Thierry Henry has told CBS Sports that Romelu Lukaku wants to stay at Inter Milan.
Lukaku scored the winning goal tonight in Inter’s 1-0 Champions League win over Porto. Lukaku had been rumoured to be leaving Inter after a lacklustre loan spell since leaving Chelsea last summer.
Chelsea and Inter Milan are thought to share good relations and it seems that there will be little chance of Lukaku featuring under Graham Potter next season.
Henry, who worked with Lukaku in the World cup as the assistant manager of Belgium, revealed that Lukaku wants to stay: “Rom likes to stay where he is. Feed him, play him in early and he’ll try to bully you. He was a different type of man to what Tuchel wanted. Is he going to fit what Potter’s trying to do? And what does he want to do? I don’t think he wants to go back. He wants to stay at Inter.”
Henry revealed that he told Romelu that he would struggle at Chelsea when he re signed for a whopping 97.5 million pounds due to the way Thomas Tuchel’s teams play.
Lukaku netted 8 league goals last season under Thomas Tuchel, his time was dominated by off the pitch drama with a famous interview with Sky Italia broadcasted detailing how he missed Inter Milan just days before Chelsea were set to face Liverpool at Stamford Bridge.
"Rom likes to stay where he is. Feed him, play him in early and he'll try to bully you. He was a different type of man to what Tuchel wanted. Is he going to fit what Potter's trying to do? And what does he want to do? I don't think he wants to go back. He wants to stay at Inter."
— Ben Jacobs (@JacobsBen) February 22, 2023
Big Rom is the poster boy for how the previous ownership repeatedly botched youth development and transfer policy. He has shown brightly in stints with West Brom, Everton and Inter (and, at least for a time, with Utd), but notably, never with Chelsea. He was ours, we loaned him, loaned him again, sold him, thought we’d buy him back, got beat to the punch, then paid HUGE money to buy him back three managers too late(!) and now have him back out on loan! On net, we’ve paid many tens of millions to miss out on ALL his best performances, including a total of more than 160 league goals (West Brom, Everton, Utd, and Inter). By comparison, we reaped a grand total of 8. Brilliant!
And to make matters worse, it’s not like we bungled Lukaku but balanced it out by finding a better option. We did enjoy three volatile seasons of relative productivity from Diego Costa (52 league goals), but have otherwise been bereft of a #9 that even begins to approach Lukaku’s productivity. Torres, Ba, Morata, Batshuayi, Higuain, Giroud, and Abraham all came and went and left little to no mark. That we continued to win much of this time was largely down to the brilliance and scoring of first Lampard and then Hazard, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Abramovich regime’s handling of Lukaku was a colossal failure (that we’re still paying for as we now have to scrounge between the couch cushions to try and find goals).
Neither us want him back, Henry…
We should never brought him back.
Never bring a player back, he won’t give anything good to the team.
And if he is conscious, he better get on good form so we can sell him for a high few!