Roma president 'categorically' rules out midfielder's sale to Chelsea

The rumors linking Miralem Pjanic with a summer move to Chelsea just received a major blow, as Roma president James Pallotta, never shy for words, made it quite clear that he does not expect his star to leave the club.

"I don't like to read newspapers, but sometimes it's unavoidable. They talk about the market and sales to teams like Chelsea, but that's not how it is. At the moment there are very few corrections to be made, we have a lot of players who will return from loan, and ones we wanted to keep at Roma like [Ezequiel] Ponce, [Umar] Sadiq and [Abdullahi] Nura."

"I try not to read too many papers, but it happens anyway. There's a lot of paper talk about players leaving, like Pjanic. I rule that out categorically, he doesn't want to leave and we won't sell him. Even just talking about it hurts the team, I'm tired of these rumours."

"If we've made any mistake up to this point it's changing the squad too much and doing too many deals on the transfer market. That said, [sporting director Walter] Sabatini has done a great job, and we've made tremendous progress since we inherited a complicated financial situation and had to do things to balance the budget."

"In the next window we'll only make a few corrective moves and integrate some young loan players."

-James Pallotta; source: Roma Radio via Football Italia

While Sabatini is leaving, it sounds like Roma have a great plan in place and are set to follow through with it.  Pjanic does supposedly have a buyout in his contract (€40m), so Chelsea could still try to tempt him to accept a move, but at the moment, this sure sounds like a long-shot.