So… listen to this… In 2013, Ben Arfa claimed that “he still dreamt of winning the Ballon D’Or”. . .
a year later, he was joining the likes of Harry Maguire… playing at Hull City… on loan… and yet, even though Ben Arfa had repeatedly been hostile towards Benzema, insisting the two “were not friends”. . .
. when they asked the Ballon D’Or winner what he thought of the transfer, he said: “Hatem was Messi… I saw him do incredible things, if he had followed the path that was designed for him, they would be playing side by side, in technical terms they’re the same”. .
. but… even though Ben Arfa himself knew he was at a breaking point, confessing that “my career has been like a Super Mario game and I’ve run out of credits, this is my last life”, 8 matches later, the only match Hull City had won was the one where they kept him on the bench and… suddenly… Ben Arfa lost his mind… One day, on his way to training, he left home speeding in his Mercedes and crashed so hard into a parked car, it ended up in someone’s front lawn but still… he just kept driving… and somehow this wasn’t enough of a warning that he wasn’t in the right mental state to play football because, the next day, he was on the starting eleven against Man United… 30 minutes later, Steve Bruce was starting to wonder whether he was imagining things… he could swear Ben Arfa had barely even moved, so he asked one of the analysts to run the data and he looked back at him, in shock… Ben Arfa had covered less distance on the pitch than the goalkeeper himself… In an instant, Steve Bruce yelled at him to get off the pitch and told him he’d never be welcomed back at Hull City… meanwhile, Newcastle, the club that had loaned him out, were so shocked by everything that had happened, they decided to terminate his contract right there, paying him his compensation package, even though there were only 6 weeks left until it expired… however, only a few days later, no one had heard from him so, worried, they went over to his house to check on him… only to find out, he had fled the country and left all of his belongings behind… Ben Arfa had truly disappeared… and for a while the world thought that, at 28 year of age, his story was over… Look, this may sound strange but… all that I’ve just said was actually… ridiculously predictable… Ben Arfa had never been… exactly normal… At 12 years of age, he was already joining the Clairefontaine academy, you know the French government funded wonderkid factory that brought us Henry, Mbappé and Anelka… and though 3 years later, he was already being talked up to be “the greatest french talent of all time” with Man United, Chelsea, Ajax and AC Milan on his tail… the thing he had become most notorious for wasn’t some goal he scored… It was the fact that even while a documentary was being filmed in the academy, he wasn’t able to keep his cool, being caught on camera getting into a fight with Abou Diaby… yes, the Abou Diaby… at one point, being filmed shouting at him that his mom worked in… a very specific profession… Before he had even signed his first contract, everyone in the country was already aware of his anger issues and… that was only the start of it… Soon, Lyon managed to bring him over to their academy and waiting there for him was a young striker by the name of Karim Benzema… On their first year together, they took Lyon to the final of the under-16 French championship where Ben Arfa scored despite their defeat…. the following year, they joined forces with Samir Nasri and won the under 17 euros with Ben Arfa scoring in every game up till the final and suddenly… they were both being promoted to the first team… For 3 years they were coming off the bench and disrupting matches, playing an essential role as Lyon took 6 trophies in that short period of time… and then… with Benzema slowly taking over as the team’s main striker and Malouda leaving for Chelsea, Ben Arfa started his season with a brace to beat PSG 3 to 2, then two more goals just a few days later against Stuttgart, going through the whole defense to score the second from a nearly impossible angle… getting his first call up to the national team around the same time and then getting his first goal less than half an hour into his debut… before you knew it, Ben Arfa and Benzema had completely taken over Lyon… they had every ingredient for a decade of success but then Ben Arfa did what he does best… there were altercations with the coach, the president, even with Benzema himself and though the board tried to calm it all down by renewing his contract, before the season was even over, Ben Arfa got into a proper fist fight in the lockerroom and despite the fact they’d go on to take 3 trophies that year, sweeping up all the awards, with Benzema being named the best player in the country and Ben Arfa taking the young player of the year award… things got bad enough that he forced his way out of the club, rejecting approaches by the likes of Man Utd, Arsenal and Real Madrid, instead choosing to move to rivals Marseille, almost out of spite, firing his agent and pretty going on the run once the club tried to sabotage the transfer, even leaving behind a 90 thousand euro check in his locker and only showing back up in court, in the middle of huge legal battle that only ended after he had called Lyon “a small club” and gone after the president asking him “the day I signed you told me you’d treat me like a son… tell me now, is this how you would treat your own child?
”. . .
