Antonio Conte took the English league title with Chelsea in 2017 and the Italian manager wanted to dominate the Premier League with some top purchases. Virgil van Dijk and Romelu Lukaku topped the list of the current coach of Internazionale, but unfortunately for Conte, the defender and forward chose Liverpool and Manchester United respectively.

“I asked the Chelsea board for two players and we almost brought them to the club”, Conte recalls in an extensive interview with The Telegraph. “One player was Romelu Lukaku and the other player was Virgil van Dijk. And it really didn’t matter if they had signed with Chelsea at the time. There was daily contact with these two.” Despite the sky-high ambitions, Conte missed the transfer market. “I always said that at Chelsea we had improved 30 percent with those players.”

“It is quite possible that we therefore lost momentum at Chelsea in our ambition to bring the club back to the top in England for years,” Conte, who left London in 2018, looks for causes. “It is a real shame that those transfers were canceled at the time. Lukaku shows at Inter that we were rightly interested in him at Chelsea and Van Dijk shows as a Liverpool player that I did not see it bad at the time.”

Conte would have liked to work with Lukaku at Chelsea. “Then it would certainly have been a different story”, the experienced coach refers to the volatile period of the Belgian striker at Manchester United. “Romelu is an incredible player who is still getting better. In his first year at Inter he has already learned a lot. He is an eager to learn and I am a person who loves to teach. Romelu really has the potential to be one of the best. become strikers in the world. “