I wouldn't mind to see him back either. He fits in well with the team and he is a kind of striker we don't have. I think his agent is a problem though, he screwed it up last time so I'm not sure our board wants to make business with him again. A CB called Francis Dickoh is also rumored to us. He is playing for the NT of Ghana and he played for Hibernian last season.
I don't remember his name but he was not cooperative at all, both in Adu's and EJ's case. A shame actually because both EJ and Aris were pleased with each other and wanted to continue working together.
Wason Renteria is the latest player to be added on the list of strikers. We are supposedly interested in the Colombian. He is a good player from what I've seen but he agreed with Cruz Azul some days ago but didn't pass the medical tests.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BdXT1DwBwI"]Wason Renteria - Once caldas 2011 - Goles liga postobon y copa santander libertadores - YouTube[/ame]
Should be a good signing. I read now that the problem with Cruz Azul was that they claim he has problems with the lungs. Because they are playing over 2000 meters above sea level. Here someone say that he had a dispute with the coach of the team. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110715192831AASTjS5 Renteria is claiming that he doesn't have any health problems. http://www.futbolred.com/colombiano...-estoy-enfermo-aseguro-wason-renteria/9963046 His agent says they will sue Cruz Azul for every dollar of that 3-year deal that they signed. http://www.futbolred.com/colombiano...-estoy-enfermo-aseguro-wason-renteria/9963046 Strange case. How can he be injured when he just finished playing a whole season with Once Caldas? He seemed to be fine with them and just shortly after Cruz Azul claim he isn't healthy.
He probably got screened, and found something wrong with him. The problem lies with them for signing a deal before giving him a screen/health examination. I hope you guys get him though, looks like he'd be a great with the touch and go soccer you guys play over there.
Here is an article from the MLS website that also mention EJ / Eddie Johnson to Aris is possible. http://www.mlssoccer.com/news/article/2011/08/17/eddie-johnson-mls-deal-falls-through
I think ARIS has a big chance to land him for decent money now, MLS were offering him pennies. WIth the Euro, Aris could match that and still be good.
Yeah EJ shouldn't be that hard to land now for Aris. From what I read he is not the first option at the moment though. So we will probably try to sign him if we can't sign Renteria or whoever we want to sign. I would be glad to have EJ back at ARIS though. Just 2 more weeks on until the transfer period close, so whatever is going to happen will happen soon.
So the 28 year old CB Francis Dickoh has signed for 2 years. He has 13 games for the Ghanian NT on his account. Last year he played for Hibernian and before that for the Dutch team Utrecht.
We will wait for Renteria until tomorrow, if he doesn't answer then we will go for someone else. The league starts in a week so we need a striker quick. Apparently he has some problems with his team, Once Caldas. Cesarec is suspended so we will probably have to play with a youngster as a striker against PAS Giannina.
I guess you guys remember Kavala and Olympiakos Volou? The mafia owners teams that first were relegated because of the owners match fixing, illegal betting and so on. Then it was decided that they will stay in the first division. Guess what? Now they are relegated again This time to the 4th division! The sports ministry of Greece decided to go in and take some action. Actually 7 teams of first division did not fulfill the goals that every team has to to take part in the first division. But of course paok and aek weren't relegated, these teams and olympiakos have all the help the need from the government and politicians. The league will probably not start this weekend as scheduled. Maybe next week or the week after that. Finally it seems like we found our striker btw. It seems to be Mikael Forssell that previously played for Chelsea, Birmingham and some other teams in England and Germany.
Wow - the plot thickens in the crime and punishment phase. It has been a roller coaster this pre-season!
New shirts presented today in the ARIS Megastore: I like the striped shirt that Faty is wearing. The purple one is quite cool too, it's different. I think that stripe shines so much because of the flashes from the cameras. Hope so at least.
