Even before his injury, can't you see how renewing the contract of one our best players, most loyal element and one of our top 2-3 most valuable assets was absolutely more important thant getting a player on loan with monstruous wages whoever it is? The press and probably the management too citing some sort of salary cap as a reason for this negotiation taking so long while at the same time having in the club the highest paid player in the league is some bullshit.
It's for sure something that affects not only our ability to offer higher more adapted wages to our top players but also our ability to negotiate because as soon as you have one Lukaku that obliterates the wage structure it becomes mire difficult to convince other players to have reasonable salaries, especially if teams like PSG are lurking.
Thta being said, guven that Lukaku's contribution is 0, signing him temporarily for so much money makes even less sense now.
End of the season we're going to have to go on the market for a striker (again) and a CB that can potentially replace the best in the league.
Sorry bro but thats just not correct, while lukaku might be the highest paid player in the league he dos not that has the highest costs for us because of the growth decree and because of him not having a transfer fee as i said Correa is more expensive on our books than lukaku....
Offering skriniar 6.5 mio/ season will result in him costing us +/-13mio per season while lukaku is at 11...........
Also again we needed a striker last season and Skriniar is was stil here so no we needed a striker more last season than we needed to extend skriniar.
Your last point is pure hindsight at it again so prety much a moot point.
Last but not least Lukaku s salary is not on our book next year so if it was a decision lukaku vs skriniar we could still chose skriniar and not loan Lukaku again. Quite sure we could bridge the 4/5 months gap till season is over.
Last but not least that salary cap is installed for a good reason and it sure as shit aint Lukaku...
And again your blaming this all on us getting lukaku at a 11mio cost a season we lost fucking 25mio because we decided to go with a ponzi main sponsor...
In addition to all that we would not be able to match PSG any ways we simply cannot pay anybody 12 fucken mios pre tax...
Looking at our financials and knowing all the shit that went down this year even 6.5 mio per season is a stretch....
All of that being said go on and blame it all on lukaku but dont get mad when members just laugh at your take.....
edit: btw i fully agree that if it was a decision skriniar vs lukaku we should choose skriniar without hesitation but imho thats just not the case.