“Mignini goes where the games are”

£623k. That is the price FC Metz have paid Dijon FCO for Roberto Mignini, a centre-back who has played 29 league games in three seasons and whose face would not stop traffic in the city of mustard. The deal was done on Christmas Day, which tells you either that Metz were desperate or that Mignini’s agent owns a very persuasive calendar.

The move makes sense only when you look at the treatment table at the Stade Saint-Symphorien. Mikaël Solvet, Emilien Hugon, Gaël Fuhrmann and Léon Jeanson are all injured, three of them back around the new year but none fit for the trip to Bastia on 28 December. Mignini, 31, walks into a back line that has been held together with tape and prayer. He will compete with Hugon, Fuhrmann and Jeanson when they return, and they have plenty of league starts between them over the past two seasons. Good luck with that.

Mignini is Argentinian, slow to settle in a new place, and he arrives at a club where Benjamin Dumont, Aziz Benoit and Antonino Bonacini all wear the garnet. All three once played for Dijon. Dumont and Benoit are on the list of people Mignini dislikes, and the feeling is mutual. The dressing room at Metz is about to become a very interesting place. Perhaps the club should have spent the fee on a mediator.

Yet Mignini is happy, his morale described as really good, and he leaves a Dijon side that is a respected name in continental football for a club its country knows well. That is one way of putting it. Another is that he has swapped Ligue 1 for Ligue 2, and the only number that matters is not the fee but the games he will actually play. At Metz, with four centre-backs crocked, he will play. At Dijon, he was a ghost in the squad. Now he gets to be a footballer again, even if half the dressing room would rather he stayed in Burgundy.