Here is a better pic of the shirts without the reflecting of the flashes. Since Olympiakos Volou and Kavala are getting relegated to the 4th division all their players will be able to leave on a free transfer. That makes rumors of us being interested in their players of course, specially the ones from Olympiakos Volou since Tsiolis coached them last year. Players being rumored from them are Umbides and Martin. Previously Sankare and Zaradoukas. But we already got Dickoh for CB so we won't go after another. Umbides is one of the best right midfielders in the league. Very skillful player that Tsiolis always praised. I'm imagining a right side with Neto and Umbides, oh lord that will be the best in the league without doubt. Martin is a good striker too. Quite normal that he is rumored to us since we are looking for a striker. The good thing is that he knows the league and he knows the coach. From Kavala the most interesting players were Douglao, Onwuachi and Abdoun. All of them already left. Douglao signed for Braga in Portugal, great move for him. He's got potential to play for a very big club in the future. Onwuachi is training with a German club but apparently he is in bad shape. Clubs from Cyprus are also interested in him. Abdoun will sign for Olympiakos. Btw Danilo Pereira that played for us last season on loan from Parma might move to Liverpool or Arsenal. He was one of the best players in the U20 World Cup. Pity we couldn't keep him, huge talent.
All of them are quite cool. The grey/silver and green ones are for the GK's. It looks like the league will start this weekend after all. Nova the channel that owns the television rights for the games demanded 4 million euros, no one wants to pay that so there will most likely be games this weekend. Of course no team wants that because there is no time to prepare for a game that is just a couple of days away. We also don't know which teams will take the places of Olympiakos Volou and Kavala yet. We are going to play PAS Giannina without Cesarec, Giannitis, Portilla and Vellidis. All this scandal and yet it was one team that lost the most. ARIS of course. Olympiakos Volou took our place in the Europa League by cheating, UEFA and EPO let them play first 2 rounds and then kicked them out of the tournament and didn't put us in their place. Like Turkey did yesterday when they decided not to let Fenerbahce play and replaced them with the team that finished after them in the league. We are losing money on this because we don't participate. Also more difficult to sign players when you don't participate in the European cups. Since we are a team that is owned by the fans we need all the money we can get. So this is a blow for us. No team in Greece has the contacts we have but unfortunately money rules most times. Kontis our General Director is the person with most contacts and knowledge in Greek football. He was the right hand of Joao Havelange for many years, worked in Brazilian NT, Flamengo and was the best Greek football agent. He has been working for us for many years, denying huge contracts from other clubs every year. We are going on our own way and our enemies can't stand that. We are the only club that doesn't have good relationship with the other corrupt ones. Specially Olympiakos that practically owns more than half of the other teams of the league. They have a huge squad because they take all the best players from the small clubs even that they don't need them, then they loan them out to them and keep paying their salary. In return they get 3 points every time they play them. Because we were the only club that didn't support them and their owner in the Super League meetings they made a open war against our club and started accusing Kontis. Even though they offered him huge a huge contract to join them some months earlier, he denied them though. Anyway, I'm getting off subject here. Because the thing I wanted to say is that these smalls sums of money makes a huge difference for us. If we would've playing in Europa League this season and every other season that they cheated us out of it we would have had that money. Kontis today mentioned some examples of that today on the radio. The year that we brought Calvo, Alex Perez etc. from Barca B and Real Madrid B we could have brought Mata too. But his father wanted 70.000 euros straight up, something we couldn't give him at the time. Now he was sold to Chelsea for 30 million euro!!! We could have brought Lukaku before he joined Anderlecht too. But his agent wanted some thousands euro too much for us. He was only 14 or 15 at the time. The latest example is Danilo Pereira. The 19-year old midfielder that played for us during the last 6 months. We were offered to buy 50% of his rights for not a very big fee, we couldn't pay that at the time though. He did his first professional games of his career for us. Not many knew about him. Now he was one of the best, if not the best player in the U20 and Parma is selling him for 10 million euros to either Liverpool or Arsenal. Well sorry for a long post, but I think it can be a interesting read for someone that doesn't follow Greek that closely
League starts today after all(if nothing change last minute). ARIS start away against PAS Giannina 21:30 Greek time. Will come up with links later if someone is interested to watch. I expect us to start something like this. [LINEUP-4-4-2]Castillo, Soltani, Kapetanos, Papasterianos, Faty, Neto, Michel, Dickoh, Vangeli, Sifakis[/LINEUP-4-4-2] It's hard to predict though. Probably Castillo will start behind the striker, maybe Soltani will be our striker even though he is more of a winger. We have the young Aggeloudis in the squad too, he might get the chance. Then it's not sure if Papasterianos will play or Toja or Prittas. Also Dickoh is a question mark since he just trained for a week.
