Chelsea don’t want him, Inter won’t sign him: What’s next for Lukaku?

Gabriele MarcottiSenior Writer, ESPN FCAug 24, 2023, 02:21 AM9 Minute Reading

Romelu Lukaku has it all. Or, more precisely, everything you can reasonably expect to gain when you’re a 30-year-old forward who hasn’t done anything in relation to his huge salary, suffered an injury-hindered campaign, nothing’ y sitters on the biggest stage (like in the World Cup and the Champions League final) and under contract with a club like Chelsea, who don’t want him and are desperate for him to leave.

Lukaku has a team and a city that love him – a place where he is comfortable, having spent three of the last four seasons there. He knows that Inter, where he played last season on loan, will struggle to sign him from Chelsea. The Milan club is still under a settlement agreement with UEFA, European football’s governing body, which means that due to previous breaches of Financial Fair Play, their spending will run out.

But Lukaku also knows they want to keep him and, just as importantly, Chelsea want him to leave to help balance the books, preferably on a permanent deal, albeit with a loan. And when both parties desperately want something to happen, they usually compromise and find a way. (There is also no alternative but a move to Saudi Arabia, which frankly has no interest in him: the combination of age, salary and low performances means that there is no one else on the market for him.)

He’s in a good place, he really is.

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It is true that the things you hold can be crushed and crushed by your fingers like dust, but here is a man who took a hammer in his hand and crushed it into dust himself. And with a week left until the end of the European transfer window, Lukaku is still staying at Chelsea.

Until mid-July, Lukaku’s future seemed set to follow a familiar script. He expressed his love for Inter and said he wanted to stay there, and that the feeling was mutual.

Chelsea moved on from Lukaku, and they did it for several reasons. Partly because he didn’t perform well after they signed him in the summer of 2021, partly because he had granted an unauthorized interview which angered the club and their fans so much that later he had to apologizeand partly because Chelsea, under new ownership, is heading in a new direction with fewer veterans on big wages.

Alas, the problem for Chelsea is that while they moved on from Lukaku, they didn’t move on from Lukaku’s contract, which cost them around $45m over time in wages and amortization. A hit like that — for a man who hasn’t produced — is so painful, it could hurt Chelsea’s chances of meeting Premier League and UEFA Financial Stability regulations. That’s what happens when you spend more than $680m in previous transfer windows, as Chelsea did, so logic suggests that at some point, they’ll find common ground.

On July 12, Inter believed they had reached a verbal agreement on a transfer fee of €30m ($32m), rising to €35m ($38m) with performance bonuses. To do so, Lukaku will take a pay cut in exchange for a longer-term deal from the three years he has left at Chelsea, to five at Inter. Chelsea will be hurt — they paid more than 3½ times to get him in 2021, and his remaining “book value” is more than €60m — but they will be able to keep a chunk of his salary.

And then came the unexpected twist.

Both Inter and Chelsea reached out to Lukaku and his lawyer, Sebastien Ledure, but both, without warning, went dark. Calls went unanswered — messages, too. His teammates at Inter were also unlucky to follow him, including Lautaro Martínez, whose wedding he attended six weeks ago in the company of Megan Thee Stallion, in particular.

Was it a negotiating tactic? Did he get a new number and forget to tell anyone? Has his roaming credit expired and there is no Wi-Fi nearby? We just don’t know.

What we do know is that on July 17, two days after Inter announced the news that he would not be available for several days and that they had given up on him, stories emerged that Ledure was talking, Lukaku was willing to talk and even yet. apologize for his radio silence. But at that moment, Inter was enough. So did Inter’s Ultras, who mocked him in a scathing communique.

We also know that stories have begun to appear linking Lukaku to Juventus, who could be a heel somewhere between Sol Campbell and Benedict Arnold. Lukaku has always insisted he will not play for Juve and, in fact, he was racially abused by some Juve fans when the clubs met in the Coppa Italia semifinal three months ago. Many Juve fans quickly took to social media to express how they dislike Lukaku, repeating the message loud and clear to the club’s hierarchy during the club’s traditional preseason friendly between the first team and in the under-23 side.

