Il roster di Roma: chi rimane e chi parte?Con un nuovo manager e un nuovo direttore

Typically, every spring, we rank and file Roma’s roster into tiers, separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were. However, after a tumultuous season that saw Roma replace manager José Mourinho with club legend Daniele De Rossi in mid-January and General Manager Tiago Pinto leave a few weeks later, a simple rank and file of the squad feels inadequate.

While De Rossi’s appointment was greeted with applause from the Roma faithful, many were skeptical that such an inexperienced manager could make hay out of an oddly constructed roster. DDR has suffered through ups and downs over the past few months, but the boy from Ostia has emerged as a legitimate up-and-coming manager, piloting Mourinho’s former men into the Europa League semifinals while remaining in the Champions League chase longer than the club probably deserved.

There’s just one small problem: Roma’s roster is a mess. With players purchased by everyone from Monchi to Pinto, the squad is teeming with poor tactical fits, bloated salaries, and depreciating assets. That’s not to suggest that there aren’t pieces worth building around, but merely ranking the players into talent tiers feels insufficient; we need to separate the core of this team from its redundancies.

We’ve harped on this for years, but Roma needs to pick a lane and stay in it. If the Friedkin family is genuinely committed to Daniele De Rossi on the touchline and Florent Ghisolfi in the boardroom, they need to give this pairing sufficient time, space, and funds to truly implement their vision.

Of course, that’s easier said than done, but step one is identifying which players on the roster fit De Rossi’s plans for the Giallorossi. And even that is easier said than done because we don’t really know who De Rossi is as a manager; he’s essentially learning the job on the fly, so his preferred style of play—not to mention which players he favors—is still kind of a mystery.

But we’ve never let a silly little thing like logic prevent us from providing unsolicited advice to our beloved Giallorossi. So, what follows is a hybrid approach in which we’ll categorize the players based on their suitability for De Rossi’s squad next season and beyond. This time around, we’re more concerned with who stays and who goes rather than Player A being better than Player B.

However, before we can do that, we must sift through the loanees.

Photo by Silvia Lore/Getty Images

The Loanees

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Romelu Lukaku, Dean Huijsen, Renato Sanches, Rasmus Kristensen

The Sanches gamble was worth a shot, but the 26-year-old Portuguese midfielder hasn’t been up to snuff. We certainly caught glimpses of the dynamic, do-it-all midfielder Sanches once was, but with only 266 minutes under his belt this season, the gamble didn’t pay off.

While he was healthier than Sanches this year, Leeds full-back Rasmus Kristensen failed to make a mark and should be sent back whence he came. To his credit, the 26-year-old Dane was ready when called upon, logging nearly 2,000 minutes at both full-back spots, but Roma can find better options on the transfer market.