Article by George Nistor – Published Monday, May 11, 2026, 12:01 / Updated Monday, May 11, 2026 12:01
Lying on the big couch of the internet, until Parma v Roma and with El Clasico waiting, a piece of news with the potential for a rare dystopia poked at me all day yesterday, on one of the last Sundays before the play-outs draw the line. to Galati Steel, Stefan Banaa 21-year-old footballer, was sent packing to the parent club before the match with Farul, crucial for the rescue from relegation, because “a soprano was screaming” in his room. Nothing about alcohol, fighting or any hooligan outing.
It's not an understatement. “He played opera music, a soprano could be heard screaming in the whole stadium”, Cristi Munteanu explained the reason behind the decision, in a dialogue with GSP reporter Marius Mărgărit, after the player exposed on Instagram, in the form of a letter, his feelings dominated by fear.
The argument deserves to be kept at least somewhere in a time capsule, if Emir Kusturica stopped in 2014, at the time when the championship only had round trips. The episode itself says everything about the involuntary comedy of Romanian football.
A play-out soprano in Galați
I read it once and burst out laughing. I reread and became more aware of the negative side as well. Deeper, you come to realize that the layers of worlds enveloping the Superliga have never been counted. In 2026, there are an awful lot of them. In the first, on the surface, in most, the handles take volume until the lime falls from the walls.
The interesting part is that Ștefan Bană is not even the type of rebel kid that we used to ritually condemn, generation after generation. On the contrary. At Craiova, those who worked with him describe him as one of the most talented players produced by the academy in recent years, a footballer with a sensitivity almost incompatible with the world he chose.
So it doesn't lack speed, it doesn't lack quality, it's not a lack. He has exactly that thing that Dadumladists immediately smell and instinctively punish: fragility. Shyness. Withdrawal itself, almost always confused with weakness.
The story turns sad when you remember what the young man has been through in the last year. Bană spoke, albeit in fewer words, about the depression that hit him after breaking up with his girlfriend, about the period when he broke down emotionally and could no longer function.
It is also understandable what is beyond his room. A whole team with the fear of relegation, with the nerves of a season in which the Steel sold their best players just so they could survive financially. In the middle of this tension, a kid appeared who phonetically detonated entire rooms.
And then Diego Zivulic entered the scene, sent to restore order. The Applicator punched the door until he drilled it. The executor of the collective peace.
Ștefan Bană was loaned until the end of the season from Craiova University
Zivulic broke down the door. Soprano, not to be found
I do not suspect the Croatian that he stayed at SARS and Jelena Rozga. Bijelo Dugme not so much. That's not what he was listening to when he nervously honked at the reporters in the stadium parking lot, with Bordun on the right, after Oțelul – FCSB 1-4, played in February.
It was a good opportunity to discover something classic. Because Bană, who knows, may even try to put art on the ears of some guys who are used to other tempos.
Without wanting to, I also imagined the Balkan movie scene, with many actors with a Lusitanian and Moldavian accent: agitated masseurs in the hallway, colleagues knocking on the door, a locker room on the verge of emotional collapse and, above all, the voice of a soprano floating through the halls. I hope we find out at some point if it was Maria Callas or Angela Gheorghiu.
The midfielder made a mistake. Of course he was wrong. There are rules of coexistence in a team and there are limits beyond which you cannot cross, but the feeling remains that our football still does not know what to do when it meets people who do not fit it perfectly.
Bana seems to be exactly the type of player who feels too much, who shuts down, that's why he risks not understanding anything of everything that happened. Not because he wouldn't understand that he was wrong, but because fatalism seems to haunt us all. Many times, we go all the way and when it's not appropriate.
If he still had to pack his bags one stage before the end, I hope that in that room, not far from the bank of the Danube, he wasn't listening to what came next. I'd like to think it was Iris and Felicia Filip – De vei plece, because nothing would fit better over this whole poorly paid and delayed sequence, like everything else from Galați.
I insist, far be it from me to think that Bană is a Chopin among Zavaidoci. You got mad at him, don't get mad at the soprano from Galați, sweet water. At least give her another chance. Because some things don't last long enough to start liking.