The Juventus link has always seemed strange. Ignore the sentiment of the fans — and you really shouldn’t ignore it, because these are your customers — Juventus are in dire financial straits and won’t be playing European football this year. The only way they can sign Lukaku is if they sell their incumbent centre-forward, Dusan Vlahovic, and the papers were soon filled with stories about how an unlikely Vlahovic for Lukaku, plus cash, deal was made at Chelsea.

This is impossible because it makes little sense for both clubs. Chelsea’s main appeal is that even if they can’t really be happy with Vlahovic (poor season, injury record, high wages), at least he’s not Lukaku, who they don’t really like. Smaller. The appeal of Juve? Apart from the fact that coach Max Allegri is rumored to be a fan of Lukaku, it’s hard to say.

Speculation was rife about a swap until Juve shut it down for a number of reasons: Vlahovic made it clear he didn’t want to move, the fans’ reaction was intense and because they didn’t really have the idea to begin with. For their part, Chelsea have always denied they were chasing Vlahovic, which all brings us to today.

With the clock ticking in the transfer window, agents and mediators across Europe are trying to engineer deals with clubs who may be in need of a striker. There have been reports linking Lukaku to Tottenham following the sale of Harry Kane (now that would have been a proper heel turn!) and Rome, where Jose Mourinho (who signed him to Manchester United) needs a center-forward, but in a little like Inter, they will never reach one with the Lukaku on the price tag.

It looks like Lukaku is being offered to teams all over Europe like never before, except now – you guessed it – the price continues to drop, both with Chelsea’s demands and his own salary expectations. The problem, again, is that it would have to be a drastic drop for clubs that might be interested in him to afford him. And those who are not interested.

The most logical outcome seems to be some sort of loan deal so that Chelsea are not left on the hook for Lukaku’s monster salary. (Yes, he is one of the top 10 highest paid players in the world in 2022-23). But even that is difficult. Chelsea are only allowed to loan five players outside of England. They have already used three of those slots, and the other is likely to go to Deivid Washington, who they recently signed from Santos and is expected to join Strasbourg for the 2023-24 season.

If Lukaku does not leave on Sept. 1? Well, there is Saudi Arabia, where the market is open until Sept. 20, right? Yes and no. Al Hilal, the club most seriously interested in him, recently signed Aleksandar Mitrovic from Fulham for $60m, and he plays in the same position.

And while it feels like every Saudi club has money to burn, in reality only four — Al Hilal, Al Ahli, Al-Ittihad and Al Nassr, all controlled by the Public Investment Fund — have done most of the spending. Not only are they limited, under league rules, to the number of foreign players they can play (eight), the four centre-forwards in the four teams are Mitrovic, Karim Benzema, Cristiano Ronaldo and Roberto Firmino, meaning there isn’t much space for Lukaku.

The most interesting aspect of this is that we haven’t heard from Lukaku. We don’t hear how he feels about the situation and what made him change his mind, which is surprising, because this isn’t the first time he’s done a 180-degree turn and gone the other direction. In the summer of 2017, everything was agreed for him to join Chelsea from Everton when, suddenly, he chose Manchester United, supposedly on the advice of his mother, with whom he was very close. This shocked everyone (and didn’t end well).

Is this a similar situation? A gut feeling to say “no” to Inter like the one who, as the story goes, drove his mom’s face to Chelsea six years ago? Maybe. He knows the training: he has had at least three different agents over the years, he has been a professional for 14 years and played for seven different clubs – in fact, only Neymar has created more transfer fee.

The big difference is that in 2017, his stock is high and he has another landing spot. It’s hard to see where he might land now, left to ponder the most immediate of decisions: not picking up the phone.