Spell Roma out backwards and what do you get? Amor. An outpouring of it.
Five thousand fans were waiting outside the Italian capital’s Ciampino airport for Romelu Lukaku. Another 16,000 were on FlightRadar tracking the Gulfstream jet of Roma’s owner Dan Friedkin. The speed (954km/h) altitude (44,000ft) and location (over Zurich) of the plane momentarily replaced Lukaku’s goals and assists as the statistics of choice for the obsessed Roma fan.
Lukaku has never known a welcome like it. A mural depicting him as a Gladiator ‘RomelV’ has appeared already in Monti, the neighbourhood near the Colosseum. A cardboard placard proclaimed him the New King of Rome.
It remains to be seen if the club organises another event like the unveiling of Paulo Dybala a year ago, when 10,000 supporters gathered outside the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana and took his breath away.
Friday’s game against AC Milan, the 35th sell-out crowd in a row at the Stadio Olimpico, should suffice. It is 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, unaware their city rivals-insulting slogan ‘Lazio Merda’ (Lazio are shit) was printed on it.
The reception party at Ciampino and the pile-ups it caused on the Via Appia were not exclusively for Lukaku. It was to see the meme-made-flesh Top Dan, the aviator-president come into land.
As a piece of bravado, this felt like the owners wrestling back some of the narrative around their club from the Imperator Mourinho. A sphinx-like billionaire who never speaks but likes to flex his pilot’s licence every now and again and personally fly in Jose Mourinho and, in this case, Lukaku, Friedkin has a hangar full of classic aircraft, including the Spitfires he lent Christopher Nolan for the film Dunkirk.
Signing Lukaku was no Battle of Britain, as it had been in 2017 when Mourinho’s Manchester United managed to edge out Antonio Conte’s Chelsea for the then-Everton striker. It was instead an apparent no-contest between the super-rich of the Saudi Pro League and the clubs of Serie A straitjacketed by financial fair play (FFP). In an otherwise undignified summer in which Lukaku ghosted Inter Milan rather than return to San Siro for a third spell, he did, to his credit, decide to give Saudi a miss, for now, and remain in one of world football’s legacy leagues.
Amor is key here as Lukaku, at Roma, will be given the love he apparently no longer felt at Inter.
“He is a big baby,” Steve Walsh, the former Everton director of football, told The Athletic about his conversation with Mourinho when he sold Lukaku to United.
Inter fans get it now. They took him back last summer, and would have done so again. But when Lukaku spent the first six months of 2022-23 injured and unable to score from open play and coach Simone Inzaghi came to rely on Edin Dzeko in the big games, he did not like it and turned his back once again on the one fanbase that truly believed him to be the player he thinks he is.
Lukaku’s judgment has to be questioned. Inter, after all, let Dzeko go in the summer and intended to sign the Belgian permanently for a second time.
Last season’s Champions League runners-up could offer him another season at that level. Roma can’t. They have not been UEFA’s top club competition for four years. Only last Friday, Mourinho predicted Roma will finish “between fifth and eighth” in Serie A this season. The following day they lost to Verona, a team who only survived in the top flight last season by grace of a relegation play-off.
Lukaku is supposed to deliver a great leap forward. The 30-year-old is, like Dybala, a former Serie A MVP, a hinge on which title races, not fourth place, have swung in Italy.
It begs the question: is a signing that has been presented as ambitious in its intent really ambitious if the desired outcome is only fourth place? Don’t get me wrong — within an Italian context, this is a tremendous coup. It is the second summer in a row Roma have got a player who was apparently destined for Inter at the start of that transfer window. The Friedkins, unlike the Elkanns and Agnellis behind Juventus, were able to strike a deal with Chelsea.
This is no mean feat. An elaboration on another unexpected piece of business.
In 2021, Roma general manager Tiago Pinto spent five days in London working on the club-record signing of Tammy Abraham who, ironically in retrospect, was sold by Chelsea to recoup some of the money spent on Lukaku, a club-record signing of their own.
This particular negotiation lasted almost as long. Pinto flew out on Friday with Friedkin’s son, Ryan, the club’s vice-president. They met Chelsea’s ownership after the Luton game that night and then held more talks in London’s affluent Mayfair district the following morning.
The pressure mounting on Pinto was immense.
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 built expectation.
It did not matter that Andrea Belotti, who failed to score a single goal for the club in Serie A last season, found the net twice in their season-opener against Salernitana. It did not matter that Pinto secured Sardar Azmoun on loan from Bayer Leverkusen only last week. “When (Pinto) offered me Azmoun, he told me there’ll be an attacker too,” Mourinho said. “If that’s right, I’ll be happy.”
