Daniele De Rossi will line up against Manchester City at the MCG on Tuesday night but it wasn’t that long ago that the Blues – and their fierce rivals Manchester United – were keen to prize the midfielder away from Rome.
De Rossi is about to begin his 15th season as an AS Roma player. Like team-mate Francesco Totti, the Italian international has spent his entire career at the club he grew up supporting but that hasn’t stopped other clubs trying to tempt him away.
In 2013, after rumours of interest from Manchester City the previous summer, Manchester United came calling. De Rossi had a decision to make.
“Some negative moments made me think about my destination, my future,” recalls De Rossi in the AS Roma team hotel in Melbourne. “There were some moments, some periods, some summers, where Rome doesn’t seem the best thing for me and for Roma too, so I thought about change.
“Once I was so close, but I made a promise to Rudi Garcia. He arrived in June 2013 and the first time I speak with him, I told him, ‘I want to leave’.
“He told me, ‘OK, but you are still a great player, an important player for me, so just give a date, a deadline, for me to know who will be my team, my players’.
“So we put the deadline on the first game of the league, which was the end of August, and the market ends on September 1.
“And then, this offer arrives after the first match, but that’s it, I made my word, that was a promise, and that’s it.”
Does he ever regret the decision?
“I am still really happy to remain in Rome for a lot of years,” he says. “Who knows how my career could be out of Rome? Maybe it can be worse. Maybe it can go in a different way from the one everybody tells me.
“They say, ‘If you go to Spain, England, Germany – I don’t know where – you can win a lot.’
“But I might also not win and maybe fail.
“And maybe this kind of love that Roma fans give me, maybe I can’t find it in another place. So I’m happy to be here, I’m happy to represent something important for Roma and for Roma’s fans and I don’t have to think about ‘What could be?’
“I’m proud of what I’ve done and it’s not finished. I have another two years – and maybe more – to spend here.
“I’m pretty sure we can win [the title] in the next two years, maybe three.”
Roma, De Rossi says, has always been in his blood.
“Being a Roma fan, it’s something you’re born with,” he admits. “It’s about your family, your grandparents, everybody is a Roma fan. It’s a dynasty.
“Then I had the fortune, the ability, to make this dream come my job.
“For me, playing for Roma, it’s what I’ve always dreamt about so it’s been easy for me to remain in this country, in this city.
“On Sundays, when I was young, I’d go to Roma’s matches with my friends. Sometimes we tried to escape our parents and go to the Curva, the hottest place to watch the game, but usually Roma’s youth team players have a card to go in to the main stand, so we went there.
“After three or four years, we had the opportunity to be the ball boys, so that was really the greatest present that Roma gave me in my life.
“To go from the stand to the pitch to watch my idols and also the other players of the other teams, it was something amazing.
“At the end of this period as a young fan, there was Francesco. He was already a young player that was becoming a great player, but I was only starting my pro career.
“I soon became his teammate. The first month, the first year, it was weird because he was someone I always watched. There was a poster [of him] on my mate’s wall.
“Then you have the opportunity to train with him, to speak with him, to play and joke with him. It was the same thing with Gabriel Batistuta.
“He came to Rome, made us win the Scudetto and during this period I was their teammate. I played with him in the mornings and then in the afternoon, I went to the youth training. It was weird, but it was fantastic.”
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