he wanted to be patient, not to go into the sea with the first club. His development had to go step by step.
More physical
Now he plays here, at a club that plays matches against Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool. At the American Express Community Stadium he tells about the first time he was in the catacombs - three days after his arrival in Brighton.
"Manchester City came to visit and suddenly I was standing next to trainer Pep Guardiola and top players like Yaya Touré, David Silva and Sergio Agüero, whom I normally only saw on television, sometimes I really had to squeeze myself. had to pretend it was normal. "
In the dressing room are shirts of Dutch players Davy Pröpper and Tim Krul, who after his rental period last year at Ajax also settled in Brighton. Ahannach's shirt is not there. Not yet. He has been met for the future.
In his position, left winger, he now has to accept four players. That is why Ahannach wants to develop as much as possible. That is necessary, because the difference between Dutch and English football is great. The game is more physical and he has to make more meters. With tricks with which he could pass five or six men in the Jupiler League, he does not get away with this.
He plays matches with the second and watches the matches from the first from the stands. No punishment. "The ambiance is really great, the whole game is sung very hard, and in Almere three thousand people watched, here it's ten times as big as that."
The language barrier is something that he sometimes has difficulty with. Ahannach speaks a word of English, but the football language is slightly different. "When I wanted to make it clear to a fellow player that he had a male in his back, I screamed: in your back! They looked at me strangely, later I heard you have to say" man on. "Sometimes I look for something in Google Translate and remember it for the next time. "
Panty
When Ahannach was certain he was going to Brighton, he was looking for information about mosques. He was curious if they were there. Ahannach follows purist salafism, which means that he lives on 'pure Islamic guidelines'.
He does not give women a hand, wears a beard and prays five times a day. That is of course possible at home or at the club, but he finds a mosque more pleasant. He could choose from three, including Al Madina, a five-minute drive from his house.
Ahannach is open about his faith and likes to discuss it. He knows that salafism is often linked to jihadism and terrorism, but his movement, purism, condemns any form of violence. "We are primarily concerned with worshiping God and arranging our lives for the Qur'an."
Faith has a lot of influence on him as a footballer, especially because of rules that he has to keep. "For example, I play with a pair of tights, because as a Muslim man you have to be covered from your navel to your knees.In the summer people find that weird.It is also quite warm, but if you want to go to paradise, you have to do something for it talk about."
Halaleten
If Ahannach had to choose a Dutch club, he would have preferred to go to FC Utrecht, because that club with Yassin Ayoub and formerly Nacer Barazite has experience with Islamic players.
"At Ajax or Heerenveen they are less used to it, and then you wonder if there is room for my lifestyle." At Brighton & Hove Albion it is certainly no problem. Halaleten is ordered from London and if he wants to pray, this can be done in the powerhouse next to the changing room.
He sees his step to Brighton & Hove Albion as the path that has already been determined for him. "That's the beauty of faith, I was perhaps disappointed that I could not go to FC Utrecht, but then Brighton came."
The best of everything? That he might not have to work later and earn enough money to make his family happy. "If my mother needs a new car, I buy it."
severnside gull
Well-known member
Thanks JRB. Quite an interesting read I thought.
How many quality strikers are realistically going to want to join a club staring at relegation knowing that they will be totally isolated up front?
Just to e clear - when I said now I didn't mean later tonight, it was now .... right now.
Nixonator
Well-known member
Seems as though we look a bit short, if only someone had predicted this.
When does the window open again?
When does the window open again?
I have moved on from the "we need a striker" position to, we urgently need a striker, a winger who is fast and can deliver a ball, a fast box to box midfielder (with experience of defending corners and scoring goals). All of them before the next game please.
Frankly I think the club need to pull something out of the bag to get morale going a bit. Bar the Palace game it's been a lean couple of months now in terms of getting the spirits up. Even the Watford win wasn't brilliant.
Charlies Shinpad
New member
After watching the game today who would want to sign for us 
Mackenzie
Old Brightonian
I agree, unfortunately without throwing stupid money at this (wages and transfer fee) there’ll be no movement. Hopefully the realisation of this will come sooner rather than later. We might have to sell before we buy.
Incredible isnt it. We failed in the last window to sign the most important player leaving us trusting to luck and exceptional defending. Here we are half way through the next window and what have we done to correct that. As it stands nothing. We are struggling and need a lift and soon. Lets hope this window doesnt also go from cluster list to cluster f##k as far as strikers are concerned.
Not necessarily,we have 2 loan positions available from the Premier League or from around the world,need pace to cause problems,in a world cup year players need to be playing
portslade seagull
Well-known member
Doesn't sound like anything happening anytime soon listening to CH. Apparently it's a hard window and were trying our best. Where have we heard that one before. 4 months to sort something and another failure on the cards
DarrenFreemansPerm
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This is my concern, we simply don’t have the same appeal as we did 3 weeks ago.
Weststander
Well-known member
Make that 9 months.
The silence is deafening as the club plummets down the table.