Returning to Rome without Lukaku, amid all the fan expectation, became unthinkable even though the finances were hard to fathom. The expense of only borrowing the player is a strenuous effort for Roma.
Pinto was not dealt an easy hand when he became the club’s general manager.
He was tasked with cleaning up the mess left by Monchi — such as a five-year contract for a 29-year-old Javier Pastore — which was compounded by errors including the €29million (£24.9m/$31.5m at current rates) acquisition of Marash Kumbulla made by the chief executive, Guido Fienga, who transitioned one ownership group to another.
The blowout in Mourinho’s first summer, a €110million net spend which did not result in Champions League qualification, has caught up with them. A year ago, Roma were hit with the strictest FFP settlement agreement doled out to clubs in Serie A. Pinto has had to jump through burning hoops to satisfy UEFA and Mourinho. This summer frankly looked like the FFP version of Mission: Impossible.
Losing last season’s Europa League final to Sevilla meant no Champions League revenue again, even in a year when fourth spot in Serie A should have been there for the taking after Juventus were docked 10 points.
Losing Abraham to a long-term knee injury in the final game of the season meant a money-spinning sale was no longer obvious and Roma needed to bring in around €30million by June 30 in order to be FFP-compliant.
Saudi Arabia’s Al Ahli only cut a cheque for Roger Ibanez for that figure after the deadline. Pinto met it in the meantime through marginal gains, selling Benjamin Tahirovic to Ajax, Cristian Volpato and Filippo Missori to Sassuolo, Justin Kluivert to Bournemouth and Carles Perez to Celta Vigo.
It was not so much a minor miracle as a major one. A series of sales have jarred with Roma spending next to nothing.
As was the case last summer, when Zeki Celik was the only signing to involve a fee, Pinto and his scouts have had to work the free-agent and loan markets.
Then, doing so yielded Dybala, Belotti, Nemanja Matic and Gini Wijnaldum, who was soon lost to a broken leg. This year, Roma are bottom of the spending table. Everyone apart from Leandro Paredes is a loanee (Renato Sanches, Rasmus Kristiansen, Azmoun) or a Bosman freebie (Houssem Aouar and Evan Ndicka).
A winless start through the first two games of the season ratcheted up the stress. It meant Chelsea could leverage Saudi interest in Lukaku to demand a high loan fee and greater coverage of his wages.
They played hardball in a way Pinto could respect. He had been in the same position with Federico Fazio and Nicolo Zaniolo. Neither had a future at the club. Interested clubs knew as much and tried to nickel-and-dime Roma. But Pinto needed to extract the maximum from their exits, just as Chelsea did with Lukaku.
The seriousness of Roma’s intent was signalled by Friedkin Senior’s arrival in London and those of chief executive Lina Souloukou and Anna Rabuano, the club’s head of financial planning. Ultimately, a deal was done on Monday, but even a loan fee of €6million and salary cover of €7.5m represents a huge undertaking for Roma. It makes Lukaku the highest-paid player at the club by some distance, even when compared to Dybala.
But it is what Mourinho desired.
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 behind Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, a season Mourinho considered — in retrospect and, crucially, the third person — as “one of his best achievements.” Whether Lukaku can deliver an instant impact, having spent the summer not playing any football whatsoever, remains to be seen. Fourteen goals in 20 starts for Inter last season suggests he has more to give than Adriano when Roma signed him in his late twenties in 2010.
But this is a gamble for Roma, in much the same way signing an injury-prone Sanches is. The Portugal midfielder featured for half an hour in the season-opening 2-2 draw with Salernitana before pulling a muscle in training. Romanisti must hope Lukaku does not do the same.
This is a huge year for the project.
On the one hand, Mourinho and the owners are ahead of schedule. They delivered a trophy and while some have belittled the Europa Conference League win in 2022, the fans do not care. They were craving silverware of any kind and are grateful, devoted even, to the owners and Mourinho for its delivery. A couple of big names have joined unexpectedly and only one (Zaniolo) has been sold. The Olimpico is full for every game.
On the other, if we overlook Nicola Zalewski, Abraham, Ndicka, Aouar and Edoardo Bove, the team is collectively old and temporary, with little resale value baked in. Mourinho could be gone in a year. Lukaku might be back at Chelsea next summer. This is the risk. But Roma hope the reward, at the very least, is a place in the 2023-24 top four.
The question I pose is this: in a league this volatile, with its four different champions in four years, shouldn’t a team like Roma be challenging in this, year three, of Mourinho’s time in the Eternal City? Shouldn’t Lukaku be the final piece?
(Top photo: Aurelien Meunier – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
