THE house he grew up in is No 71 on a street in the quiet village of Wintam, between Brussels and Antwerp, and behind the few roads of tidy social housing, if you know where to look, you can find a patch of grass enclosed by trees where Romelu Lukaku played football every day of his young life.
This is the story of the goalscorer who will wear United’s No 9 shirt next season, the Belgian star who made his professional debut at 16 and whose career had been on a startling upwards trajectory ever since he was discovered as a 12-year-old footballer of uncommon size and pace.
Wintam is a comfortable, forgettable place – not the gritty urban setting of football prodigy folklore – and our guide is Vinnie Frans, 23, who has been Romelu’s best friend ever since the two boys were six. Frans remembers the Lukaku family’s first visit to their putative new home and standing in the street as they pulled away in their car, waving back to Romelu’s mother Adolphine.
“I knocked on his door the first day of school, and said, ‘Let’s play some football’ and we did that every day from then on, just me, him and his brother Jordan [now at Lazio]. Rom was already big then, but no muscle, just tall and really fast. I would say to him ‘Rom, you are big but you will slow down as you grow, you’ve got to keep working on your sprinting’”.
But Romelu was not to slow down. In fact, he was to confound all those who predicted that the huge physical advantage he enjoyed as a boy would slowly be eroded through adolescence. Frans was with Romelu, 24, on holiday this summer in Los Angeles when he made the decision to sign for United ahead of Chelsea. Frans recalls discussing the choice Romelu was given, these two childhood friends concluding in the end that United had made all the running with three bids. “I said to him, ‘Who wants you the most?’ and he said, ‘It’s United’.”
The pictures on Frans’ phone from that holiday are a world away from Wintam. Frans plays in goal for the semi-professional club Zaventem in Belgium’s fourth tier, his day-job is as a security guard at the British School of Brussels and he conserves his annual leave to visit his old friend.
He happens to spend his holidays with the likes of Paul Pogba and NBA star Serge Ibaka but it is the friendship with Romelu he cherishes. “Romelu doesn’t forget where he came from. That’s something you appreciate about him. There are some guys who earn money and suddenly they don’t know you.”
He also remembers that it was tough at times for Romelu as a child. “He had a lot of people talking s— about him because he was so fast and scored so many goals. Parents would say he was older than he was. I think it was a bit of racism. He and his brother were the only black kids around here. Our families were very close. If either had a problem with money the other gave to them and the next day it would be paid back.”
The pair would watch videos of Romelu’s father Roger, a professional footballer who moved from Congo to play in Belgium and enjoyed a decent career, if not lucrative, as a target-man striker including a spell at the local side Rupel Boom. “I would say, ‘Damn, your father was a good player’,” Frans says. “Rom would say ‘I want to score goals like him’. In the end he developed beyond his father. Roger was a goal-machine with his head. Rom has everything, a left foot and a right foot.”
The boys attended Huveneers primary school and both joined the academy of local professional club Lierse SK, which was hit by a match-fixing scandal in 2006, meaning they lost many young players, including Romelu and Jordan, to Anderlecht. Vinnie can recall the people-carrier that would arrive every day to take Romelu to Brussels for training until eventually he moved there.
Romelu was 12 by the time that Gyselinckx got a call from Marck Van Hooymissen, a friend of his sister, who said he had seen a remarkable young player in Wintam. Gyselinckx went to watch and signed Romelu on the spot for the academy at Lierse SK where he was working at the time. He later moved to Anderlecht and when Lierse lurched into crisis Gyselinckx recruited Romelu and Jordan.
With Romelu at its centre, the club took their development programme far beyond what it had been before. Some of those sessions were him working one-on-one with a coach to smooth out the rough edges in his technical game. “If today he can score goals with his left foot, his right foot and his head,” Kindermans says, “then it is because of what he did here.”
Amongst his peers at Lierse he had been unstoppable, in a youth team that Gyselinckx recalls, “played 10 men behind the ball and just cleared it up field for Romelu to chase.” At Anderlecht he had to get used to playing with a team that dominated possession and also to receiving the ball in the box rather than galloping in with it at his feet. He was also played two or three agree-groups up – the fear in the early days being that once others matured physically, Romelu would struggle. By 16, he was in Anderlecht’s first team and by the time he joined Chelsea, aged 18, he had played 98 senior games and scored 41 goals.
