Lukaku leaves Napoli for Fenerbahce after 64 minutes in a year

Romelu Lukaku has left Napoli for Fenerbahce, and the fee tells you most of what happened to him in Italy. Six million euros. Two years ago he arrived from Chelsea as the striker Antonio Conte had gone out of his way to get; he leaves for less than the price of a squad full-back, having played 64 minutes of football in the last year.

Fourteen goals, then almost nothing

The first season was the one Napoli wanted. Lukaku scored 14 goals in 38 matches in 2024-25 as Conte’s side won the Scudetto, doing the work strikers of his size are bought to do, holding the ball up and letting the rest of the team arrive.

The second season lasted about half an hour. He tore his rectus femoris in a pre-season friendly against Olympiacos on 14 August last year, badly enough to damage one of the insertional tendons with it. He flew to Belgium to see a specialist, chose conservative treatment over an operation, and was out for 124 days. He came back, and then the season quietly fell apart: seven appearances in all competitions, not one of them a start, 64 minutes on the pitch, one goal. Italian reports had him out of the first-team picture entirely by the closing weeks of the season, after disagreements over his fitness and his rehabilitation.

Napoli have moved on twice over since then. Conte, the manager who signed him, left in May, with Massimiliano Allegri arriving on a three-year deal. Rasmus Hojlund’s loan from Manchester United turned permanent for 44 million euros, which is a lot of money to spend on the man who plays in your position. There was no version of this summer in which Lukaku stayed.

What Fenerbahce are getting

Six million euros, with performance-related bonuses on top. His salary is reported at around 10 million euros a season, which is the real cost of the deal and the reason it was available to a Turkish club rather than an Italian one.

He is 33 and he has 316 goals in 681 career matches. He is Belgium’s leading scorer of all time with 93 international goals, a record that is not going to be beaten soon. None of that guarantees a striker’s legs after a year of standing still, and Fenerbahce know it, which is presumably why so much of the money is conditional.

“Hello dear Fenerbahce fans. It is a great honour and privilege for me to join your club,” Lukaku said on arrival in Istanbul, adding that Turkey is where he first discovered professional football as a child.

A squad that keeps buying famous names

He walks into a dressing room that reads like a Premier League team-sheet from four years ago. Nathan Ake arrived from Manchester City in July, Mason Greenwood from Marseille after him, and they sit alongside N’Golo Kante, Milan Skriniar, Nelson Semedo, Marco Asensio and Anderson Talisca. Ismail Kartal is the manager, back for a fourth spell at the club on a one-year contract he signed in June.

Whether all of that adds up to a team is the question Fenerbahce have been asking themselves for several summers. They get an answer quickly. Having knocked out Sturm Graz in the third qualifying round, they host Lyon on 18 August in the first leg of a Champions League playoff, with the return a week later. Win it and they are in the league phase. Lose it and they drop into the Europa League, and a squad assembled at this cost starts the season having already failed at the thing it was assembled for.

For Lukaku the calculation is simpler. He is one of those forwards who has been written off at every stop and has kept scoring anyway, at Everton, at Inter, at Napoli in the season that mattered. A year on the physio’s table at 33 is a different kind of setback, though, and Istanbul is where he finds out which way it goes.

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