Reports: Roma May Land Coric This Weekend

No matter how the final three weeks of the Serie A season playout, I think we’ll all look back on this as one of the more memorable (if not confounding) seasons in recent Roma history. What started with a spate of uncertainty (new manager, new DS, new players, where those third shirts brown or black?) nearly wound up with an appearance in the Champions League final, and in between all that were the peaks and valleys we usually associate with a Roma season—upsets over top clubs and dropped points versus the lightweights.

However, with Roma netting nearly €100 million from their Champions League campaign that uncertainty doesn’t seem like it will carry over to the summer, right? Right? Right!? Well, not so fast. While that revenue is impressive and actually puts Roma ahead of Juventus in terms of European revenue this season, they’re still subject to the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30th, which means Roma may still have to trim some fat to stay copasetic with FFP.

Speaking to this point, Mauro Baldissoni was quite candid:

As I’ve said so many times, doing sales first is used to recalibrate the deficit between costs and revenue. Costs have to be kept high for us to compete at a high level and maintain this level of competitiveness. That means having high costs, and if those are higher than revenue it means having to make sales.

The greater the access to higher revenue streams the greater the competitiveness, which means we’ll have less need to resort to these tactical sales, it’s a growth plan. It’s a strategy that a lot of teams use to offset deficits, the results have proven this is the right strategy and we’ll continue to follow it. This year we’ll have higher revenues, so it’s a growth plan.

Thanks to that €100 million and the money coming from Qatar Airways and Hyundai on the shirt deals, Roma should be able to rest a bit easier on June 29, 2019, but not this year. It appears that once again hard decisions may have to be made, but that’s a problem for future Ted and Marshall, let’s stay positive.

According to reports earlier this week (sorry, the ESPNFC non-sense sort of took center stage) Roma may have already fired their first salvo of the 2018 summer transfer season. Ante Coric, Zagreb”s 21-year-old Croatian midfielder, has been sprinkled in the Roma transfer papers here and there throughout the season, but it seems like Monchi may have sealed the deal, reportedly landing Coric for €7 million (plus €1 million in bonuses)

Coric has had a bit of an up and down year in terms of playing time, but has been a regular rotation piece over the past few weeks, garnering over 300 minutes in April alone. Despite an inconsistent season, Coric’s reputation as the “Next Luka Modric” precedes itself, as he’s long flashed a creative spark and ability to distribute from midfield, but his relatively paltry price tag should give you pause on that comparison—Coric remains very much a prospect, an exciting one sure, but he’s not exactly a finished product.

If this deal does indeed come to fruition, it calls into question to future of several young Roma players, Gerson in particular, as the club can only accommodate so many 20-something-they-might-be-great-someday type of players. Then again, Roma needs a massive overhaul in the midfield, so who knows.

One thing is for certain, Roma has taken a positive step forward this season, so converting these speculative, long-range transfer plays into immediate successes (a la Cengiz Ünder) will go a long way towards making Roma a consistent threat.