Inter’s inability to offload enough players for fees to reach the €80 million sum targeted in the transfer market this summer has been a major factor in the club’s decision to accept a bid by Chelsea for Romelu Lukaku.
This according to today’s print edition of Milan-based newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport, who report that the club directors have been unable to bring in any significant fees for fringe squad members, and that this has led to the need to accept the Blues’ offer.
The Nerazzurri’s financial targets in the summer are widely-known, with a reduction in the wage bill needing to be accompanied by €80 million in net gains in the transfer market.
To this end, the club sold Achraf Hakimi to Paris Saint-Germain last month for a fixed amount of €60 million, plus €8 million in easily-achievable add-ons and another €3 million in further add-ons.
The club directors had planned to supplement this amount with incoming cash from deals for unwanted players such as Dalbert, Joao Mario, Radja Nainggolan, and Andrea Pinamonti, but so far only Mario has been offloaded permanently, released from his contract to join Benfica.
Meanwhile, Dalbert has joined Cagliari on loan with an option to buy, and Nainggolan and Pinamonti are still at the club and not set to be sold permanently for fees.
Adding to this the fact that the likes of Alexis Sanchez, Ivan Perisic, and Arturo Vidal are currently set to stay on at the club, and the ownership is still displeased with the financial situation at the club even after Hakimi’s sale.
Accordingly, President Steven Zhang has felt that he has little option but to accept Chelsea’s major cash offer for Lukaku, with the fee received set to easily cover the amounts still targeted which have not arrived through the sales of redundancies.
The Nerazzurri directors, for their part, believe that the €80 million target can still be reached, and that the financial goals can be met through the spreading out of large salaries over extended contracts, sales of players with buyback clauses inserted into them, and possible sales in January.
Zhang, however, is not convinced, and currently feels resigned to the necessity of selling Lukaku rather than relying on the directors to provide the amount necessary to stabilize the club’s finances in the market.
Should the directors not be able to convince the President that the necessary liquidity can be brought in through other operations, then he will press on with the Lukaku sale, seeing it as an opportunity which he cannot pass up.
