Roma agree a 35 million euro deal for Santiago Castro as Dovbyk joins Bologna on loan
Gian Piero Gasperini finally has his centre-forward, and Bologna have turned a 13.2 million euro signing into a 35 million euro sale with a sell-on clause attached.
Jul 28, 2026
Roma have agreed a fee of 35 million euros plus a 10 per cent sell-on clause with Bologna for Santiago Castro, and Artem Dovbyk is heading in the opposite direction on loan. Both players were booked in for medicals on Tuesday, and it is comfortably Roma’s biggest outlay of the summer.
A 21-year-old for the centre-forward problem
Castro is 21 and has been a Serie A regular since Bologna took him from Velez Sarsfield in January 2024 for 13.2 million euros. He has 16 league goals from 79 appearances, eight of them in 2024-25 across 36 games and seven last season, and he was part of the Bologna squad that beat Milan in the Coppa Italia final in May 2025.
None of that makes him a finished article. He is a striker who scores at a steady rather than spectacular rate, and Roma are paying for the next four or five years rather than the last two. What he does offer Gian Piero Gasperini is movement and a willingness to run channels, which is the sort of forward play the coach has always built his sides around.
Roma had been running out of options
Gasperini said in mid-July that the club needed to move faster in the market, and he had a point. Roma walked away from Crysencio Summerville and from Mason Greenwood, who joined Fenerbahce instead, and remain stuck in a stand-off with Club Brugge over Nicolo Tresoldi. Their summer signings before this were Daniele Ghilardi from Verona and Donyell Malen’s loan from Aston Villa turned permanent, neither of which solved the striker question.
That question matters more now than it did a year ago. Gasperini took Roma to third in his first season and back into the Champions League for the first time since 2018-19, and a squad going into that competition cannot carry a centre-forward who is unavailable half the time.
Dovbyk’s two seasons in Rome end without much noise
Dovbyk arrived in 2024 for around 39 million euros off the back of a season in which he was La Liga’s top scorer, 24 goals for Girona. Rome never quite worked out for him. His second season kept getting interrupted, first by a rectus femoris injury in November that ruled him out for more than a month, then by a thigh strain in January that needed surgery and kept him out for close to two months, and he finished it well behind Malen in the pecking order.
Bologna are getting him on loan with an option to buy, which is a sensible way to find out whether the player who tore up La Liga is still in there. Domenico Tedesco, who took the job in June after Vincenzo Italiano left by mutual consent, loses his most saleable attacker and gets back a proven scorer at no risk beyond a season’s wages.
The maths favour Bologna
Turning 13.2 million euros into 35 million in two and a half years, and keeping a tenth of whatever Roma sell him for later, is the sort of trading Bologna have built their recent run on. Roma get the young striker they have been circling since June, five weeks before the window closes on 1 September.