When Romelu Lukaku gave an interview to seek forgiveness from the fans of Inter Milan for leaving them for Chelsea and said he would love to return to San Siro, there was a certain inevitability that he would upset the fans of Chelsea. And so it has come to pass.
To make matters worse, Inter fans do not appear to be in a particularly forgiving mood.
'It doesn't matter who runs away in the rain,' said the translation of a sign unveiled outside their stadium, 'it matters who stays in the storm. Bye Romelu.' And to add to the mess, the Chelsea boss Thomas Tuchel was distinctly unimpressed.
Romelu Lukaku gave an interview to Sky Italia which upset supporters and staff at Chelsea
Chelsea boss Thomas Tuchel was not impressed at Lukaku's words of unhappiness at the club
It is, presumably, only a matter of time before Lukaku gives another interview, this time seeking forgiveness from the fans of Chelsea. It is a difficult road for a player to travel because apologies only beget more problems and upset more people, particularly in the court of social media. Maybe it would have been better not to set out on the journey of justification in the first place.
But then that would have been a shame. Lukaku is one of the more cerebral players in the modern game and one of the more courageous. His views are always worth reading and he has the confidence to say what he thinks, which is a relative rarity today when original thought in a player is often media-trained out of existence.
A few years ago, in the build-up to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the Belgium striker gave an interview to the Players' Tribune that laid bare the realities of his impoverished childhood in Brussels and the motivation that drove him to become a superstar player.
'I wanted to be the best footballer in Belgian history,' he wrote in that piece. 'That was my goal. Not good. Not great. The best.
'I played with so much anger, because of a lot of things … because of the rats running around in our apartment … because I couldn't watch the Champions League … because of how the other parents used to look at me. I was on a mission.'
Lukaku signalled his intention to return to Inter Milan sooner rather than later in the interview
Inter Milan's Ultra fans responded by telling Lukaku that they don't want him back in banner
It was a great interview, the kind that teaches you not to look at a player in quite the same way again, the kind that tells you about his visceral desire to use football to care for his family, to let nothing get in the way, to dedicate himself to the game utterly and completely.
I loved the honesty and the detail of that interview, the way he talked about knowing things were bad when he came from school and found his mother mixing water into their milk so it would last longer. It takes a kind of bravery to open yourself up like that.
'I don't know why some people in my own country want to see me fail,' he wrote. 'I really don't. When I went to Chelsea and I wasn't playing, I heard them laughing at me. When I got loaned out to West Brom, I heard them laughing at me. But it's cool. Those people weren't with me when we were pouring water in our cereal. If you weren't with me when I had nothing, then you can't really understand me.'
The interview he gave to Sky Italia, the interview that has caused all the problems, was uncompromising in a different way. Lukaku knows the sensitivities of the modern game and he must have been aware his words, his surfeit of honesty, might not be well received by his current employers. He went ahead with it anyway.
Lukaku's return to Chelsea has not gone as well as he or supporters planned so far this season
For whatever reason, Lukaku seemed to want to put the record straight with Inter fans about why he left in the summer. It is part of the psyche of many modern footballers to want to be loved by the fans of former clubs in a way that other generations of footballers cared about less, or maybe less obviously.
This did not quite belong to the same family of communication as the social media messages put out by the people who run players' Twitter and Instagram accounts. You know the type: the fulsome apology because
