Romelu Lukaku

[kurt0411]

People being in denial/salty and spouting some absolute nonsense in here. We would not have won the league without Lukaku and he wasn’t just the best player at Inter last season he was the best player in the league. These are facts people need to accept.

Now onto his importance in a team, Chelsea would not be title contenders this season without Lukaku, it’s as simple as that. They won the champions league but to win a league you need players like Lukaku who will solve a lot of games against the weaker teams and get you the 3pts. Chelsea last season were a cup team, they dropped a ridiculous amount of points cos there strikers couldn’t find the back of the net and I’m afraid we’re gonna suffer from the same fate this season. We could do a lot better in 1 off games though for sure so hopefully that translates well for the CL

 

[brehme1989]

Best player in the league yet he wasn't even the best or even 2nd best of his own team... Yeap, denial is reflecting all over the place.

 

[Sawyer]

This is a ridiculously repetitive argument.

Pick one, they're all at least as valid:

We would have not won the scudetto without Lautaro Martinez.
We would have not won the scudetto without Alexis Sanchez.
We would have not won the scudetto without Christian Eriksen.
We would have not won the scudetto without Achraf Hakimi.
We would have not won the scudetto without Ivan Perisic.
We would have not won the scudetto without Milan Skriniar.
We would have not won the scudetto without Stefan de Vrij.
We would have not won the scudetto without Samir Handanovic.
We would have not won the scudetto without Niccolo Barella.
We would have not won the scudetto without Marcelo Brozovic.
We would have not won the scudetto without Matteo Darmian.
We would have not won the scudetto without Alessandro Bastoni.



It's a naive argument. Without player X, we'd have replacement player Y and he'd probably contribute just as much, depending on what his cost was to the club and what the cost to replace him was.

And the irony here is that Lukaku is the easiest to replace of them all due to the sheer cost to bring him and have him here... Please stop using this sentence. It applies to almost everyone in the Scudetto squad.

Touch a wee nerve there did I? I'll put up with your opinion and you put up with mine mate, its a forum. Stats for Lukaku speak for themselves, not even the scoring and assists, try % of games won when he played v % of games won when he didn't for example.

You can have an opinion on anything we like but to say Lukaku didn't play the biggest role in bringing our scudetto 19 other than Conte is just simply not true. You aren't the "man" at a club for no reason.

 

[Nero Indigo]

For Pete’s sake! We definitely won this deal because he’s guaranteed to decline from here on out. We got 115 large for this dude at the age of 28, so even if he played like a fucking toilet brush cleaning a public latrine - I’m fucking good with that. Jeez!

 

[Candreva Crosses]

For Pete’s sake! We definitely won this deal because he’s guaranteed to decline from here on out. We got 115 large for this dude at the age of 28, so even if he played like a fucking toilet brush cleaning a public latrine - I’m fucking good with that. Jeez!

Hmm, is that so easy to determine? I think he will do good at Chelsea, atleast this season before we even have a discussion about decline.

 

[Sawyer]

Hmm, is that so easy to determine? I think he will do good at Chelsea, atleast this season before we even have a discussion about decline.

I think he will do well for years still, just to add.

 

[Nero Indigo]

I’m quite confident he peaked with us. He’s not going to do better than here at Chelsea. I’d put money on it if I could

 

[brehme1989]

Touch a wee nerve there did I? I'll put up with your opinion and you put up with mine mate, its a forum. Stats for Lukaku speak for themselves, not even the scoring and assists, try % of games won when he played v % of games won when he didn't for example.

You can have an opinion on anything we like but to say Lukaku didn't play the biggest role in bringing our scudetto 19 other than Conte is just simply not true. You aren't the "man" at a club for no reason.

How exactly did he play the biggest role? Specifics please and not generic numbers.

He played the biggest role in having us out of the Champions League, but I guess you don't want to go there.

Our best players last season were Barella and Hakimi. Lukaku's competition would be Skriniar, Brozovic and the 4 month spell of Eriksen & Perisic as well as Lautaro if anything. You can say he was better or more critical than all those and we may agree on some, but he was definitely not the catalyst for winning the league.


Hakimi and Barella separated us from competition, not Lukaku. Lukaku was extremely lucky to benefit forming that triangle on the right side.

