Napoli center forward Romelu Lukaku gave a long interview to the ‘Friends of Sports’ podcast. During the question and answer, the Belgian footballer spoke thus of the reasons that led him to give up the Belgian national team in both September and October: “In my first conversation with Domenico Tedesco I wanted to tell him that I would like to leave the national team. I had already done what I had to do. Tedesco told me that he really needed me and after a conversation with my brother, I decided to continue. In these two months, however, I chose for myself, I needed it mentally and physically. I hadn’t done my summer preparation: why should I put myself in a situation like that again now that we’re making good progress with Napoli and I’m gradually getting back into shape? I don’t have the fire I always played with in the national team, it’s not lit. I want to go to the 2026 World Cup, this is my motivation.”
Then on his relationship with Antonio Conte he added: “When I arrived in Italy he told me: ‘Listen to me, in my system of play you can’t keep the ball too much, you have to give it back immediately, you don’t have to play like Lautaro’. From that moment Lautaro and I knew that we had to pass the ball to each other. with each other and that Lautaro’s qualities matched mine perfectly. We continually trained to pass the ball to each other, so at a certain point I knew perfectly well where he or Sanchez or whoever would play in his place Kvaratskhelia. This is what Conte does: he creates a sort of partnership between the players. The same thing goes with McTominay.”
On his controversial relationship with English teams and the Premier League, these are Lukaku’s words: “In England they wanted to put me in a cage. They saw me and thought: ‘He’s the new Drogba!’. But I’m not like that: Didier had his back to goal much more, he could manage the ball from wherever you played it. But he’s not the my style…”