Now that Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho have signed for Manchester United and Erling Haaland is off limits for the summer, the big transfer story is Romelu Lukaku to Chelsea.
The Blues have made it very clear to Inter they would like to bring back their former starlet, who never quite managed to impose himself at Stamford Bridge, and they are willing to pay the big bucks to get him.
A first offer of around €100m + Marcos Alonso has already been rejected, but there is a general feeling in Italy that €130m should do the trick, as such an amount of money would be too hard for Inter to refuse.
Gazzetta dello Sport have said as much on Wednesday, and Corriere dello Sport echo this in their columns, asking if the Serie A side could say no to €130m + the Spaniard.
The answer to that is they probably can’t, and that’s despite them promising to both the fans and Simone Inzaghi they wouldn’t sell any more big names after Achraf Hakimi.
The key matter in all this is Romelu Lukaku’s wishes, who ‘didn’t seem different from usual’ during training on Tuesday.
However, the Inter top brass are planning to sit with him ‘in the next few hours’ to discuss what he wants, but it’s made clear that ‘from the half answers they and Inzaghi received when they asked him about the subject, they didn’t receive a concrete “I’m staying”’.
That’s a sign Lukaku ‘is thinking about his future’, not helped by his agent, Federico Pastorello, who ‘pushes him to think about it and it’s easy to guess what he would like’, since it’s his job to make his client happy, ‘preferably by transferring him often from one club to another’.
Should the striker decide to leave, ‘Inter will not be able to hold him back by force’.
It’s stated ‘they will fight, but resisting would be difficult’, which was all too clear when they lured him from Manchester United.
Basically, if he is to get a transfer, he will have to make that clear, and it would then ‘be up to Chelsea to arrive at the right valuation’ fee wise.