 

[brakbrak]

Man I didn’t wanna get in this endless loop debate but I couldn’t resist, people who kept saying how we struggled without him don’t realize that we played exactly the same with or without him.Conte had no plan B whatsoever, he deployed Sanchez exactly the same way as he would play Lukaku

 

[Sawyer]

How exactly did he play the biggest role? Specifics please and not generic numbers.

He played the biggest role in having us out of the Champions League, but I guess you don't want to go there.

Our best players last season were Barella and Hakimi. Lukaku's competition would be Skriniar, Brozovic and the 4 month spell of Eriksen & Perisic as well as Lautaro if anything. You can say he was better or more critical than all those and we may agree on some, but he was definitely not the catalyst for winning the league.


Hakimi and Barella separated us from competition, not Lukaku. Lukaku was extremely lucky to benefit forming that triangle on the right side.

You can't ask for specifics when you ignore points such as % of wins with or without him, thats specific, as are his stats. Anyway Imma a bow out, sure Kaku wasn't instrumental and we'd have scudetto 19 without him, my bad pal.

 

[brehme1989]

You can't ask for specifics when you ignore points such as % of wins with or without him, thats specific, as are his stats. Anyway Imma a bow out, sure Kaku wasn't instrumental and we'd have scudetto 19 without him, my bad pal.

He featured in 36/38 games - both seasons - why would that even be important?

Don't pretend as if you didn't leave that there just to stick in as some sort of argument.

We won 3-1 and 4-0 in the first season in games he didn't feature and had a 5-1 win and a 2-2 draw (vs Parma) in last season. That's only two points dropped over 2 seasons without him [see how ridiculous it can sound?] and we had Kolarov starting center back, with Gagliardini and Darmian on the left and Perisic as starting forward in that Parma game...
His thing was goals, yet we averaged 3.5 Serie A goals in games he didn't play. Which I would assume exceeds the actual average... Wooh, another great argument, no?

 

[DiegoMilito22]

I can name a bunch of big games where he was completely invisible. He mostly scored when the team was already leading. We were leading 3-0 against Shakhtar in UEL and then he scored 2 goals. Were those goals really useful? On the other hand he was completely useless against Shakhtar in UCL when we needed only one goal and the team was under pressure. Same goes about local matches. 5 games against Juve and 0 goals from open play.

 

[wera]

I think we can all agree Lukaku actually did better than what we expected from him, since he was underperforming in United. He was one of the pieces that helped us make the next step, being 2nd in the league, going to EL final and then winning the Scudetto on the next season is proof enough. Fuck it, he couldn't help us in CL, but we have been underperforming there + Conte who never managed to get through the Group stage just makes a perfect marriage of fuckery.

Let us not forget that some people here hate stats AND keep talking about how we don't need a high-scoring team, but when it's about Lukaku, that's the first thing they go to for arguments . Obviously playing without Lukaku would make us play differently, but making it look like we would always do a lot better if we never had Lukaku is some kind of genius semantics that makes us all participate in an idiot spin cycle.

He is gone, let's hope the Lukaku-haters are right and we will achieve so much more without him now... but let's not act like 64 goals and 16 assists in 2 seasons (95 games) is so easily replacable. I don't give a fuck if he mostly scored against lower sides, did it help us? Yes. Then what is the fucking problem here?

 

[.h.]

I definitely see us winning the treble now that the first striker as far as I can ever remember since I started watching Inter to score 30+ goals in a season for two years running has gone.

I've gone back to 82-83 and no striker has ever scored 30+ goals in 2 seasaons consecutively. Meazza did it in 29/30 and 30/31, maybe he's the last one before Lukaku.

 

[qb4ever_2k]

I definitely see us winning the treble now that the first striker as far as I can ever remember since I started watching Inter to score 30+ goals in a season for two years running has gone.

I've gone back to 82-83 and no striker has ever scored 30+ goals in 2 seasaons consecutively. Meazza did it in 29/30 and 30/31, maybe he's the last one before Lukaku.

Quite crazy Ibra never reached these milestones. But then I remember he was a total choker in CL too

 

[.h.]

he was mostly on track in 2007-2008, but then a couple of injuries prevented him from doding it + he lost form. He was 14 in 20 in the league, then coming back from injury 3 in 6. Total 22 in the season. 08/09 he was 29 in 47 - with only 1 in 8 games in the CL.

 

[brehme1989]

I've gone back to 82-83 and no striker has ever scored 30+ goals in 2 seasaons consecutively. Meazza did it in 29/30 and 30/31, maybe he's the last one before Lukaku.

