Roma Board Approves €210 Million Capital Increase

It's not as if the sale of AS Roma needed more intrigue but in addition to sweating out the who/what/when/why/wheres of the club's eventual sale to Dan Friedkin, experts, pundits, and fans alike were keenly waiting to see what would become of the club's massive debts, which ran as high as €221 million in June of 2019 and have consistently remained in the €200 million neighborhood ever since. Would they simply roll with the punches or make a concerted effort to effectively wipe the slate clean, ostensibly freeing up the club to invest more into the product on the pitch?

Following a shareholder’s meeting earlier this week, we may finally have an answer to that question:

Grazie mille to Biafora for passing along that pdf because I tried like hell and couldn’t find it on the official site, but in essence, the club confirmed losses of roughly €188 million as of June 30, 2020, which, when taken with a host of other financial figures, pushes the club's current total group losses to €204 million, which was officially confirmed by the board on December 9th.

Financial mumbo jumbo aside, not much has really changed since Friedkin started eyeing the club in late 2019. Due to consecutive seasons without Champions League revenue and the financial hit imposed by the pandemic, the club is in deep doo-doo—nine figures worth of doo-doo, to be exact.

But, there may be hope on the horizon. As reported by the Corriere dello Sport yesterday, and basically confirmed by the press release above, the Friedkins are prepared to inject €210 million in new capital, which should ease the pressure of those losses and give them them more leeway to spend on other areas, though ancillary moves (read: player sales) may still be required for this Roma reset.

Now, I'm not enough of a financial wizard to tell you when this windfall is coming and what to expect in terms of Roma’s spending habits going forward, but you don't have to be Scrooge McDuck to know that this was Roma's only route out of catastrophe.

One would assume that the Friedkins were familiar with these figures when negotiating the sale of the club with James Pallotta, so presumably, they factored in that cost when making their considerations for purchasing the club, so this may have been the plan all along.

Nevertheless, for beleaguered Roma fans, this may usher in the hard reset we've been longing for the past several years. I wouldn't necessarily go out and buy a Kylian Mbappe Roma kit yet, but better days are in store for the Giallorossi.