LUKAKU LEFT OUT IN COLD BY CHELSEA’S BIG TRANSFER BONANZA
▶ Blues splash out on Fernandez, Mudryk and Co, while Belgian left to wonder about future after Inter loan
Spending records were being broken by the hour as the curtain drew on a dramatic winter transfer window. This is a rare time when the agility and reaction speed of executives is tested almost if they were athletes. It’s also a time when it can feel utterly distracting to a footballer actually involved in a top-level fixture on deadline day.
A thought for Romelu Lukaku as he led the forward line on Tuesday evening for Inter Milan, where he is on loan, in their Coppa Italia quarter-final against Atalanta.
When Lukaku took to the field, he held the status of Chelsea’s most expensive signing ever. By the time he came off, with Inter 1-0 up in the second half, he had been deposed in that list, the club that still owns the Belgian having agreed to meet the buyout clause set by Benfica on the 22-year-old Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernandez.
The cost to Chelsea for Fernandez, named best young player at the 2022 World Cup, exceeds €121 million (£107m), and took their spending in the last two transfer windows and the eight months since Chelsea came under new ownership to more than €550m.
Viewed through Lukaku’s eyes, the transformation of his parent club is bewildering.
Until barely two weeks ago, his name featured twice in the top five Premier League transfers of all time, his 2017 move from Everton to Manchester United an enduring landmark. Once Chelsea hijacked Arsenal’s bid for Mykhailo Mudryk – committing what could, with add-ons, be as much as €100m to Shakhtar Donetsk – that deal also slipped down the rankings.
Where Lukaku, who was sold by Inter to Chelsea in the summer of 2021 for £97.5m, now ranks in Chelsea’s on-field plans was already clear: nowhere. The player would like a permanent move back to Inter, although the prospect of Chelsea recouping even half their initial layout, after his loan expires, is remote. In the upheaval at Stamford Bridge, the eventual sale of Lukaku looks almost a
footnote. The landscape, since Roman Abramovich’s 19-year ownership ended because of UK government sanctions against Russia-linked businesses, has been rapidly redrawn.
Less than a year ago, Lukaku was scoring the goals that put Chelsea, as reigning European champions, into the Club World Cup final and then helped them win it in Abu Dhabi. He was centre-forward in a team managed by Thomas Tuchel and featuring Andreas Christensen, Antonio Rudiger and Marcos Alonso in defence, Jorginho in midfield, and with Callum Hudson-Odoi and Hakim Ziyech supplying passes to Lukaku, with Timo Werner understudying his position.
All but one of those players – and Tuchel – are now elsewhere, and Ziyech was expecting to be until his proposed loan transfer to Paris Saint-Germain was not accepted by the French league because Chelsea had, reportedly, failed to complete the correct paperwork before Tuesday night’s deadline.
Ziyech and PSG were yesterday studying avenues through which they might still push the deal through.
Jorginho, a key part of Tuchel’s 2021 Champions League-winning side, had been sold to Arsenal earlier in the day, a clear signal that Fernandez is earmarked as long-term governor of Chelsea’s midfield.
The club lured the Argentine,
who joined the Portuguese club from River Plate last July, with a vision of a supersquad for years to come: Mudryk to the left of him, a duo of de luxe French central defenders in Benoit Badiashile, 21, and Wesley Fofana, 22, behind him.
That pair of young central defenders between them cost the new Chelsea owners more than €100m, and were given unusually long contracts, to 2028 and 2029. Fernandez has signed an eight-year agreement. In some cases, the costs of the new players will be spread over the length of the contracts, to ease any immediate issues over Chelsea’s meeting Financial Fair Play limits on the allowed ratio of spending to income.
A harder argument to put to Fernandez concerned the short-term prospect of glory. Chelsea sit 10th in the Premier League, 10 points shy of the top four. Of the two available routes to qualifying for next season’s Champions League, winning the 2022-23 edition almost looks the more viable.
They meet Borussia Dortmund in the last 16 later this month, and must today decide which of the maximum of three winter signings are added to their squad for European competition. Eight players were signed during January, including Joao Felix, on loan from Atletico Madrid. He, Mudryk, or Badiashile look likely to have to sit out the Champions League.