12 million euros later, Ben Arfa had joined Marseille as the most expensive signing in their history… but that… would make no difference… Two weeks after arriving, Ben Arfa had already gotten into a fight with Djibril Cissé… and even though, after 11 league games, he had already gotten 6 goals and 4 assists, then, in a champions league match against Liverpool, he started off things by fighting another teammate before the match even started, getting dropped to the bench and then refusing to come on once the manager called upon him… once again, completely derailing his season, getting dropped to the bench and watching as from afar as Benzema joined Real Madrid alongside Ronaldo and Kaká while he failed to get a move out of Marseille and ended up being forced to stay for one more season, at the hands of Didier Deschamps, a conservative manager the fans accused of “killing football’s Mozart”, as he repeatedly benched him even after he popped off in the second half of the season, pulling off 5 goal contributions in 7 matches as he took the player of the month award in February, assisting the decisive goal as he took Marseille to the league cup final and then getting another assist there to take the title, before closing down the season by again assisting the goal that secured the club’s first league title in 18 years… leading a few fans to come up a conspiracy theory that Deschamps was benching him so that he would be the one seen as the messiah that brought Marseille back to the top… and I’m guessing Ben Arfa believed them because… again… he went on strike, told the press he was “ready to go a full season without playing”, then, in proper Ben Arfa fashion, fled to Paris and… in a second… Marseille knew damn well to just give up and let him go… Look, I think it’s at this point that we have to go a bit deeper into the psychology of Hatem Ben Arfa because… how do you explain that a 23 year old already with 15 titles to his name, more than the likes of Maradona, Kaká and Zidane across their entire careers, a guy who Platini called “the new Maradona”, who Thierry Henry called “a footballing monster”, one who got into serious confrontations with Cissé and Benzema… and still had both of them insisting that no matter what, he was technically just as good as Messi…. was unable to get an offer from a truly top tier club… there was only Galatasaray, Newcastle and Werder Bremen… What was so wrong in this guy’s head? Well… as I always say, if a player is acting crazy, look for his agent… in some rare cases, his father… or worse, both… You see, it was pretty clear that during Ben Arfa’s last year at Lyon the craziness hit a whole new level, which is interesting since that just happened to be precisely… when he fired his old agent and got his personal adviser Michel Ouazine to take over that role as well… and who is this guy?
He was his next door neighbor growing up who just happened to become a bit too close with the kid from the moment he realized how talented he was… and even now, way over a decade later, he still lived with him and followed him wherever he went… but wait a second, we need to talk about the father… Kamel was a former tunisian international… It was in Hatem’s blood to become a footballer however they did not get along, Ben Arfa had repeatedly accused him of lacking any affection towards him, claiming he never hugged him or told him he loved him once throughout his whole life… in fact, one of his teammates once blamed his temper on his relationship with his father, claiming that “it was as if he was trying to make somebody proud who just wasn’t there”. . .
and it would be easy to blame the father, if not for what would happen two years later… So, Ben Arfa arrived at Newcastle on loan with an option to buy meaning that when four matches later, Nigel De Jong hit his leg so hard, he literally went across it, breaking both his fibula and his shinbone, leaving his foot dangling, completely detached from the rest of his body… a tackle so horrendous, even De Jong’s national team banned him… well, surely Newcastle wouldn’t wanna keep Ben Arfa after that… right? . .
. No, as much as Alan Pardew was against his signing, complaining to the board that they were “signing a rascal”, as one teammate said “from the first session, we were all… wow… it was a joke how good he was”. .
. and so when, back on his second start, he had rifled in a 25 yard winner… they had already decided they were going to keep him… they paid up… and 412 days later, with a full season gone, Ben Arfa was back in the starting eleven… and believe it or not, that was the year that cemented… his cult hero status… It still took him months before he was able to consistently play over 45 minutes and yet, only a bit more than a month after that first start, in a match against Blackburn Rovers, Ben Arfa got the ball around center circle, darted past the first three players, pulled it back and by the time he smashed it in… two players were laying on the ground… he had ran more than 70 meters on the ball, it was a goal that got him nominated to the Puskas award, one of the greatest Premier League goals of all time… and yet, 92 days later, he grabbed the ball even deeper into the pitch and proceeded to run straight towards goal with the most perfectly timed touches and just slipped it in… as a teammate said in the post match interview: “Not many can dribble past a whole team and score… but to do it twice? Wow”.
. . add to all this flair the fact that, throughout Newcastle’s most decisive stretch of the season, Ben Arfa had been pulling a goal contribution every 85 minutes, while playing mostly in midfield, getting them to finish just 4 points off the top 4, their best in nearly a decade and… in the space of 5 months, Ben Arfa had become the fan’s golden boy… in fact, he even managed to get called up to the Euros… but that’s where things went massively wrong… Ben Arfa only got little more than an hour of gametime, didn’t score, assist or taste victory once and still managed to wreak havoc in the dressing room, shouting that “worse players than me get to play all they want”, getting so aggressive with the manager that a hearing with the disciplinary committee had to be held after the tournament which was already enough send him off the rails… and that was before his own father crashed into the building and attacked his now agent Michel Ouazine, headbutting him and yelling so that everyone could hear: “You stole my son, aren’t you ashamed?
