Spell “Roma” backwards and what do you get? Cupid. A flood of it.
Five thousand fans waited for Romelu Lukaku in front of Ciampino Airport in the Italian capital. Another 16,000 were on FlightRadar, tracking Roma owner Dan Friedkin’s Gulfstream jet. The plane’s speed (954 km/h), altitude (44,000 feet) and position (over Zurich) temporarily replaced Lukaku’s goals and assists as the stats of choice for the obsessive Roma fan.
Lukaku has never experienced such a reception. A mural depicting him as the gladiator “RomelV” has already appeared in Monti, the neighborhood near the Colosseum. He was declared the new King of Rome on a cardboard poster.
It remains to be seen whether the club will organize another event like Paulo Dybala’s unveiling a year ago, when 10,000 fans gathered outside the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana and took his breath away.
Friday’s game against AC Milan, the 35th consecutive sellout at the Stadio Olimpico, should be enough. It’s easy to imagine him walking under the Curva Sud and picking up a scarf like the one Michel Bastos draped around his neck all those years ago, not knowing that the insulting slogan of city rivals was “Lazio Merda” (Lazio is shit ) was printed on it.
The reception party in Ciampino and the resulting pile-ups on the Via Appia were not exclusive to Lukaku. It was about watching the meme-made Top Dan, the Airline President, come ashore.
It felt as if the owners had wrested some of the narrative around their club from the Emperor Mourinho as a sign of their bravery. Friedkin is a sphinx-like billionaire who never speaks but occasionally shows off his pilot’s license and personally flies Jose Mourinho and, in this case, Lukaku. He has a hangar full of classic aircraft, including the Spitfires that he lent to Christopher Nolan for the film Dunkirk.
The Lukaku signing wasn’t a Battle of Britain like in 2017, when Mourinho’s Manchester United managed to edge out Antonio Conte’s Chelsea for the then Everton striker. Instead, there was seemingly no competition between the super-rich of the Saudi Pro League and the Serie A clubs forced into a straitjacket by Financial Fair Play (FFP). In an otherwise undignified summer in which Lukaku preferred to leave Inter Milan as ghost hunters rather than return to San Siro for the third time, he has, to his credit, opted not to play Saudi Arabia for the time being and in one of the the most traditional leagues in world football.
Mourinho signed Lukaku from United (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Cupid is crucial here as Lukaku will receive the love at Roma that he apparently no longer felt at Inter.
“He’s a big baby,” Steve Walsh, Everton’s former director of football, told The Athletic about his conversation with Mourinho when he sold Lukaku to United.
Inter fans understand it now. They brought him back last summer and would have done it again. But when Lukaku spent the first six months of the 2022/23 season injured and unable to score from games and coach Simone Inzaghi relied on Edin Dzeko in the big games, he didn’t like it and he turned his back on one fan base again truly believed him to be the player he thinks he is.
Lukaku’s judgment must be questioned. Finally, Inter let Dzeko go in the summer and wanted to sign the Belgian for a second time.
Last season’s Champions League runner-up could offer him another season at this level. Roma can’t. They have not been UEFA’s main club competition for four years. Just last Friday, Mourinho predicted that Roma would finish “between fifth and eighth place” in Serie A this season. The following day they lost to Verona, a team that only survived in the top flight last season thanks to a relegation play-off.
Lukaku should make a big leap forward. The 30-year-old, like Dybala, a former Serie A MVP, is a decisive factor in the fact that the title fights and not fourth place were decisive in Italy.
The question arises: Is a commitment whose intent was presented as ambitious really ambitious when the desired outcome is only fourth place? Don’t get me wrong – in the Italian context, this is a huge coup. It is the second summer in a row that Roma have acquired a player who was apparently destined for Inter at the start of this transfer window. Unlike the Elkanns and Agnellis behind Juventus, the Friedkins were able to secure a deal with Chelsea.
This is not an easy task. A elaboration of another unexpected deal.
In 2021, Roma coach Tiago Pinto spent five days in London working on the club’s record signing of Tammy Abraham, who ironically was subsequently sold by Chelsea to recoup some of the money they had spent on Lukaku, their club’s record signing. had issued their own.
This particular trial took almost as long. Pinto flew out Friday with Friedkin’s son Ryan, the club’s vice president. After the Luton game that evening, they met Chelsea’s owner and then had further conversations the next morning in London’s affluent Mayfair district.
The pressure on Pinto was enormous.
Roma have been looking for a striker all summer. The links to Karim Benzema, then Alvaro Morata, Gianluca Scamacca, Marcos Leonardo and Duvan Zapata have only raised expectations.
It didn’t matter that Andrea Belotti, who didn’t score a single goal for the club in Serie A last season, scored twice in the season opener against Salernitana. It didn’t matter that Pinto had just signed Sardar Azmoun on loan from Bayer Leverkusen last week. “When (Pinto) offered me Azmoun, he told me there would also be an attacker,” Mourinho said. “If that’s true, I’ll be happy.”
