On Thursday morning Roma president Jim Pallotta had his say on events that saw the Giallorossi controversially miss out on the signing of forward Malcom.

Pallotta joined Sirius XM FC's football show to discuss the extraordinary events that unfolded earlier this week - as the Giallorossi agreed a deal with Bordeaux for Brazilian winger Malcom, only for the player to eventually end up at Barcelona.

Here are the key comments from the president's interview...

GETTING THE DEAL DONE

“Malcom is a young man that we have been following for about three years now. Originally some of the stuff on him came out of our analytics group, and we liked him a lot. A couple of weeks ago we started some discussions with Bordeaux, and saw that he was available. He had been talking to a couple of other teams too but he definitely wanted to join a team that was going to be competing in the Champions League, and had been doing so regularly.

"We had a deal with him, there’s no question we had a deal with him. If you look back, a couple of days we were expecting him to get on a flight to arrive in Rome at 10pm, and a lot of fans had found out about it and were at the airport. As far as we were concerned, as every other deal has worked in football – or at least the vast majority of them – he was coming for a medical and then we’d finish the signing.”