Magic man Voodoo message ‘told Lukaku to make Chelsea move’
Farhad Moshiri has claimed that Romelu Lukaku refused to sign a contract extension at Everton after the striker’s mother got a “voodoo” message telling him to join Chelsea.
Moshiri, the club’s major shareholder, also said that he “wasted” two summers trying to persuade the Belgium international to stay at Goodison Park.
Chelsea ended up missing out on Lukaku as well, with Manchester United securing the forward in July in a deal worth £75million, although Moshiri argued that Everton effectively lost money because he would be worth significantly more now.
In an extraordinary speech last night at the club’s general meeting, before an audience of shareholders at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall, the Iranian businessman spoke openly about his unsuccessful attempts to persuade Lukaku and Ross Barkley to stay at the club.
“With Romelu, I wasted two summers trying to keep him,” Moshiri said. “The first summer, I spent almost three months, and we managed to keep him for another year. Last summer, we offered him a better deal than Chelsea, and he just didn’t want to stay.
“If I tell you what we offered, you won’t believe it. His agent went to Finch Farm to sign the contract. Then somehow during the meeting, Romelu called his mother and said she was on a pilgrimage to Africa and had seen some sort of voodoo that said he had to sign for Chelsea.
“What can you do? He’d gone to Los Angeles and wouldn’t come back, his brain had gone.”
England midfielder Barkley left Goodison Park for Chelsea in a £15million transfer last week, with Moshiri saying that Everton could not have done more to try to keep a player who would have been out of contract at the end of this season.
Moshiri added Barkley had told the club, via his agent, he would consider staying if “his friend” John Stones was allowed to leave, which he did in August 2016, joining Manchester City for £47million. He said: “When it got to two years left, I went to his agent and said that we needed to extend the contract. He said, ‘You need to get [Ronald] Koeman [as manager]’. Then he said, ‘You need to let John Stones go’. Then for six months, Bill [Kenwright, the chairman] couldn’t find the agent. Ross just didn’t want to stay.”
Meanwhile, Barkley’s move to Chelsea has provoked an angry response from the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, who has asked police, the Football Association and Premier League to investigate the circumstances behind the deal.
In a letter to both the FA and the Premier League, which Merseyside Police said is being “considered”, Anderson has claimed Barkley’s transfer may have been purposely delayed while his contract ran down. Anderson wrote: “At best, this represents a very poor deal for Everton. At worst, it could be seen as a deliberate attempt to drive down a player’s value so as to benefit the player, his agent and the buying club.”