Santiago de Querétaro paid 5,786,999 SVC for Vicente Espinoza Hevia on Wednesday. That's one SVC short of 12 times the 22-year-old right-back's 482,250 SVC valuation. By Saturday the deal had made #general-chat the angriest room on the server.

The numbers from Saturday: 824 messages in #general-chat. LilPimiETuk, the player's agent, wrote 367 of them (44.5%). rosvorn, backing him, added 194. Badinho (badinhodt1340 on Discord), the manager who sold the player, posted six.

The paper trail

The chain records it like this:

• 17 Oct: LilPimiETuk says he became the player's agent
• 23 Oct: Badinho's P Santiago de Chile (Palestino, Chile's top flight) list him with a minimum bid of 5,786,999 SVC
• 27 Oct: Querétaro, a Mexican second-tier club with 35.46M SVC in the bank, make the only bid
• 28 Oct: the deal completes once the 24-hour matching window closes

LilPimiETuk had put the player on No Renewal. He couldn't match the bid. His Varna Green club has 3.21M SVC today. His claim is that Querétaro is Badinho's alt and that the lad was parked there out of spite. A different manager account is listed at Querétaro, nobody has shown proof in public, and Badinho never answered the alt claim. For what it's worth, Querétaro do have two 78-rated defenders who can play right-back, and Espinoza Hevia is injured until 12 November.

How it kicked off

At 00:41 on Saturday rosvorn opened with: "I think it's time to point out unsportsman managers." Badinho replied to the wrong man ("This is not me, are you stupid?" came back from rosvorn) and then signed off:

I, as the club manager, must protect the club's investment—and I therefore have the authority to put that player up for sale to avoid a loss in value.

Then LilPimiETuk woke up.

This community is COOKED...

His case is that every agent sets NR without asking, "because i don't trust the managers", and that "All of this drama could have been prevented if he just dmed me." When VitoBonani told him to mark the player non-transferable, he pointed out that "you can't set NT and NR at the same time."

The jury splits

VitoBonani said he'd checked the in-game dates and called it "complaining for the sake of complaining." The chain partly backs him. The listing came six days after LilPimiETuk became agent, not "immediately" as LilPimiETuk kept saying, and the bid came four days after that. But LilPimi is right that the price was 12x from the first minute.

Gevenito had the line of the day:

\"No Renewal\" is a decision made and not an offer. Negotiating starts before you set NR, not after you set NR.

He also said that finding "a bag 🎒 with millions of dollars" in the street, "most people first option will be to keep it." snaus74 took the agents' side: "It's normal to put your agented player on NR. Because you can't trust many managers nowadays I'm afraid."

Threats both ways

This is where it gets nasty for everyone:

The moment he screws up and the player is concerned, i will put him on unhappy. 🙂

rosvorn followed with his own warning: "next time Im putting NR to everyone who's upgrading and not DMing anyone and just get them to the Free Bench."

The 12x grey zone

rosvorn took the row to #soccerverse-fa and asked: "How can FA decide if a player worth 12x without knowing the future?" cloudsv_ had already given the working answer in general chat: "you can do whatever you want. if there's a report, then is when we check." Gevenito added that the FA weighs "verifiable evidence provided by the reporter". Hours later, cloudsv_ in the FA channel: "Maybe we have a crystal ball but we never said."

Side note: my robot namesake, the Skez bot, gave cloudsv_ a ten-minute timeout over a "Goebbels" line. LilPimiETuk talked it round, and it admitted it "may have mistaken a username for a Nazi comparison." Nobody called Goebbels shows up anywhere in the public chat. "Bad Skez," said LilPimi. Fair.

The verdict

None of this came out of nowhere. On Friday LilPimiETuk wrote that things were "making me want to just quit the game day by day", and joachim_95952 added: "I have had it for the moment."

By the rules as they stand, both men did what the game lets them do, and they've both lost. In LilPimi's own words: "now we both lose btw." Palestino lost a right-back, Querétaro have an injured one, and LilPimi is the agent of a player he can't afford. A five-minute DM before the No Renewal or before the listing could have avoided the lot. Until the game rewards talking first, whoever moves first will keep winning.