Report: Newcastle now shock contenders to sign £33m forgotten Chelsea striker

Newcastle United are now interested in taking Romelu Lukaku off Chelsea's hands once his loan with Roma comes to an end.

The silly season has started, when media outlets around the world bring out their dartboards loaded with players' names and throw darts into them with different club crests on the flights to generate a transfer story.

This time around it's Belgian outlet Voetbalkrant who threw a Newcastle United dart into the board where it hit Romelu Lukaku.

Lukaku is still on the goals trail at Roma

The Chelsea striker is currently on loan at AS Roma where the 30-year-old has six goals and one assist in 11 games.

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Newcastle will be shopping around for a striker, there's no doubt about that and Chelsea have set a fee of around £33million for the Belgian, which would make him affordable, but nothing about this one makes sense to us at all.

Lukaku keeps coming back to the Premier League and it never works out for him, why would Newcastle take that risk?

We can do better than 30-year-old Lukaku

Aside from that, his age doesn't fit the profile of a Newcastle transfer target either.

This just feels like another case of a quiet day in the media offices so we'll link mega-rich Newcastle to a high-profile star and ignore any logic. Although they also claimed last week that Newcastle 'dream' of signing him, so they're pretty adamant about this one it seems.

A couple of years ago we'd have been excited by the possibility of having Romelu Lukaku in a Newcastle shirt, but now, we believe we can genuinely do better.