Romelu Lukaku, the rebel who moves the most money, returns to Inter

Romelu Lukaku returns to Italy, where he was happy.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
29 June 2022 Wednesday 05:57
14 Reads
Romelu Lukaku, the rebel who moves the most money, returns to Inter

Romelu Lukaku returns to Italy, where he was happy. After a season at Chelsea marked by his incendiary statements and his comings and goings with German coach Thomas Tuchel, the Belgian striker will return, in the absence of official confirmation, to Inter Milan on loan. The footballer is already in Italy and has passed the medical examination, according to Sky Sport journalist Gianluca Di Marzio. The Nerazzurri team will pay 8 million euros for the operation which, with supplements, could reach 10 million, according to various Italian media. No type of clause has been established for the purchase at the end of the season, although it is difficult to think of a return of the player to London after what happened this year.

Such was Lukaku's displeasure at Stamford Bridge that even the salary would have been lowered from 12 to 8 million, a reduction of 33.3%. After shining at Inter Milan between 2019 and 2021, where he played a total of 95 official matches, scoring 64 goals and dishing out 16 assists, the Belgian starred in one of the most important transfers in recent years in European football. Chelsea, then current champion of the Champions League, paid 113 million euros for his services, which made him the most expensive signing in the club's history and the player who has moved the most money with his transfers throughout history. football (325.56 million).

He came to be the reference in attack that the blues did not have. Pure power, capable of holding the ball on his back and helping his team to arrive with more troops and generate dangerous situations, also of running into space in the open field and finishing with precision. The defensive system that Thomas Tuchel had created, characterized by the suffocating pressure up front, the deployment of its midfielders and the solidity of the line of three central defenders, now had the piece that placed them as one of the main candidates to challenge Manchester City and Liverpool in England and to defend the title in Europe.

Nothing is further from reality. Chelsea competed well in the Champions League and came close to eliminating Real Madrid in the quarter-finals. In the Premier League, they finished light years behind the first two who, although they set a bar that is difficult to maintain for 38 games, were not even forced to look in the rear-view mirror at any time. If on a collective level it was a regular season, on an individual level Lukaku disappointed everyone. He has only started 16 league games and four Champions League games, scoring a total of 15 goals in all competitions, half as many as the year before with Inter Milan.

Tuchel opted for him before other important options that Marina Granovskaia (sports director who also leaves the club) raised at the end of the 2020-21 season. From the team offices they recalled the forward's unproductive time at Stamford Bridge, where he arrived at the age of 18: "Tuchel spoke to us about Lukaku as if he didn't know that Lukaku was in the pay of Chelsea for six years," said a member of the technical secretariat in statements collected by El País. Then they let him go to Everton and they did not even consider taking him back when he left for Manchester United, despite having a very favorable buy-back clause. They considered him undisciplined and unfocused.

The German coach ignored Granovskaia and insisted on hiring the Belgian, who assumed enormous potential, greater than that of any other scorer. The credit that he had after winning the European Cup led the club managers to satisfy his whim. Time ended up proving the Chelsea board was right and the relationship between Tuchel and Lukaku did not take long to crack.

The striker had already shown on many occasions that he is not one to bite his tongue in public. Leaving Manchester United for Milan, after two years in which neither he nor the Red Devils achieved sporting stability, Lukaku declared in a podcast that he was tired of always being seen as the culprit of everything: "If they want to kick me out, blame me, fuck them. A lot of people thought I couldn't be part of the team. For me it wasn't like that, so it was best to go our separate ways."

This year, although he began scoring three goals in his first three league games, he failed to have continuity in Tuchel's elevens. An injury on matchday eight caused him to miss a month of competition and, shortly after, he contracted coronavirus. From then on, the coach opted for another type of forward that was less positional and more mobile, such as Kai Havertz. Lukaku, as he had already done at Manchester United, complained in an interview on Sky Sports: "I think the coach could give me a little more, but I have to respect his decisions."

It did not stop at a simple vindication of its interests, but went further. "I have Inter in my heart, I hope to play there again," he confessed in that same interview, held in January, in the middle of the season with Chelsea. Despite his apologies through the English club's media, the fans never forgave him and his relationship with Tuchel was never the same. In fact, the German expressed displeasure with him by frequently pointing fingers at Lukaku for his performances. After the 1-0 loss against City, he assured that "he had a lot of turnovers without any pressure", and after falling against Real Madrid he said that "he should have scored".

The 29-year-old striker has a complicated character, they know it in Manchester and London. However, when things go well he proves to be one of the most dominant and resourceful strikers on the planet. At Inter Milan he was happy with Antonio Conte, whose game model was ideal for his characteristics, since it promoted the generation of spaces and individual duels in which the Belgian feels like a fish in water. Now, with Filippo Inzaghi on the bench and with the city's residents celebrating a Scudetto for the first time since 2011, Lukaku will try to get the best version of himself back.

The atmosphere will be more hostile than he remembered at the Giuseppe Meazza. His march to Chelsea did not sit well with the ultras of the North Curve. Already during the season, when they echoed the disagreements between Lukaku and Tuchel, they showed a banner that read: "It doesn't matter who escapes with the rain, counts who stays in the storm. Goodbye, Romelu." Now, closed his return, they assure that he will no longer be "treated like a king", but "is like any other". Although they admit that they will never go "against Lukaku while he wears the Inter shirt", they confess that his departure has been "a betrayal" and that they have felt "very disappointed". The support of the tifosi "will have to be earned on the field with humility and sweat".