TUNIS — Espérance Sportive de Tunis have signed the Peru international midfielder Jesús Castillo on a three-year contract running to 2029, completing a move from Universitario de Deportes that had been trailed for several weeks.
Castillo, 25, is a defensive midfielder. He passed his medical and the club confirmed the signing at the start of August, with the contract details reported this week. He arrives nine days before Ligue 1 opens, with Espérance facing Étoile Sportive du Sahel on matchday one at Radès on Sunday 23 August.
What the club is buying
Espérance lost the championship last season to Club Africain and go into 2026-27 rebuilding a spine rather than adding decoration. A holding midfielder is the least glamorous and most consequential position on that list: it is the role that determines whether a possession-based side can control the middle of the pitch in the Tunis derby and, more importantly, in the CAF Champions League group stage, where Espérance's ambitions are set and where physical midfield contests are usually decided.
Signing a 25-year-old international on a three-year deal also says something about the model. This is not a short-term loan to patch a gap; it is a player at the start of his prime committed for the length of a project. Espérance have historically been able to do this in a way most Tunisian clubs cannot, because continental participation gives them a revenue line — CAF prize money, sponsorship, transfer resale — that the domestic league does not provide.
The context most clubs are operating in
That is the honest asymmetry in Tunisian football this month. While Espérance were completing a signing from South America, other Ligue 1 clubs spent the summer negotiating with the league over participation licences and unpaid obligations, and Étoile du Sahel needed an extension of the licensing deadline. The gap between the clubs that can shop internationally and the clubs trying to satisfy financial criteria is widening, and a league with one or two solvent members is not a competitive product.
There is a second risk specific to this kind of transfer. South American players moving directly to North Africa have a mixed record of adaptation — climate, language, playing rhythm and a domestic calendar interrupted by African commitments all count against a quick start. The three-year term suggests the club has priced that in.
What the league has been asked to do
The proposals on the table are not new and do not come from the clubs that can already afford players. The players' and coaches' bodies, and the league's own licensing framework, point in the same direction: enforce financial criteria consistently rather than through repeated deadline extensions, so that clubs budget against real revenue; and negotiate broadcast rights collectively, with a distribution formula that does not simply mirror the existing hierarchy.
Several African leagues — Morocco's Botola and South Africa's PSL are the examples most often cited by Tunisian administrators — have moved further on centralised broadcast income than Tunisia has. Whether Ligue 1 follows will determine if signings like Castillo remain the story of one club or become the story of a league.