TUNIS — Espérance Sportive de Tunis announced on Monday the signing of Imad Faraj, the 27-year-old Franco-Moroccan attacking winger, from the Azerbaijani club FK Baku on a three-year contract running to 2029. AfricaFoot put the total value of the operation at 1.2 million euros including bonuses and performance premiums; the club did not publish a figure.

Faraj came through the French youth system and represented France at youth level before a career that has taken him through Lille, Belenenses in Portugal, Excelsior Mouscron in Belgium and AEK Larnaca in Cyprus. In his first season at Baku, in 2025-26, he played 32 matches across all competitions and scored seven goals. He arrived in Tunis on 13 August to complete the deal.

The timing is tight. The 2026-27 Ligue 1 season opens on the weekend of 22 and 23 August, with Espérance hosting Étoile du Sahel on the first matchday — one of two headline fixtures alongside Stade Tunisien against CS Sfaxien. Faraj has four days to integrate before a derby-weight opening.

The most expensive rebuild in the window

Faraj is the third significant attacking or midfield addition Espérance have completed in a window that has been, by Tunisian standards, extraordinarily active and disorderly. The club signed Peru midfielder Jesús Castillo to a deal running to 2029, closed a protracted and costly pursuit of Lucas Ribeiro, and saw the Court of Arbitration for Sport lift Youcef Belaïli's suspension — a ruling Espérance responded to by activating his contract while Mouloudia d'Alger maintained it had also signed him.

Set against that, the sporting logic of the Faraj deal is straightforward. Espérance's attacking output declined last season and the squad lacked width capable of beating a defender one against one. Faraj's seven goals in 32 matches is a respectable return for a wide player, though it came in the Azerbaijani Premier League, a competition with a lower defensive baseline than the CAF Champions League group stage Espérance expect to reach.

The part that deserves scrutiny

Espérance are spending at a level no other Tunisian club can approach, in a season when the FTF had to extend the licensing deadline to 17 August to allow indebted clubs — Étoile du Sahel among them — to satisfy financial criteria and keep their places. A league in which one club conducts a multi-million-euro window while several others negotiate their survival with the federation is not a competitive league in any meaningful sense; it is a title-holder and a supporting cast.

That imbalance is not Espérance's fault, and the club is entitled to spend what it raises. But it does make the domestic competition a poor preparation for continental football, which is the stated purpose of the spending. A championship decided by March does not sharpen a squad for a Champions League quarter-final in April.

What has been proposed

Tunisian football administrators and club officials have periodically raised two mechanisms used elsewhere. The first is a centralised television and sponsorship rights pool distributed on a formula weighted to competitive balance rather than negotiated club by club — the model that underpins most European leagues and that the FTF's own licensing reforms have gestured towards without implementing. The second is enforcement rather than extension of the licensing rules: deadlines that move each August, as this one did, signal that financial criteria are negotiable, which removes the incentive for clubs to restructure.

Neither is on the agenda before Saturday. Espérance open at home against Étoile du Sahel with a rebuilt front line and a squad that cost more than most of the league combined.