Juventus played a friendly match at the Allianz Stadium in Turin against their reserve team on Wednesday. The match wasn’t that important: it was needed to prepare for the start of the championship and to bring the fans back together after the summer break, but it was still talked about for the chants with which the fans present they wanted to reiterate the club not to appreciate the possible purchase of the Belgian centre-forward Romelu Lukaku, considered a goal for Juventus in this summer window of the transfer market.
The day after the friendly, the main Italian sports newspapers claim that the negotiations between Juventus and Chelsea for the player’s transfer have stopped. According to Gazzetta dello Sport it would have been Chelsea that refused the exchange offered by Juventus with the Serbian center forward Dusan Vlahovic, purchased for around 80 million euros in January 2022 and returning from a disappointing season, also due to some physical problems.
Sky Sport he adds that Juventus would have asked for 40 million euros plus Lukaku for Vlahovic, while Chelsea would not intend to pay more than 20-25, as well as not being in a particular hurry to sell Lukaku in Europe, since he could end up in Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of the summer, a transfer of Lukaku to Saudi Arabia seemed unlikely. Now, however, it is considered possible because all the more concrete opportunities for his transfer to Europe, and to Italy in particular, seem to no longer be feasible.
Last season Lukaku had played it with Inter, who had taken him on loan from Chelsea just a year after having sold him for over 110 million euros. After this annual loan, at the beginning of the summer Inter had begun negotiations with Chelsea to buy him outright, but these negotiations ended suddenly in mid-July.
It is not known exactly what happened, but it seems that Inter became aware of certain talks Lukaku had with other teams, including Juventus and Milan, just as the deal with Chelsea was about to end. Lukaku would also have avoided responding to Inter managers who sought explanations, who would therefore have decided to interrupt talks with Chelsea and abandon the purchase of the player. The inflexibility of the position taken by Inter was recently confirmed by the vice president Javier Zanetti, who Gazzetta dello Sport he said: «For what Inter has done for him, we expected a different type of behaviour. He has the right to go where he wants, God forbid, it was enough just to say it in time. However, no one is bigger than the club and when building a team you always have to consider who you put in the dressing room.”
Lukaku has not been left without a team, given that he has a valid contract with Chelsea until 2026. However, Chelsea seems to have definitively excluded him from their plans, even after having changed three coaches in a few months. This is because his return to Chelsea two seasons ago after winning the Scudetto with Inter hadn’t gone well at all. He hadn’t been able to find space in the team and mid-season he said in an interview that he wanted to return to Inter, despite the fact that he had only been a Chelsea player for a few months. After that interview, relations with the English club have never been recovered: the team has made other choices in attack, has bought other players and does not plan to involve him in any way. However, Lukaku remains one of the highest paid players in the squad (about 16 million pounds a year) and keeping him would only be counterproductive, even for a very rich team like Chelsea.
His return to Inter hadn’t gone particularly well on a sporting level either, mainly due to physical problems that he had been carrying with him for almost the entire season. However, Inter continued to appreciate the player and his potential, as did the fans, who still remembered his decisive contribution in winning the Scudetto in 2021 (a season with 30 goals in 44 appearances). For these reasons, the club had tried to buy him outright, moreover at a discounted price given the difficulties the player had recently.
The opportunity to have a center forward who can still make the difference in Serie A at a reduced price has also attracted Juventus, who are trying to get competitive again but have limited spending power (also due to the recent UEFA sanctions ). In this case, however, the obstacles are represented by the presence in the squad of another starting center forward, Vlahovic, who should therefore be sold, and then by the opposition expressed several times by the fans. In addition to having until recently been a rather representative player of Inter, Juventus’ rival par excellence, Lukaku was harshly contested by the Juventus crowd in last season’s Coppa Italia semi-final first leg, even with racist chants and insults the Turin police station issued over 170 bans on access to sporting events.
In Europe, the summer window of the transfer market closes between 31 August and 1 September. This means that Lukaku has less than a month to change team, and in his situation it no longer seems a matter of course: he is 30 years old, an engagement that few teams can afford and he has also shown that he cannot adapt to any environment, but rather that he needs the right conditions to be able to make his contribution. However, the deadline for the European summer transfer market does not apply to the Saudi league, whose teams can continue to sign players until 20 September.
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