Eden Hazard’s career: Real Madrid, Chelsea, Belgium compared

The Belgian forward has announced his retirement: here’s a look through his career.

Walking through Eden Hazard’s career is like walking through a house of mirrors. Every angle, every way you look, shows you something new from a different, perhaps distorted angle. The Belgian has announced his retirement from football after a career of winning everything there is to win at club level in Europe, after sealing his status as arguably the best player on the continent for a time, after doing literally nothing and stagnating on the bench for half a decade. Fitting all that into one career appears to need TARDIS bigger-on-the-inside physics, but not for Hazard. He did all that and he’s only 32-years-old.

The diminutive winger rose to prominence at Lille, where he had earned a youth contract and moved abroad after being scouted from a local team. Hazard made the first team under then-manager Rudi Garcia, who promoted him permanently into the senior setup, where, simply put, he took the league by storm.

The number 26 shirt was rapidly changed to 10 as his talent became recognised: his stocky body pressed low into the turf somehow helped the ball stay stuck to his toe; squat but powerful piston-powered legs ran at 100 revolutions per second around the pitch, repeatedly fooling defenders into lunging towards empty spaces the player had occupied seconds ago. And his finishing was refined and deadly: the player, in 194 games, scored 50 goals and got 53 assists as his team raced to the Ligue 1 title in the 2010-11 season. Lille also defeated PSG in the 2011 Coupe de France final and the Belgian was quickly named Ligue 1 Player of the Season.

Eden’s move to Chelsea, naturally, was seen as a big-money gamble from a team that spent money