“A return to Argentina”

The last glimpse of Gino Alarcón in Lens colours was brief: two games, no goals, then the road back across the Atlantic. On 16 August, the 32-year-old Argentinian completed his move from RC Lens to Club Olimpo de Bahía Blanca for £0.6m, a small transaction with the weight of a homecoming.

Football gives its departures a strange poetry. A player arrives carrying possibility; he leaves carrying the shape of what did not quite happen. Alarcón’s Lens chapter was short, barely enough time for the red and gold to become a second skin. Now he returns to Argentina, where his next act will be written in the Argentine Premier Division.

His career has taken him through seven clubs since 2046/47. Across those years, he has made 327 club appearances and scored 26 goals: a working football life, built less on spectacle than on persistence. He has never played for Argentina’s national team. At Olimpo, the old arithmetic gives way to a fresh question of belonging: what can a returning son offer when the welcome is still warm but the page is blank?

Lens have also parted with Lowick Léopoldie, who has moved to Coruña in a separate deal worth £0.6m. There is a quiet melancholy in seeing two departures from the same club arrive together, each player stepping out of one story before the next has found its opening line.

For Alarcón, that line lies in Bahía Blanca. Lens offered only a passing chapter; Olimpo now offers the chance to make the return mean more than the journey itself.