Wolves midfielder Meritan Shabani has been training with Grasshoppers, and is due to play in their first pre-season friendly match on Friday.
According to the Swiss club’s official website, the 23-year-old has been with them since the beginning of the week.
Grasshoppers are taking on Challenge League FC Schaffhausen, which is being livestreamed on gcz.ch for those wanting to watch.
There is then a training camp for the club at Crans-Montana in June 27, before they play matches against Yverdon-Sport FC (July 1) and 1. FC Köln (July 9).
They will then face SV Wehen Wiesbaden on July 17.
Grasshoppers’ season then gets underway on July 24 against Lugano.
Of course, Grasshoppers are a club Wolves have close ties with, with Jenny Jinyuan Wang – wife of Fosun owner Guo Guangchang – owning the club.
Wolves have sent a number of players there on loan in recent times, and the two clubs have a good relationship.
There have not yet been any official announcements from Wolves regarding Shabani.
Perhaps it could be that the plan is to ultimately send him there on loan after this period of training with the club.
Shabani has been extremely unlucky since making his move to Wolves from Bayern Munich in 2019.
He ruptured his ACL in an EFL Cup game against Reading shortly after joining the club.
After recovering, he then went to Dutch club VVV-Venlo, but suffered a recurrence of the ACL injury he had previously.
He returned to action for the Wolves U23s earlier this year.
Unlucky Shabani needs a loan move, and a break
It is interesting that Shabani is training with Grasshoppers, but there hasn’t been any word from Wolves about the situation. Perhaps it will come in due course.
Ideally, Wolves will send him there on loan.
He needs to be getting regular minutes now and there’s a good chance he’ll get that at Grasshoppers, who have been kind to Wolves in handing Molineux youngsters chances.
Shabani has been really unlucky with his two injuries, and hopefully he can kick on from them in 2022/23.
This was a player who a lot of people were excited about when he first arrived at Molineux coming from Bayern.
Hopefully wherever he plays next season he can stay fit and maybe send a message to Bruno Lage back at Wolves.