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As Eden Hazard ponders a Chelsea exit, a move to Madrid is wrought with worries
Dermot Corrigan |

May 29, 2019

WEDNESDAY'S Europa League final could be Eden Hazard’s last game for Chelsea, with everything pointing now to him joining Real Madrid this summer for a fee of around €100 million.

Hazard has been a long-time target of Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane, and with a big squad shake-up certain, his arrival has already been taken as done by many Blancos fans and pundits.

So much so that there has been little questioning of whether the Belgium international is likely to make the ‘galactico’ impact required by the always demanding Blancos fans and pundits.

It could be instructive to compare Hazard’s numbers for the season with previous occasions when La Liga’s big two have raided the Premier League to take its best player – Luis Suarez to Barcelona in 2014, Gareth Bale to Madrid in 2013, and Cristiano Ronaldo to Madrid in 2009.

Suarez hit 31 goals and 17 assists in the Premier League during 2013/14, playing all but one minute of the last 33 games [after being banned for the first five for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic the previous campaign].

That made him the most prolific top scorer in a top-flight season for almost 50 years, and almost dragged a patchy Liverpool team to that season’s title. Not even his divisive past stopped the Uruguayan winning both the PFA and Football Writers' Player of the Year awards.

Suarez was not just head and shoulders above everyone else in the Liverpool team, he was by far the most effective and influential player in England that year. Having turned 27 that January, he was also just at his peak as a player. So Barcelona stuck to their decision to sign him for €80 million – despite further misbehaviour at that summer’s World Cup.

Twelve months previously, Bale had also torn up the Premier League in his final year as a Tottenham player. The Welshman hit 21 goals and nine assists, plus a further four goals and six assists in limited playing time across the Europa League and FA Cup. 12 goals in his last 13 PL games drove Tottenham to their record points tally in a Premier League season [72].

Even though Spurs still finished fifth in the table, Bale’s personal exploits brought him both the PFA Player and Young Player of the Year awards, and the Football Writers prize too. There was little debate, especially as he had become pretty much unstoppable in the season’s second half. He was just 23 – but had turned 24 by the end of August when Madrid paid a world record €101 million fee which did not seem so outlandish at the time.

Ronaldo’s final season at Manchester United was 2008/09, when he hit 22 goals and 10 assists across 45 UCL and PL games. There were brilliant and decisive performances in each UCL knock-out round against Inter, Porto and Arsenal, before United ran into Pep’s Barca in the final in Rome.

But those under-par stats were not so important, as Ronaldo had already done enough to clinch the move to Madrid the previous campaign when he had 42 goals in 49 games in all competitions as United did the PL and UCL double. Only Alex Ferguson’s strength of character stopped the move happening then – but Madrid had already decided to spend the world record €91 million fee.

Ronaldo was clearly the best player around – even if a dip in focus in his final year in Manchester [and perhaps some sentimentality among voters] allowed Ryan Giggs and Steven Gerrard to take the individual awards in his final year. He’d won both the PFA and Football Writers’ best player award in the two previous seasons, and just turned 23 a few months before he moved to the Bernabeu.

So does Hazard’s 2018/19 match up to those who went before him and succeeded at either Madrid or Barca? His 16 goals in 37 PL games is quite a way below the tallies put up by Suarez, Bale or Ronaldo. His 16 assists is much more competitive, but then Madrid already have players who can set others up. What they need is more goals, lots of them, and individual match-winning quality.

At 28 now Hazard is almost exactly a year older than Suarez was when he left for Spain, and much older than either Bale or Ronaldo when they made their moves. He was in the PL team of the year as far back as 2012/13 in his first season at Chelsea. His one Football Writers player of the year award was in 2014/15. The only time in his career Hazard has reached 20 goals was his final season at Lille, 2011/12. Last season he was the driving force behind Chelsea finishing third, but he was well down the pecking order in both the players' and writers' player of the year votes.

Maybe Zidane does not see Hazard as coming in to revitalise the Madrid team on his own. He has always been a fan ever since getting to know him during Eden’s Lille days, but just never had the chance to sign him until now. It is less certain whether Blancos president Florentino Perez sees it as value, but for the moment the Frenchman appears to have wrested control of transfer matters.

That means that when Hazard does now inevitably arrive, possibly as Madrid's most expensive player, he will have to up his contributions considerably to reach the expected standards. That is not impossible, but it looks a big ask at this point.

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