Romelu Lukaku felt he had no choice but to leave Manchester United this summer after a series of leaks concerning his future at the club.

The Belgium international joined Inter Milan for a fee of around £73m, ending his two-year stint with the Red Devils. It was generally felt that Lukaku didn’t fit into Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s plans at the end of last season but the forward says the club failed to protect him when they refused to ‘shut down’ the rumours regarding his departure.

“I felt like a lot of rumours, ‘Rom going there’, ‘they don’t want Rom’, and nobody came out to shut it down,” he told the LightHarted Podcast in an interview recorded just before he signed with the Serie A side.

“It was for a good three, four weeks. I’m waiting for someone to come out and shut it down. It didn’t happen. “I had my conversation, told them it was better to go our separate ways. If you don’t want to protect somebody, all these rumours come out. I just wanted you to say ‘Rom is going to fight for his place’, but it never happened for four, five months.

“It was all, ‘he’s got to go, he doesn’t deserve to be there’. Well OK, then I want to go now. There is fighting for your position, but also being somewhere that people want you to be.”

Lukaku scored 42 goals in 96 matches for United following a big-money move from Everton in 2017. He hints that the stories regarding his departure were coming out from inside Old Trafford. “I told them it’s not good for me to be at a place where I’m not wanted. We’re not stupid. They consider us dumb, but we are not dumb, we know who is doing leaks and stuff.

I told them, you can’t be working like this, it’s better for me to go now,” he added. Inter Milan are 6.50 to win the Serie A title this season, with champions Juventus 1.40 and Napoli 5.50.