Lukaku blasts Manchester United, Barcelona tell Neymar they will sign him on one condition, PSG reject Real Madrid's shock swap offer for Neymar and more: Transfer Roundup, 22 August 2019
With less than 2 weeks to go until the transfer window slams shut, we should be braced for the resolution of some transfer sagas that consistently grabbed the headlines this summer. We are in the business end of the window and set for an exciting week and a half.
Here are the top transfer news and rumours of the day.
Romelu Lukaku criticises the way his departure was handled by Manchester United
Romelu Lukaku has hit out at the way in which his exit from Manchester United was handled with respect to "leaks" (rumours). Lukaku claims that he did not feel protected towards the end of his stint at United as no one came out to defend him while several rumours linking him with an exit were doing the rounds.
Lukaku revealed in LightHarted Podcast with Josh Hart:
"A lot of stuff has been said where I didn't feel protected. I felt like a lot of rumours, 'Rom going there', 'they don't want Rom', and nobody came out to shut it down.
"It was for a good three, four weeks. I'm waiting for someone to come out and shut it down. It didn't happen.
Lukaku also hit out at how nobody defended him when the rumours initially came out and the lack of backing from the club made him want to speed up his exit.
"I had my conversation, told them it was better to go our separate ways. If you don't want to protect somebody, all these rumours come out. I just wanted you to say 'Rom is going to fight for his place', but it never happened for four, five months.
"It was all, 'he's got to go, he doesn't deserve to be there'. Well OK, then I want to go now. There is fighting for your position, but also being somewhere that people want you to be.
Lukaku also suggested that if the club had handled things differently, he would have continued to work hard even if he wasn't going to be a starter at United under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as the Norwegian always seemed to favour the faster and slicker Marcus Rashford over the big Belgian.
"If you're happy, you find a way, it doesn't matter if you're on the bench or starting. But nobody told me that was the situation, so I thought for two, three weeks to analyse, see all this **** coming out in the media. Who leaks it? Not me. Not my agent. I see it on my phone come out of nowhere.
"I told them it's not good for me to be at a place where I'm not wanted. We're not stupid. They consider us dumb, but we are not dumb, we know who is doing leaks and stuff. I told them, you can't be working like this, it's better for me to go now."