Let's judge Eden Hazard by his own standards, and not on the outrageous expectations we placed on him. He is no Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, and he never wanted to be.
When you are considered a good footballer, you might be lucky enough to enjoy a fairly successful career. You might score a few goals, maybe even win a few trophies. Good on you. But it gets tricky when you are considered very good, and even trickier when you are seen as world-class. The reason is because, with a certain level of skill, you cannot coast. You are now judged on standards you did not set, standards you might not even hope to reach. But standards you will not escape.
Think Nani at Manchester United, think Bojan at FC Barcelona.
"For people, Eden Hazard has to score three goals in every game like Messi or Ronaldo. I don't know if I will reach that level one day, but I try to give my best. It doesn't matter if I score or not, I just want to play a good game." – Hazard, August 2015
Hazard has experienced this, and to an extent, still does. He is held to a measure, to a benchmark he did not necessarily construct. There is a curious feeling that has surrounded him that he could do more, even at Chelsea, and although that might be the unfortunate price of being a prodigiously talented player, I have grown uncomfortable with it. Early on in his career, the comparisons I am sure he dreaded began. After almost every good performance in England, fans and journalists started likening him to Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. You might have heard of them. He could carry the ball as well as both superstars, probably better than Ronaldo, but there was a demand for more goals, for him to confess his aspiration to win the Ballon d'Or. Could he find the back of the net as often as they did? In hindsight, we can pretty much conclusively say that he could not score as many goals as Ronaldo and Messi a season simply because he has not, but if only we had just listened to him. Time and time again, actually as far back as 2015, Hazard has told us, the public, to our faces, that becoming a lethal goalscoring machine was not in his colour wheel. "I try, of course, but I realise that I will never be a true scorer. It's not in me. It is mainly mental – at 2-0, not thinking that is enough, for example. Sometimes I still think, after a goal, 'that's enough.'"
In that same interview, Hazard was quoted as saying: "I'm not in search of records like some other players. If I can score between 15 and 20 goals each season, I will be very happy. I'm at a peak of my career, but I want to become even better every day. I'm not there yet". Since those remarks, it could be said he did improve, with his most productive campaign coming in 2018/19, in which he scored 21 goals and assisted a further 17 strikes in all competitions. It was Hazard's finest individual season as a professional, but only the second time in his career he had reached the 20-goal mark, with the first time he achieved this feat being in 2011/12 with Lille. Sidenote: Remember when that was a very good tally for a winger? We, football, wanted Hazard to be a player he was not, to be a personality he was not, and thus he became a victim of our projection, of expectations we set for him. If he can run, beat three or four players and calmly slot the ball into the goal that easily… why can he not do that every week? Or 40 times a season? Why has he not fared better in the UEFA Champions League? We were using Ronaldo and Messi's never-seen-before ruthless desire upon which to judge the happy-go-lucky Hazard, and while that could be perceived as complimentary in some ways, it was always unfair.
"It is not important how many goals I score. You know me, I don't care about that. I just want to enjoy my football and win games." – Hazard, September 2018
Real Madrid expected more from Hazard too, and in their case, it was completely warranted. The Spanish giants made him their most-expensive purchase of all time in 2019 at €100 million (R1.8 billion), a fee that could reportedly rise to about €160 million (R2.9 billion) after add-ons when all is said and done. Ronaldo had left a year earlier, in 2018, and because Kylian Mbappe and Neymar were off the table at the time, and Hazard had a big admirer in Zinedine Zidane, it was the Belgian who joined the 13-time Champions League winners. He was dubbed Ronaldo's successor, at least in some corners of the press. Nobody could have guessed, however, just how short he would fall of Ronaldo, and how far he would fall from grace. His time in LaLiga has been plagued with injuries, nine different ones in fact, which, by the end of his most recent spell on the sidelines, will mean he has missed 42 matches due to fitness problems in a year and a half. Furthermore, he has hardly been at his scintillating, mercurial best when fit either. Three goals in 28 appearances. Of course, it is difficult to find any sort of rhythm when you are in and out of the side, but less than a handful of truly outstanding displays do little to flatter.
This is neither a criticism nor a defence of Hazard, but merely an observation that we will always do more harm than good by projecting onto players, especially when we are comparing them to two of the greatest footballers of all time. While it is natural to seek familiarity, we are actively letting ourselves down instead of being let down. Hazard is a phenomenal player and has enjoyed a wonderful career, and at just 29 years old, still has many years in which he probably will recapture his brilliance. He certainly has not helped himself in some instances, such as when he arrived at Los Blancos slightly heavier than expected last year, but I do think that, for the most part, a lot of what Hazard has battled with is bad luck. In his career for club and country to date, he has scored 195 times and assisted 185 goals, and won nine trophies, including four league titles in three different countries. I hope, I really hope we soon shake the feeling that he has not quite delivered on that early promise…
And yes, I get that an obvious argument to mine might be "well, we expect more from somebody who earns his salary", and that would be fair, I would not call you crazy. But consider that, by any other metric, Hazard is one of the best players football has seen over the past decade and that maybe, just maybe, we are doing him a disservice by measuring his success next to standards he did not set.
