Among the issues inherited by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital when taking over Chelsea last May, there was a specific £97.5m-shaped one that stands out. The new owners had no ties to Romelu Lukaku having not signed him in 2021 but they did need to deal with him.
The Belgian had failed spectacularly since returning to the club he joined aged 18 in 2012, being frozen out by Thomas Tuchel and scoring just eight league goals. Only five of those came after the third game of the season.
In an unsanctioned interview with Sky Italia less than a third of the way through the season he had all-but cut the ties with the club. Lukaku, who had been struggling for form and fitness due to injury, criticised Tuchel's tactics and spoke glowingly of former side Inter Milan, burning bridges with Chelsea fans who treated him like a king upon his fairytale reunion.
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That left the German coach between a rock and a hard place and ultimately the relationship only ever showed flickers of recovering. With or without Roman Abramovich, seeing Lukaku in a Chelsea shirt this season was always going to be unlikely.
The new owners acted quickly, though, and secured a loan deal for him back to San Siro, where he had won Serie A at in 2020/21. After less than 12 months Lukaku went from a record signing to heading out of the Stamford Bridge exit door but the can has only been kicked down the road. He is, afterall, still owned by the club and the loan deal ends at the end of this season.
He signed a five-year deal upon joining so will still have three years to see out. With a U-turn at Chelsea unlikely but financial issues and Inter seeking value for money, sorting a loan for next term is far from a certainty either. Boehly inherited the problem but will now have to sort it out himself.
The one small boost here is that Boehly has no face to save with the deal whereas Abramovich did. The Russia oligarch struggled to offload underpeforming and overpaid players throughout his reign and it caused issues still marring the side to this day. Boehly, with this case in particular, has no such tie to Lukaku so can be ruthless in an easier fashion than would be true had he purchased the player.
The question still begs, how do Chelsea resolve it? Lukaku is a £97.5m asset that has only seen out less than two years of his deal. When it comes to how these figures look on the books, the price is split across the contract. This is ammortisation and something the Blues took advantage of over the winter.
That effectively means that when it comes to Lukaku, he will be valued at £39m less on the books after this season, still a price of £58.5m if Chelsea wanted to break even on him in a single transfer fee. They will receive around £8m for his services from Inter as a payment but the prospective price of that ahead of another deal next season may well be negotiated down by the Italian side.
When it comes to value for money, the CIES football observatory estimates his worth to be less than £18m. Even for Boehly and Co that is a drop off of £40m from his book value and a massive £80m from the price paid by the club for him less than 24 months ago . For savvy businesspeople, this one is still up in the air.
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