Roma Review of 2016 Part 9: The departure of Miralem Pjanic

In part nine of Roma’s review of 2016, we look back on the summer transfer window and the departure of former favourite Miralem Pjanic...

John Solano, Roma fan: “Going into the summer, knowing that Spalletti would be there throughout the summer and pre-season training with the entire team, I was completely optimistic. I was nothing but hopeful that maybe this season they would challenge Juve a little harder for the Scudetto. Then, when they sold Pjanic, it was a bit of a blow to the stomach.”

Mauro Baldissoni, Roma General Manager: “Sometimes fans don’t understand that it’s not up to the club to pick the other club who is going to buy your players. [Miralem] Pjanic is a great player, so it is not surprising that he attracted the interest of important clubs. Then, it’s his choice whether he wants to go and play there. Particularly in this case, he had a contractual right to decide if and to whom he would be sold, because he had this option in the contract when we renewed it two years earlier. He basically activated his contractual right and he informed us that he wanted to be sold and Juventus was the club that was going to buy him. Basically it was the player’s choice and we couldn’t do anything to fight that. But in general, at some point if players decide that they want to leave, it’s not productive to force them to stay even when they don’t have a contractual right like Pjanic had.”

Wayne Girard, Roma fan: “I had a feeling that Pjanic was going to go: it was either he or Leandro Paredes. I had a feeling it was one or the other. Pjanic was so influential last season for us and for Spalletti’s play. Especially in his offensive movement, as he was even being pushed back to a regista sometimes. I always had this feeling he was going to go to Arsenal or Manchester United.”

Mauro Baldissoni: “This was a contractual clause so it’s an agreement that you have to find with your counterpart. At that point, the counterpart is the player with his agents so it’s a matter of negotiation. If you say, ‘OK, I put the release clause at 100 million,’ of course they wouldn’t accept it, but he wanted the clause. So you have to negotiate and find what the market value would be at that point. That was the situation with Pjanic. In fact, the clause was higher in the first two years and was dropping every year of the contract: every year that passed by, you have lower contractual leverage on the player.

“You negotiate the value of the release clause that is normally higher at the beginning and then depreciates every year alongside the term of the contract. This goes in parallel with the value of the asset in your books. This is actually a very typical economic evaluation. Even more than that, it’s a matter of negotiation and agreement with the counterpart, otherwise he wouldn’t have renewed the contract and we would have lost Pjanic much earlier. He could have avoided renewing the contract and left as a free agent, or left a year earlier for a much lower amount because at that point we were at the end of his contract.”

Wayne Girrard: “Even when I saw it on the news, I couldn’t take it in. I did not think that Miralem, the same guy kissing the badge, celebrating under the Curva Sud and talking to the fans, was going to go to the supreme rival. That he was going to jump ship. There was no explanation, it happened very quickly. I can’t even imagine what that felt like as a child, when you see one of your heroes switch. At this moment I thought that Roma was screwed.”

John Solano: “One thing Roma have proved, even when they sold guys like Benatia, is that they have no problem finding replacements. As the summer progressed and we brought in some reinforcements, I was optimistic again. I can’t definitively say that even if Pjanic had remained that we would be in a better position than where we are now. I think everyone pulled together and we have been more of a collective group this season. The players have definitely made up for that loss.”

Mauro Baldissoni: “We work under certain rules that are valid for every club in Europe: they are set by UEFA, the Financial Fair Play. These specific rules on some financial targets have been introduced and we have to respect that otherwise we cannot participate in the championship or in the European tournaments. Considering that the club had been producing losses in the past years, high ones before the new ownership arrived, we were out of the financial parameters set by UEFA. In order to respect those parameters, you had to reduce the losses and increase the revenues. But you don’t increase the ordinary revenues in as quick a time as you can with selling players.

"Selling players and reinvesting in new players is also a way to maintain a high level of competitiveness while respecting both the European and Italian Financial Fair Play rules. This is still something we need to do until we complete a financial turnaround, which we are very close to completing. We will be able to have a wider range of options unlike what we have now.

“This is something that has to be taken into consideration because we compete with big European brands that start from more favorable positions in terms of much higher revenues. In Italy, Juventus make almost double what we make in terms of revenue. We have to compete respecting some financial restrictions, so that means that you have to be able to sell players and reinvest the money in ways that you can keep your competitiveness.”

Wayne Girard: “I was really looking forward to the team staying the way it was. I thought maybe a striker could have been added if Dzeko went down or didn’t manage to hit form again, whatever was going to happen to him. The biggest thing for me in the summer was just that everyone stayed put.”

Mauro Baldissoni: “It’s easy to say but you always want to try to improve the team during the transfer window and the way you do it is to look at the areas where you were less effective in the previous season. That happened to us - we wanted to strengthen the defence because we didn’t do as well as we would have liked. We had some issues with some pace.

"We wanted to invest in some defenders and this is what we mainly did. Considering that in the other roles, we have very good midfielders and close to the best attack of the season, with some of the forwards we bought in the previous winter transfer market like [Diego] Perotti and [Stephan] El Shaarawy. So we decided to intervene and invest to improve the defence.

“Also we could count on the return of [Leo] Paredes and [Kevin] Strootman in the midfield. Despite the Pjanic sale, we could reinforce midfield with these two players and with the investment of a young, promising talent like Gerson. He has to be ready not only for today, but also for the future considering he’s only 19 years old but he’s one of the best talents around at his age. We were able to concentrate more on defence than the midfield and attack - this was our general strategy.”