Roma...

“It was a painful sale for all of us,” Sabatini, who preferred to move him on to a foreign side, noted on Friday.

“At the beginning we didn’t think we could sell Erik and we didn’t want to. Then some new factors came into play and as time went on we started to consider the eventuality.

“A club made him an offer that we didn’t and couldn’t match. And rather than trying to win a war that we probably wouldn’t, we opted to sell.

“When that Italian club offered him €3.5m a season, as well as a €2m commission to his agent father, we knew we had lost the player.

“His people started pushing for a renewal and that is when I started moves to sell him. Had we begun negotiations sooner then we probably could have sold him for an even bigger fee…”

- The words of Walter Sabatini himself.

Roma did not want to sell Lamela initially. His greedy pappy forced their hand. Lamela himself had very little say in any of this, which only added to his frustration.

I disagree with some of the comments here regarding Marquinhos and Lamela. Firstly, the sale of these players partly bankrolled Roma's spending on other players, such as Benatia, Gervinho, Ljajic, and Strootman.

Furthermore, Ljajic and Gervinho are good replacements for Lamela. They are reliable goal-scorers and the transfer fees of both Ljajic and Gervinho combined are less than the fee Spurs paid for Lamela. Yes, it could've turned out to be a bad piece of business if Lamela had improved on previous years and become the next superstar and at the same time Ljajic and Gervinho had flopped, but that hasn't happened so far.

Most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, Benatia is an enormous improvement over Marquinhos. Marquinhos is a talented, but pretty much unproven defender who only played half a season in a proper defence (i.e. not under Zeman) and even then, Roma's defence was a mess. He was sold for well above his market value (30 mil) and subsequently replaced by Benatia who has been a rock for Udinese for a very, very long time. He is prime age for a CB and has enormous experience. Oh, yeah... and he cost a third of Marquinhos' transfer fee. Maybe PSG will buy Castan for 30 million next summer, lol. I think this deal was a particularly good piece of business for Roma and doesn't show lack of ambition at all. It's an example of prioritising a good value player over a big money player... perhaps Real Madrid could learn a thing or two from Roma.

Sadly Osvaldo wasnt replaced. Boriello is no scudetto material, bench player max.

Also, Roma are in pole to sign Leandro Paredes.