“People in love with football must be in love with Eden Hazard”- Mourinho.
Eden Hazard is an incredibly talented player. He is the man who is winning the Best Young Player Awards in two different leagues, League 1 France and Premier League. Not only get the individual glory, but Hazard can also play an instrumental role in carrying his team to success. His significant influence was shown when he helps Chelsea and the Belgium national team achieve success in the last five years. After seeing his stunning CV’s people may ask why he failed in real Madrid?
Expectation and Lack of Discipline
The first reason that made Eden Hazard fail to fulfill his potential in Real Madrid is that the fans and Spain Pers have a high expectation. It is not a secret that the fans have certain expectations from Eden Hazard, following the £103.5million that Real Madrid spent to bring him to Santiago Bernabeu. At that time, Hazard came to an entirely new country, new teammates, and had to adapt to the highly competitive climate in the Real Madrid squad.
He came to replace one of the best players in the history of football, Cristiano Ronaldo, also put an additional burden on his shoulder, and he seems not ready for it. The fourth-time Ballon d’Or winner is such an outstanding player with great talent, but despite Ronaldo’s talent, Ronaldo has some qualities that Hazard did not have, which are discipline and hard work. This quality makes Ronaldo have a fewer injury when he was in the same ages as Hazard. Also, the Spain pers and Madrid fans are getting used to that habit, so they demand the same attitude toward Eden Hazard. So when Eden Hazard got out of shape when he came back from vacation, the Madrid fans were an outrage. They said that Real Madrid gets scam since they paid more than £100 million for “Fat-Hazard” instead of the player with the highest level professional.
The situation got worse when Eden Hazard suffered repeated injuries. Instead of being on the pitch with the Real Madrid squad, Hazard spends most of his time in the medical treatment room. These conditions did not make it ideal for the player who was brought in to replace the departing key player, Cristiano Ronaldo.
Real Madrid
Hazard has privileges in Chelsea, but all that privilege he gets after he was done remarkable jobs in the club, including won back-to-back player of the season awards, the award he went on to win four times in six campaigns. An improved 17 goals and ten assists in 2013–14 was eclipsed by the Belgian’s joint-most prolific season for Chelsea the following year, scoring 19 times in all competitions and being crowned Premier League player of the season as Chelsea won a league and League Cup double. However, Real Madrid is not Chelsea. He needs to prove that he worthy to worn the Real Madrid white. It became more complicated since Real Madrid is a team that consists of the highest level players, and everyone in the club must give everything to get recognition and acceptance from its fans and surrounding.
In Chelsea, his former teammate, Filipe Luis, has shared a story about Hazard’s attitude in the dressing room. In one of the interviews, Luiz said Hazard is a good player, but he did not train well. Five minutes before the game, he would be playing Mario Kart in the dressing room. Then, he starts warm-up without tying his boot laces up. But then no one could take the ball off of him. He would dribble past three or four players and win games on his own. The Brazilian left-back adds that “Hazard has so much talent. Perhaps he lacks a little bit of ambition to say, ‘I am going to be the best player in the world,’ because he could be.”
Under Zinedine Zidane, Real Madrid has won 3 UCL consecutively; that caliber of success is demanding, and to achieve the same level, all players should give the most of them, even the best player on the team. Hazard signed five years deal when he moves from Chelsea to Madrid, so he might have one more year to charm Zidane and Madrid board to keep him in Santiago Bernabeu until his contract is due in 2024.
Aging
Related to the reasons above, the lack of discipline has cost his long-term fitness abilities. When a player is getting older, the risk of injuries is increasing. Some professionals try to keep their fitness levels by doing a strict diet and extra work in the gyms. Those are two things that Eden Hazard did not do. So when he gets older, his body getting weaker, and he is most likely to get injured.
Hazard turn 30 the last January, and he not likely to escape from aging. His talent is still there but does he have the same fitness quality to play in 30 or more games every season? That will be the question that the Real Madrid board should evaluate before his value decrease even further.