Romelu Lukaku loan signals the true end of the Roman Abramovich era at Chelsea - The Warm-Up

THURSDAY'S BIG STORIES The Lukaku Conundrum Ad/> How do you solve a problem like Romelu Lukaku? You loan him out, as quickly as possible; you send him back to a place where he was happy and hope he scores enough goals that his resale value doesn't tank completely. He's heading back to Inter Milan, so the papers believe. Ballon d'Or'Carrying Chelsea on his shoulders' — Mount backed for future Ballon d’Or success2 HOURS AGO All in all, tremendous business from the Italians.

Sell a player for the best part of €100m, then bring him back a year later — happy and grateful and thoroughly re-motivated — for a fraction of the cost. For Chelsea, meanwhile, this whole experiment goes down as a tremendously expensive mistake: all that money and just 15 goals. Though perhaps that isn't a truly awful return, given that Thomas Tuchel couldn't ever work out what to do with him.

If this were the previous Chelsea regime, we might wonder if Lukaku wasn't being stashed offshore, to return whenever the next head coach on the merry-go-round gets a turn. This, after all, is the club where Victor Moses went from fringe squad player to the best wing-back in the world and then back again, as the club chewed through managers and systems. One manager's flop is another manager's superstar.

But Stamford Bridge is under new ownership, and perhaps the carousel has stopped at just the wrong time for Lukaku. The names flying around the rumour mill — Christian Pulisic, Hakim Ziyech out; Raheem Sterling, Ousmane Dembele, Gabriel Jesus in — suggest that Tuchel is being given license to remake the team's attack as he sees fit. Can they press? Can they play alongside Kai Havertz? Can they go a whole season without giving an interview about how much they want