Line up confirmed, the only change from above is that Toja is starting instead of Papasterianos. LINK 1 LINK 2 LINK 3 LINK 4
Disappointing result. 0-0 away against PAS Giannina. We should have won the game. We played great in the first half. Many many great chances to score. 2 posts with Toja and Kapetanos. We should have had a penalty too and then the ref also didn't give anything when their keeper made a save outside the penalty area. I don't know what we did in the 2nd half though. Very bad performance after the break, many easy mistakes and we didn't create very much either. See highlights here: http://goal4replay.net/VideoWatchF.asp?ID=57688&Ln=En Dickoh showed that he is a great CB. Very strong and quick, he impressed even though he's just been with the team for week. Faty did well in the first half but in the 2nd half Toja dropped his performance so Faty had to run for both of them. So Faty made many easy mistakes in offense since he was so tired from running to cover all spaces in defense. Now we have a couple of weeks until the next game, so the the team has to work to be ready. We have to win games like this if we want to finish top 3.
So we just signed a striker finally. Victoraş Iacob from Romania that played for our rival Iraklis during the last 2 years. Third player we sign from them this season He did a great first season for Iraklis, scoring 11 goals in the league, last season he did not do that good though. Quite logical though, Iraklis had so many problems. Players did hardly got paid during at all. Iacob is a tall(1,91cm) and very strong striker. Tough player to meet, he opens spaces for his teammates. Can be good for Castillo, Soltani and Neto. He's got one problem though, he gets so many cards. Many yellow and red cards for him when he played for Iraklis. Hopefully he can control himself better in ARIS. I'm not super excited about the signing. I expected something better and someone that scores more goals, but let's see. If he plays at his full potential it should be a good signing. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekeYRQry-8Q"]VICTORAS IACOB MOVIE.wmv - YouTube[/ame] He was the fan favorite at Iraklis. We are rumored to be close to sign the Argentinian Umbides from Olympiakos Volou, he is waiting to terminate his contract with them though. Would be a quality signing. There is also a rumor about us being close to sign one big name before the transfer closes tomorrow. A surprise for the fans. Let's see... There was a offer from Ukranian club Chernomorets for Vangeli, they offered us 1 million euros. Good offer. But Vangeli didn't want to leave for Ukraine. Cesarec and Toja today signed their new lower contracts that they agreed to sign some time ago.
It will be interesting to see if there is a surprise signing tomorrow - and who it is. You mentioned lower contracts for Cesarec and Toja - any idea how much lower?
I don't remember exactly but I think it was around 30% lower. Both players really wanted to stay which is great. I hope we can see them play at their full potential this season. Kristi Vangjeli just got sold to Chernomerets from Ukraine. A guy that will always be remembered by us Aris fans. He was the one in the current squad that had been playing the longest. He is a real Aris product, been in the team since 2002. Maybe not been a regular most of the time but when he played he always gave it all. Good for us to get some money out of him now in the end, it's important to be able to sell players too. Best of luck to Vangeli! Maybe it's time for Neto to back to his RB spot now. Hopefully we can get Umbides for the right winger spot. These two guys would make the best right side in the league, without doubt. Let's see what tomorrow has to offer us...
No surprise signing actually no signing at all and the transfer period closed. Though we still have 10 more days to sign players that has been without a club for the last 3 months. Maybe there will be given a permission to the Olympiakos Volou and Kavala players to find a club outside the window too. Since most of them haven't been able to terminate their contracts yet. At least Aravidis finally left, that player never offered anything to the club. Simply not good enough. Nacho Garcia stays. He signed a new lower contract. He will get 280.000 euros instead of the 400.000 he was supposed to get. Probably he will leave in the winter though. It will be difficult for him to play since we have many midfielders. But I'm sure Tsiolis will give him chances if he works hard enough at practice, Tsiolis is a very fair coach.