Why the Lukaku transfer to Chelsea fell through

While Everton are currently looking pretty bad for leaving the highly important striker position unfilled right up to the penultimate day of the transfer window, reports from Belgium indicate that the Blues did have a very solid plan to prevent this from happening.

As reported by Sport Witness, who quote from Belgian publication Foot Magazine, the Toffees had wanted to sell Romelu Lukaku to the club of his choice, which had been Chelsea all along.

In return, the Blues had asked for Michy Batshuayi, Bertrand Traore and €50m. While that sounds like a king’s ransom, it’s also a perfectly reasonable amount for Everton to demand considering Lukaku was the hottest property in the Premier League transfer market, he desperately wanted to play at Stamford Bridge and it seemed Chelsea were willing to atone for their grievous mistake in letting him go to begin with.

However, it appears now that Chelsea politely declined and instead Mino Raiola orchestrated a well-planned move to take Lukaku to Manchester United where another one of his prominent clients and a close friend of the Belgian, Paul Pogba was lying in wait.

Quoting from the extract, the manipulations of Raiola are masterful but his plan worked like a charm -

A little more than two weeks before joining United, Lukaku learns that Raiola never caught up with Chelsea and feels cheated. The Italian-Dutch agent then asked Paul Pogba to connect the violins. "A very common practice," says an important agent of the environment.

The two friends find themselves on vacation on the heights of Los Angeles in a majestic villa chartered by Raiola (he would even own according to some rumors). Rafaela Pimenta, Brazilian lawyer of Raiola and confidante of Pogba, is also present in the city of the Angels. It is she who will stage, somewhat grotesque, the formalization of the transfer via the account Instagram of Pogba.

For Everton, having two very good strikers like Batshuayi and Traore would have prevented the desperate situation the club finds itself in now. As for the fans, this information only leaves us thinking about what could have been.