Juventus propose Romelu Lukaku, Dušan Vlahović swap deal — report

Romelu Lukaku exists in a sort of footballing limbo these days, having burned his bridges at Chelsea, then burned them at Inter Milan, too, while having no interest in going to Saudi Arabia even as a deal with Juventus continues to not materialize. Juve’s interest was said to be largely contingent on finding a taker for Dušan Vlahović, and one has yet to materialize there as well. PSG were in the running, but they have seemingly thought better of it now.

So, perhaps the logical solution is to swap the two unwanted, underperforming strikers, but Chelsea had shown little interest in doing so when that rumor was initially floated a few weeks ago. But having run out of other creative solutions, we’re now back on the trade track, with Sky Italia claiming that “for the first time, Chelsea have opened up” to Vlahović and this possibility.

We are now “working to seek an agreement on the economic settlement”, which may or may not involve some cash changing places as well. Sky claims that it would be us sending money alongside Romelu to Juventus, which seems a bit silly, but they did play €70m for Vlahović 18 months ago, and at 23, he is a fair bit younger than Lukaku (and thus presumably has a bigger upside).

The biggest problem with this idea is that it still extends the impact of our Lukaku mistake, and would just call it Vlahović. We’re looking for a clean break (as evidenced by Lukaku apparently not even training at Cobham these days), and this would not be it.