The Municipality of Bitola is set to sign a "handball platform" with the women's handball club Pelister 2012. The agreement goes on the agenda of the Council's next session. The goal, the municipality says, is additional support for the activities, development and promotion of women's handball and encouraging sport among the town's female population.

So far it all sounds like a routine municipal press release. Then comes the sentence that actually says something.

The municipality stresses that the agreement "does not constitute grounds for a change in the club's capital structure, its merger or takeover, its division, or any other change of status".

That is a very specific denial of something nobody publicly asked about. When an institution pre-emptively lists four things it will not be doing - merger, takeover, split, change of status - it usually means those four things have already been mentioned somewhere the microphones did not reach. An initiative does not defend itself against thin air.

The subject was discussed at a meeting between mayor Toni Konjanovski, council president Bojan Bojkoski, and the club's management and players. What came out of it was "an exchange of views on future cooperation and possibilities for additional support".

Women's sport in Macedonia survives on exactly this kind of agreement - without them the clubs do not exist, and municipal support is almost the only stable income. All the more reason for the Council to read the agreement as a financial document rather than a gesture of goodwill: how much money, over how many years, what the municipality gets in return, and what happens if the platform one day expands into something more than "support". The denial is written for today. Contracts are read for tomorrow.