Roma president James Pallottta appeared today on Sirius XM. These are his words:
“The Champions League? I’m pretty confident we can play Barcelona. Obviously, it’s an incredible team with incredible talent, not just Leo Messi by any means. Having said that, every game is important from here to the end of the season to qualify for the Champions League, so I don’t want us just looking forward to Barcelona. The David versus Goliath is more people sending texts and emails to me, but I don’t look at my players as anything less than Barcelona’s. Roma can play anybody, they just have to play 90 minutes and we can’t let a team like Barcelona take advantage of any mistakes. I think the guys are ready to play, I just don’t want us to look past Bologna this weekend.”
He continued, “There’s frustration on my part when people go, ‘Oh, Roma is a supermarket.’ And possibly football directors before liked to trade (players) more but when you think about it, we’ve been like Juve and others in terms of selling players. Two of our players like Pjanic, he had a release clause. He had to go. Salah, while he’s tearing up the Premier League, he asked us to leave and he had no time left on his contract so we had no choice. There are things that go on behind the scenes that people don’t realize. Either players want to leave or things we have to do – we’re not trying to sell players just to sell players.”
“Monchi? It took him some time to settle in because we all know that with the media in Rome and the amount of press surrounding him it’s not easy. It takes time. We’ve been unlucky with injuries but Kolarov has had a great year and Ünder starting to play really well. I’ve been a fan of Alisson since Day 1 and I think Schick will be helpful in the future. Monchi had to deal with some problems in regards to Financial Fair Play. He was probably surprised by the first 3-4 months, there was some trouble getting everything right, but we have a relationship based on mutual trust.”