A return to Rome without Lukaku was unthinkable given all the fans’ expectations, even if the finances were difficult to imagine. The hassle of just loaning out the player is an exhausting effort for Roma.
Things weren’t easy for Pinto when he became general manager of the club.
He was tasked with cleaning up the mess left by Monchi – such as a five-year contract for 29-year-old Javier Pastore – marred by mistakes such as the €29m (£24.9m/31.5m) takeover million at current rates) was further exacerbated by Marash Kumbulla’s CEO Guido Fienga, who transferred one ownership group to another.
The bankruptcy of Mourinho’s first summer, a net expenditure of 110 million euros that did not result in qualification for the Champions League, has caught up with them. A year ago, Roma were hit with the strictest FFP agreement given to clubs in Serie A. Pinto had to fight through all sorts of hurdles to satisfy UEFA and Mourinho. This summer honestly looked like the FFP version of Mission: Impossible.
Defeat in last season’s Europa League final against Sevilla meant there was once again no Champions League revenue, even in a year in which fourth place in Serie A should have been awarded after Juventus were deducted 10 points became.
The loss of Abraham to a long-term knee injury in the final game of the season meant that a profitable sale was no longer obvious and Roma needed to bring in around €30 million by June 30 to be FFP compliant.
Al Ahli of Saudi Arabia did not write a check for this figure to Roger Ibanez until after the deadline. Pinto, meanwhile, made it through marginal gains by selling Benjamin Tahirovic to Ajax, Cristian Volpato and Filippo Missori to Sassuolo, Justin Kluivert to Bournemouth and Carles Perez to Celta Vigo.
Lukaku is needed as Abraham is injured (Silvia Lore/Getty Images)
It was less of a small miracle and more of a big one. A series of sales has left Roma spending next to nothing.
Like last summer, when Zeki Celik was the only transfer for whom a transfer fee was due, Pinto and his scouts had to look around the free agent and loan market.
Then Dybala, Belotti, Nemanja Matic and Gini Wijnaldum, who was soon lost due to a broken leg, gave way. This year Roma are at the bottom of the spending list. Everyone except Leandro Paredes is a loan player (Renato Sanches, Rasmus Kristiansen, Azmoun) or a Bosman freebie (Houssem Aouar and Evan Ndicka).
A winless start in the first two games of the season increased the stress. This meant Chelsea could take advantage of Saudi interest in Lukaku to demand a large loan fee and greater security on his wages.
They played hardball in a way that Pinto could respect. He was in the same position as Federico Fazio and Nicolo Zaniolo. Both had no future at the club. Interested clubs knew this and tried to dupe Roma. But Pinto had to make the most of his departures, just like Chelsea did with Lukaku.
The seriousness of Roma’s intentions was signaled by the arrival of Friedkin Senior in London, as well as the arrival of chief executive Lina Souloukou and Anna Rabuano, the club’s head of financial planning. A deal was ultimately struck on Monday, but even a loan fee of €6 million and salary cover of €7.5 million represents a huge undertaking for Roma. This makes Lukaku by far the club’s highest-paid player, even compared to Dybala.
But that’s exactly what Mourinho wanted.
This is the final year of his contract and he wanted the player who scored 27 goals in their first season together at Old Trafford, a season in which United finished second to Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, a season that Mourinho, in hindsight and above all as the third person – as “one of his best achievements”. Whether Lukaku can make an immediate impact after not playing any football at all over the summer remains to be seen. Fourteen goals in 20 starts for Inter last season suggests he has more to offer than Adriano did when Roma signed him in his late twenties in 2010.
But that is a risk for Roma, as is signing an injury-prone Sanches. The Portuguese midfielder played half an hour in the season-opening 2-2 draw against Salernitana before suffering a muscle strain in training. Romanisti must hope Lukaku doesn’t do the same.
This is a big year for the project.
On the one hand, Mourinho and the owners are ahead of schedule. They delivered a trophy and while some belittle winning the Europa Conference League in 2022, fans don’t care. They longed for cutlery of any kind and are grateful, even devoted, to the owners and Mourinho for supplying it. A few big names arrived unexpectedly and only one (Zaniolo) was sold. The Olimpico is full every game.
On the other hand, if we ignore Nicola Zalewski, Abraham, Ndicka, Aouar and Edoardo Bove, the team as a whole is old and makeshift, with little resale value. Mourinho could be gone in a year. Lukaku could be back at Chelsea next summer. That’s the risk. But Roma will hope the reward is at least a place in the top four for the 2023/24 season.
The question I ask is: in such a volatile league, with four different champions in four years, shouldn’t a team like Roma pose a challenge in this third year of Mourinho’s time in the Eternal City? Shouldn’t Lukaku be the final piece?
(Top photo: Aurelien Meunier – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)