It’s been 3 years since you stole him from us”. . .
later telling the press that Ouazine had forever conspired to separate Ben Arfa from his family in order to have even more control over him and that it had now been 5 months since the last time they had heard from him… to this day no one is quite sure who is right but between having an abusive father and being used as a puppet by a master manipulator… no wonder he turned out this way… After that hearing, he was dropped from the national team and would only play for them twice more until the day of his retirement… At club level, after another good start to the year, he would be sidelined for most of the season with another injury, watching as the club rapidly sank towards the bottom of the table and though, upon his comeback he would famously claim he “still dreamt of winning the Ballon D’Or”, with his relationship with Alan Pardew worsening as the fans turned their backs on the manager and pinned the two against each other, using Ben Arfa as a poster boy for their revolution, famously photoshopping his face onto the body of Che Guevara and naming him as the club’s final hope while blaming Pardew for everything wrong with the team… everything collapsed… With the support of some of the more veteran players, Pardew ostracized him completely, refusing to give him a start even as Newcastle went on to lose 11 of their final 14 games of the season and eventually sending him down to the under-21s… as Ben Arfa said: “It felt like I had been locked in a dark room without an exit. I was a prisoner, I saw hell”. .
. and it was at this point that everything I described at the beginning of the video happened… they sent him to Hull City, 9 matches went by as Ben Arfa’s mental state seemed to deteriorate faster than ever and one day… he disappeared… With everyone worrying over what was going on with France’s former golden boy… Nice manager, Claude Puel, a man that had forever been mesmerized by the stories he had heard back when he worked at Lyon, flipped through his phonebook, got someone to hand him Ben Arfa’s number, promised him he could turn his career around and in a flash he was back on tv, telling the press that “Even if Real Madrid called at this very moment, I would still sign for Nice”. .
. and for a moment, all was sunshine and rainbows until the French federation froze the transfer, claiming that the one match he had played for the Newcastle under-21s was still deemed as official which paired with his time at Hull City went against FIFA’s law the no player can sign for 3 clubs in a single season… even with one appeal after the other, nothing stuck and for 9 months, Ben Arfa was unemployed, considering retirement at 28 years of age, with his only remaining connection to football being the 5-a side matches he played with his friends trying to keep up his fitness… claiming he “would go to the north pole to play football if necessary”, while one newspaper wrote that “Ben Arfa is now nothing more than a sorry tale for the local pub”. .
. yet… they were massively wrong… Convinced to rise back from the ashes by Nice’s president Jean-Pierre Rivère, Ben Arfa sprung back into the spotlight with a vintage solo run that saw him leave 5 players behind in just his 3rd match back, then hitting Saint Ettiene with an arguably even more impressive goal to total out at 9 goal contributions in the first 9 matches of the season, eventually ending the year with even more impressive numbers… 15 goal contributions in the final 15 matches, finishing as the league’s 4th highest goal scorer despite playing mostly out of midfield, leading Nice to a top 4 finish, just two points off of second place, their best since the 1970s… a feat so incredible that he had Cantona himself claiming he was “the best player in France” and going after Deschamps on live tv for his refusal to call Ben Arfa up to the 2016 Euros… but if they didn’t want him… well… PSG, Barcelona, Chelsea and Atletico certainly did and with Ben Arfa being a lifelong PSG fan, the decision was easy… it was time to live out his childhood dream… I mean, what could possibly go wrong? *sigh* Unai Emery never wanted him at the club but… with Ben Arfa available for free, Ibra on his way out and the board looking for a quick way to fill out their star player quota, they didn’t even bother asking the coach… they put in a contract clause that would see him get an extra 75 thousand euros a month just for arriving to training on time and not running his mouth off in the media… and hoped for the best, but what was even the point if, throughout the year, Unai Emery refused to start him anywhere else other than the French Cup… and… even there, he dropped from the semi finals onwards, even though he had gotten 9 goal contributions in the previous 3 cup matches, at one point, blasting him in front of his teammates, telling him to “Stop talking like you’re Messi, you are nowhere near him”.
. . to which, rightfully, the guy lost it again though… in a much funnier manner… getting back at Unai Emery by repeatedly mocking his accent in front of everyone else… then offering club president Nasser Al-Khelaifi the same treatment once he tried to force him to take a transfer to Turkey, humiliating him so much in front of the Emir Of Qatar that he went into a fit of rage, promising him he would never play for PSG again… which Ben Arfa didn’t seem to take too harshly, deciding to squeeze every last cent out of the club, sitting out the final year of his contract, indeed not making a single appearance, being spotted multiple times eating kebab out of a food truck while his teammates practiced and eventually posting a photo of himself on instagram with a birthday cake exactly one year after Unai Emery had last called him up for a match… but the sweetest revenge only came… after… he left… Almost a full year later, as PSG got to the final of the French Cup, Ben Arfa and his new club Rennes were waiting for them there… he had already been dragging them to the top ever since the quarters so once they went two goals behind, he put pedal to the floor and miraculously, by the end of the night, the trophy was theirs… but the mission was only complete once Ben Arfa went into the stands and stood in front of Nasser Al-Khelaifi forcing him to shake his hand, before going up to the cameras and claiming: “It was a special night to win a title as Nasser watched.
He should’ve known that in life you should never underestimate your opponent because one day, he may come back stronger”. . .
and as much as 3 years later, he’d still retire with the title of “greatest wasted talent in the history of French football”. . .
as he once said: “The fans at St. James Park still sing my name to this day, what greater legacy could you leave?
