€100m for Lautaro? Liverpool capitulation shows he's not worth it

Carlo Garganese

• Updated: 16 Feb 2022 16:02 CST
• 4 min read

For the third year in a row, Lautaro Martinez is set to be one of the most wanted men on the summer transfer market.

In the summer of 2021, Arsenal, Tottenham and Atletico Madrid all made offers of between €70-90 million for the Argentine attacker but he remained at San Siro after Inter opted to sacrifice Romelu Lukaku to Chelsea for €115m instead.

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The year before, Lautaro had been the main transfer target of Barcelona on the express command of Lionel Messi, who has forged an impressive partnership with the forward for the Argentina national team. That pursuit ended, though, when the Coronavirus pandemic ravaged the footballing economy.

Will Lautaro leave Inter?

Lautaro has since signed a new contract with Inter until 2026, becoming the highest-paid player in the squad.

But his future is still very much up in the air. Inter’s Chinese owners Suning remain in a very precarious financial position, with hundreds of millions of pounds of debts to repay.

Lautaro himself would also be open to a new challenge after four years at Inter if the right offer came about.

Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and PSG are all reported to still be interested in signing Lautaro at the end of the season.

He is valued by Inter in the region of €100m. But Inter's 2-0 Champions League defeat to Liverpool on Wednesday showed he is not worth that amount.

He made virtually no impact on the game and was hauled off with 20 minutes to go for Alexis Sanchez.

Lautaro's poor performance was just his latest dismal showing in 2022.

Lautaro scoring drought

Lautaro has now gone seven club games without scoring, failing to hit the net versus Atalanta, Empoli, Venezia, Milan, Roma, Napoli and now Liverpool.

In fact, he has only scored once in his last 10 matches for Inter – and that was a penalty in the Coppa Italia.

This is not the first time this season that Lautaro has gone on a long scoreless streak. From the start of October until November 21, the 24-year-old also failed to hit the net for either club or country.

That dry period spanned nine games during which he also only produced one assist.

Despite these two long fruitless stretches, Lautaro still has a reasonable 12 goals (and two assists) in all competitions for Inter this season. He also has five goals for his country in World Cup qualifying in 2021-22.

And in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons he scored a total of 40 goals for Inter, again a more than decent number.

Lautaro stretches without scoring

But last season, he also embarked on four long stretches without scoring. He failed to hit the net for five consecutive games in October 2020, eight in November and December 2020, six in January 2021 and five in April and May 2021.

Despite that, he still ended up scoring 17 Serie A goals.

Scoring goals is not a problem for Lautaro. He is fast approaching 100 career goals and also has an impressive 19 strikes in 38 games for Argentina.

The concern is more about how streaky he is. He will score a huge amount of goals in patches and then disappear completely for just as many extended periods.

And when he plays badly, as he has done during this latest drought - and as he did against Liverpool - he offers little else.

For any club planning to spend up to €100m, they will require much more consistency than that.