Did you also notice the games played during that period?
And did you consider how much better the league was further back than now?

 

[.h.]

I'm aware of that. I'm just saying, you can bang on about context as much as you want, but no one has even come that close to it.Its not like we've got history where a striker scores 25-28 goals a season for two consecutive seasons in an 18 team league.

And, even so, its still an accomplishment to ACTUALLY do it. Inter was a much stronger side when we had Mourinho/Ibra/etc, and no one managed it then.

Vieri, Icardi, Ronaldo, Ibrahimovic, Eto'o, Milito, Adriano, etc, all didnt manage to do it.

I think, at the least, that deserves a well done. And yes, dont get me wrong, he's not as good as many of the players I've listed, but we should still appreciate his actual outcome at Inter.

Look at it like this - he put his transfer value up almost 50% despite being 2 years older, AND in tihe middle of a pandemic where values hve probably been cut on averagae 20-30%.

 

[Shark]

He's running his mouth again. Don't make me hate you, Lukaku

https://twitter.com/x/status/1434104302319112193

 

[brehme1989]

@.h. It remains a personal feat for him, surely, but let's not pretend that it came as a result of his individual quality more than it came as a result of team style and performance. You can claim that he was the main reason for all that if you wish, but let's not pretend that his scoring was something the team relied upon.

It looks impressive when you see that Lukaku in 2 seasons managed to have two Top 5 scoring seasons, both 30+, from 1980-81* until today.

I'll illustrate a bigger picture below using some pretty straight forward parameters I selected.

So you can see here that Lukaku is joint 2nd and 5th in the last 40 odd years. But you'll also notice that the list is very modern heavy, only 3 entries in our top 15 are not from the last 20 years (Ronaldo, Serena, Altobelli 1985).

From this list, apart from Adriano in 2004-5, he has the two lowest scoring ratios from non-Penalty goals.

From the minutes per goal (including PKs), his second season ranks 5th out of 15.

But you can notice that the related non-PK number makes quite a jump there.

Another underrated parameter is how many goals less were scored by our scorer:

Two top 5 entries for the last two seasons once again, with Lautaro having a much closer gap than most other high scoring seasons. Eto'o is the only one who comes close in a 30+ goal performance in 2009-10 with a 14 goal difference. Djorkaeff and Pazzini in 1998 and 2011 lag significantly. I mean just consider that this selection relates only to 25+ goal scoring seasons and the gap is 24 and 26 goals from 1st to 2nd alone in those seasons, whereas Lukaku's performances is closer to what a healthy 25-28 goal season would look like in the 2000s.


Now taking only the players who scored at least 25% of our goal total, here's how it looks:

As you can see, while it's a very good feat, it doesn't really rank very high in the "carrying us" rhetoric that people have been throwing around for almost 2 years now.


When you discount penalties as well (formula removes players's PK goals and removes the total PK goals scored by the team's total, data entry from transfermarkt), using the 25% as the cut off once again:

where Lukaku ranks in the low 20s with both entries out of 41 seasons.


Now, that's just looking at numbers. You mention that Vieri, Ronaldo, Adriano, Zlatan etc never did that. But they played in a different era, a time with less goals scored in general, with more strikers, some would argue tougher to score as well due to better defenses and competition and of course, less games. And most importantly, these players rarely played consecutive seasons in full fitness.

I don't think other than Eto'o, Icardi and Palacio did we have a striker in the last 20 seasons where they had consecutive seasons with more than 30 games played in the league. I'm sure Vieri and Ronaldo didn't, not sure if Cruz managed that but he was hardly a striker. Don't recall if Adriano managed 2 full seasons, but it's possible. Milito definitely wasn't as much around out in his second year, though his 3rd was better than his 1st.

And there's the issue that Icardi and Palacio played for teams that kinda sucked and Eto'o was sacrificed in his first season quite a lot. You could argue that it's remarkable that he's stayed away from injuries, but that's where it should end.

Hitting a landmark of 30 goals is definitely noteworthy, but removing all context from it to exaggerate someone's output feels silly to me and yes, I'll keep calling it out as long as it's a thing.


*1980-81 is just the date I picked to start gathering the data, will eventually go further back.


P.S: I could enhance the dataset, open to suggestions. But would like to keep it goal related only, though standings and Europe progression is something I was considering to include but not sure how to implement it.