Romelu Lukaku vs. Alvaro Morata: An imagined oral history of the flame war to come

"In hindsight, we should have seen something coming. Lukaku going to Chelsea, then — surprise! — joining United. Morata set for United, then picked up by Chelsea. It was always going to be a mess."

Alan Nonymous looks bitterly into the grey Manchester sky. His hand shakes as he sips his coffee, and my eye is drawn to a network of scars on the back of his left hand. He sees me looking, and smiles ruefully, before taking me back to the beginning of what would become one of the strangest conflicts in recent history.

"There were even jokes about it, during preseason. That running tally of goals during friendly matches, everybody going back and forth online. It was funny. Well, some of it. Then opening day happened, and it all suddenly … exploded."

On Saturday Aug. 12, 2017, Alvaro Morata, who had moved from Real Madrid to Chelsea for around £60m, made his first competitive start for the club at home against Burnley. Though he played well, and looked busy, he didn't score. The following day, Romelu Lukaku made his first competitive start for Manchester United at home to West Ham. He scored. Twice.

According to Sue Donym, sports editor of a major tabloid newspaper, "It didn't matter that Joe Hart, West Ham's new goalkeeper, was probably at fault for both goals, or that United didn't look particularly good. It was exactly what we wanted. One of them to score, and the other to draw a blank."

With United having spent all summer stringing Morata along, only to suddenly gazump Chelsea, and with Chelsea having to swing back to Morata as a result, the press smelled an opportunity.

"We went pretty big, of course we did. MOR-LIKE-A-WASTE-OF-MONEY-ATA, after the Burnley game. And then, LUKA-COOL-AS-YOU-LIKE. We did some comedy photoshops and published a couple of slightly overheated opinion pieces. And then I went home."

Four hours later, after a frantic call from her boss, Donym was back in the office. What the press hadn't realised was that the Lukuku-Morata transfer was the spark that would set the internet ablaze.

"The photoshops, and those opinion pieces — within hours, they were the most viewed pieces on our website for the months. Within 24 hours, they were among the most viewed on the website ever. Ever. It was astounding. And the comments … the numbers went surging up in real time."

Alison Lias, professor of media studies at the University of West Anglia, believes that a perfect set of circumstances kicked off the perfect storm. "So first of all, you had two extremely large transfers, both to clubs who desperately needed a striker. We had already begun to see that online interest in football actively increased between seasons, thanks to transfer rumours, and these were two huge examples.

Photo by Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images

"Then you had all the other stuff. Which player was the first choice of which club? There were stories that [Chelsea's then-manager] Antonio Conte had been texting Lukaku almost up until he joined United, and equally, there were stories that United preferred Morata but got fed up with waiting for Madrid to lower their price. Naturally, all this manifested itself in questions about the players' ability: is Lukaku just a flat track bully? Does Morata do everything except score goals? And the biggest question of all: why had the other club got it wrong?

"The whole thing coalesced into a multi-faceted flame war that boiled down, at heart, to 'yeah, well, we didn't even fancy him anyway.’ And as everybody knows, there’s no position that has to be defended so strongly."

The argument quickly spilled over from the comments sections of sports websites and football-specific Twitter into everything else. By the time Christmas rolled around, with Lukaku leading Morata by 11 goals to 9, nowhere on the internet was safe. Facebook threads would start with a heartwarming video of a cat confused by a mirror and end, 300 comments later, with families torn apart over Lukaku’s possibly dodgy first touch.

Everybody was sucked in. Football fans that didn't care about either side still found themselves wading into arguments. Even people with no interest in football found themselves angrily taking sides. One individual, who we'll call Monica, confessed to spending "night after night trolling through various computer game forums, insisting that Morata's off-the-ball work was more beneficial to the team as a whole than Lukaku's goalhanging. I didn't watch football then. I don't now."

By February, when Morata overtook Lukaku's tally for the first time, the ongoing row was threatening Britain's online infrastructure. Twitter in the UK began to experience outages at weekends. Bans were evaded with anonymous, temporary accounts with names like @BigRom420 or @Moratology. Google searches were redirecting to football stats pages. On Facebook, various filters and blocking mechanisms were unable to stem the tide.

It's probably fair to conclude that the press didn't help. Or perhaps, couldn't help themselves. In a world driven by clicks and page impressions, publishing something — anything — relating to Lukaku, Morata, or both, was like injecting steroids into the numbers.

"Take viral articles about Neymar during the World Cup in Brazil, then double, triple, quadruple the numbers," recalls Donym. "It was astonishing. Nobody cared what the piece said, nobody cared if it was exaggerated, hysterical, or barely coherent. They just wanted to look at it, and then argue underneath it."

I asked her if she regretted her newspaper's contributions to the conflagration. "No. Not in the slightest. We were just giving the people what they wanted."

Even that piece about Lukaku buying more Capri Sun than Morata?

"Look, it's not on us that they just wanted ammunition."

In March, following an adorable but futile attempt by Arsenal fans to somehow shoehorn Alexander Lacazette into the debate, things came to a head. With vast swathes of the internet virtually unusable, Britain's Conservative government introduced far-reaching legislation that severely limited internet access throughout the country. All major newspapers closed down their comments sections completely, except for the Guardian. And Mourinho and Conte released a joint video statement, though Mourinho was later accused by a Chelsea official of reading his lines "sarcastically.”

Photo by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images

It's unclear how many actually saw this video — ironically, the government's internet filters may have prevented its distribution online — but robbed of its battleground, the war died down. The football itself probably helped: Lukaku finished the season with more goals, 26 to 22; Chelsea fans were able to take consolation from Morata's higher number of assists. But neither Chelsea nor United won a trophy that season, finishing third and fourth in the league respectively, and both players were outscored by three of their peers: Harry Kane, Sergio Aguero, and Player of the Year Jermain Defoe.

Finally, after a brief flurry at the 2018 World Cup, the argument blew itself out over the summer. Conte left Chelsea, and United broke their transfer record again. Most of the articles have now vanished from their respective websites, and the comments sections have been purged. A change of government in the UK has seen the internet restrictions relaxed, and now all that remains are memories, the occasional screengrab, and a strange mutual shame that hangs heavily over football fans from the time. Plus, of course, a few scars.

"I got them after a Lukaku goal, funnily enough." Nonymous chuckles to himself. "He scored, so I turned to my tablet, and the first thing I saw was a Chelsea fan saying he'd shinned it. I just lost control. Punched clean through the thing. Severed everything in my hand there was to sever."

He stands, and shakes his head. "It was a strange time."