“Small circle, I ain’t never really round squares…”
Romelu Lukaku cryptically quoted this line twice on his Instagram account during his one-year return to Stamford Bridge. Then he was gone.
In August 2021, Chelsea FC paid €115m — the 7th most expensive transfer in history — to bring Lukaku back after he scored 64 goals over two seasons at Inter Milan. In June 2022, the new owners shipped him back to Inter on a €8m loan fee. A €107m loss, absorbed swiftly and without ceremony. The unofficial reasons: problematic figure, attitude issues, disruptive behaviour.
Lukaku was meant to be the final jigsaw piece. The prolific goal-scorer who would lead Chelsea into a new era. Turned out he was a square peg in a round hole. The goals were real. The fit wasn’t.
Recruiting creatives is never easy.
Portfolios show the final output. The interview doesn’t reveal much — candidates tend to claim credit for everything while carefully avoiding mention of the Creative Directors, the strategists, the client servicing people, the clients themselves who all contributed. The real picture only emerges on a live project.
And sometimes, it’s not even about skills. It’s a pure Lukaku moment — the talent who simply can’t fit into the system and the culture. In a studio, the square-peg-round-hole problem shows up in familiar forms: attitude, project management, interpersonal dynamics, the individualistic detachment that quietly drives everyone else mad.
Even if the person is world-class. So what?
“How do you deal with a person who doesn’t fit in?”
Move decisively. Move on as soon as possible. Even if it means taking a financial hit.
I know. It sounds brutal.
When I was a young boss in my 30s, I saw fitting a new person into the studio as my responsibility — even when it was obvious they weren’t the right fit. I was wrong. It never ends well.
Skills can be taught through guidance and experience. Personality, behaviour, attitude — those are different. And I’m not talking about obviously bad behaviour: lateness, rudeness, laziness, disrespect. Those are straightforward. I’m talking about the harder cases — the person who is introverted and detached, the eccentric who is genuinely inaccessible, the one so lacking in confidence that their approval-seeking buries the whole team in 10,000 questions a day. You can’t punish someone for being who they are. But you also can’t rebuild the team around them.
My idea of being kind was to be patient — to accept that every individual is different, and to ask the team to do the same. Bear with this person. Work with them. Hopefully over time it gets better.
But why should the whole team be realigned to accommodate one individual?
Tuchel, Chelsea’s coach at the time, faced the same question. He chose the group over the individual. The new owners backed that call and took the €107m hit without hesitating.
The alternative is what most studios actually do. The give-him-a-chance card gets played. Then it wears off. The person is slowly isolated — delegated tasks they can do without supervision, without needing to interact with anyone. The studio quietly builds a square hole for the square peg and hopes nobody notices the shape of the thing.
It doesn’t work. It just delays the inevitable while costing everyone more.
The kindest thing — for the individual and for the team — is to let them go somewhere they might actually fit.
The cruelty isn’t in the decision. It’s in the procrastination.
