Honestly, cannot see a reason to keep him [obviously talking about the end of the season and not during this one] if his value is considered to be high enough. Cash it in. If it also gives an excuse for Conte to fuck off, good job!
All this talk about him "carrying" us is utter nonsense. He's carried us to an EL final loss having almost nothing to do with us being in that place in the first place (aside from the Leverkusen game and that blooper Ludogorets goal for the laughs), two CL eliminations by not showing up in the bigger games, and ironically most fans are the happiest about our performance in the toughest possible games (away to Real and Barcelona) when he wasn't even around! Yes, he scores a lot, but he's not really the reason we do so. His % per the team total is not that high.
If you want to talk about strikers "carrying" a team in the last 20 years, then you have:
2002-3: Christian Vieri. More goals than appearances and had he been fit the entire season we'd probably win the Champions League...
2004-5: Adriano.
2007-8: Zlatan Ibrahimovic [if only he was fully fit]
2008-9: Zlatan Ibrahimovic
2010-11: Samuel Eto'o
2011-12: Diego Milito
2017-18: Mauro Icardi
We do not depend on either of our strikers to score goals, if anything they miss a lot more chances than they convert. The league is also so much different from 5 years ago, let alone 15-20 and you have a much harder road to score goals. Getting to 25 goals in Serie A in the last 3-4 seasons is probably the equivalent of getting to 15-18 goals 15 years ago. You disagree?
Goals per game in the entire league was usually fluctuating between 2.45 and 2.65 throughout the 2000s and mid 2010s. 2016-17 was the first season we closed in on 3 goals per game (2.96), then we saw a drop to the higher levels of the previous years (2.68) for 2 seasons in a row and now....
2019-20: 3.04 goals per game
2020-21 almost halfway through: 3.11 goals per game
That means that in all Inter games, we'd have an increase of around 15 goals per year. So sure, that's not all Inter goals you would say. But where does this increase come from? If you check the numbers you will notice that the bottom 5-10 clubs haven't improved much in terms of scoring but the top 5-10 clubs have increased their goal tally over the years. So It's safe to say that of this 15 goal average, around 11-12 of them are in favor of the big teams.
You can claim this a Conte victory that we score more (at the expense of good, sound defending, but whatever), but you definitely cannot say that we depend on Lukaku.
I wanted us to sell him last season and get Luis Suarez or Edinson Cavani as that would allow us to fix several problems in the squad, even with Conte sticking around. Such as the non-existent left wing back or a backup striker.
Sure, if you sell Ibra and replace him with Eto'o, Milito, Motta and Sneijder then great.
If you sell Eto'o and replace him with Diego Forlan, Ricky Alvarez and Jonathan, not so much.
I don't know why people keep insisting on saying this, but both Milito and Motta were signed before the 2008-09 season ended and the plan was to pair Milito with Zlatan. You can argue Eto'o + Sneijder which on its own is an excellent return, even if Sneijder was a possibility without selling Zlatan. They wanted 20m at first and we got him for 15m. Payable in three instalments since people think that means something
The actual deal we offered was loan + obligation for 20m [triggered after we reached a CL spot or something easy like that], so a Zlatan sale wasn't really that necessary to pull a deal off, it just made things easier as we completed the deal right away.
The reason I'm nitpicking on this is because a false narrative is constantly being used for this. Moratti wanted the Champions League, he had Mourinho, and he was willing to spend! Post-CL era with Moratti 'fatigued' and the costs rising so high after extending everyone as a thank you for the Tripleta, we had to sell Samuel Eto'o, who was earning as much as Zlatan did here (11m net). We didn't sell him to reinforce the team, we sold him because we wanted to strip down the salary structure.
Now we have a cash problem, but not so much a financial problem. We can use funds that we sell players for, we don't care
that much about capital gains anymore and we sure need the liquidity. And we won't be selling a player we depend on, as great as his contribution may be. If Manchester City is willing to give us anything close to 80, let alone over it, we shouldn't even blink an eye. But a straight deal, no player exchanges and all that bullshit unless they're willing to talk Bernardo Silva + $$$.
10 years of FIF
