Francesco Totti has blamed the board for recent failure as he leaves the club after 30 years.
Francesco Totti has claimed that he was kept out of everything at the club and leaving Roma is like ‘dying’.
The Italian International has been a servant of the club since 1989 when he joined as an academy graduate. He went on to make 786 appearances for the club and won five major titles with the club. Following his retirement, Totti was appointed as technical director of the club.
The club sacked the manager Eusebio Di Francesco, who guided them to the Champions League Semifinals last season. Poor recruitment by not finding perfect replacements for Alisson Becker, Mohamed Salah, and Radja Nainggolan hit him hard. The season started on a poor note which forced the Italian side to sack the former Sassuolo manager.
Three months later, Roma’s king Francesco Totti steps down from the technical director role after being constrained by the board. Infuriation with the treatment is the major role for his self-ejection.
In a news conference at the Italian Olympic Committee, Totti said: “I never had the chance to express myself. They never involved me,”
“The first year that can happen but by the second [year] I understood what they wanted to do … They knew of my desire to offer a lot to this squad but they never wanted it. They kept me out of everything. It’s a day that I hoped never would have come.”
“Presidents come and go, coaches come and go, players come and go. But not emblems,” Totti said. “This is far worse than retiring as a player. Leaving Roma is like dying. I feel like it’d be better if I died.”
Totti’s departure comes a month after then-captain Daniele De Rossi announced he, too, was leaving Roma after the club surprisingly decided not to renew his contract. Totti said Romans were being pushed out of Roma since Pallotta and some fellow Boston executives purchased the club in 2011 becoming the first foreign majority owners in Serie A.
“For eight years here, since the Americans came, they’ve done everything they could to sweep us aside,” Totti said. Pallotta runs the club from Boston and has not been to Rome in more than a year, and Totti said that was problematic. “When the boss isn’t around everyone does whatever they feel like,” Totti said. “That’s the case anywhere.”
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Francesco Totti leaving his boyhood club will fill the fans with total distress.
