When neither his father nor Karim Benzema understood him, Florentino Pérez went home to the Bron neighborhood in Lyon and sat down to wait for him. On occasion, Pérez has referred to what began that day as “a love story.” This Monday, 13 years after that courtship at home, the president of Real Madrid and the forward flew to Paris together. To pick up, at 34 years old, his first Ballon d’Or after propelling the team to the Champions League with crazy comebacks. The podium was completed by Mané and De Bruyne.
To take the stage, he dressed as the rapper Tupac had done when he attended the gala of the American Music Awards in January 1996, months before he was shot to death in Las Vegas. He even put on glasses to be delivered by Zidane, whom he pointed out on stage as one of his “idols”, along with Ronaldo.
Benzema recalled the work he dedicated to football, and also wanted to remember how difficult it was: “There have been moments that have been very hard. You have to think about the times when I wasn’t in the French team [por el caso del chantaje a Valbuena]. But I never stopped working.”
Already with the award, he returned to Pérez: “It’s like my family. He came to my house to sign me and he showed the kind of person he is.”
Bron’s journey to the Châtelet theater has not been a straight line. Hiring him was seen for several phases as a misunderstood idyll. For the fans of the Bernabéu, yes, but also for Mourinho, for example, who considered him an almost harmless striker, and in 2010 he hung a famous barb on him: “If you don’t have a dog to go hunting, and you have a cat, then you go with the cat, because you can’t go alone”. That upset Pérez, and angered Benzema who went to the coach’s office.
“At that moment the pot went away,” he said in 2017 on Canal + France. “I told him what to tell him. We were together for an hour. I am a soccer player, you are my coach. I respect you, so respect me as a footballer. And since then there were no more stories of cats, dogs or whatever. I’m shy, but if you laugh at me, you will find me.”
Deep down, Benzema found in Mourinho the same reproach that he had heard from his father, Hafid, since he was a child. “The only thing he said was for him to score. Nothing more”, recalls the footballer in the documentary The Benzema case. The father confirms it: “I told him: ‘Come on, shoot, shoot. Come on, mark. Don’t pass.”
The lack of harmony lasted during his first seven years in Madrid. But as he told Jorge Valdano, in the end he understood his son: “Now he understands my football and what I do on the pitch. Before it was just goals. Now I can talk to him.”
Benzema lived for a long time under the shadow of questioning. In September 2017, when he signed a contract extension until 2021, he expanded on the matter: “Am I missing a goal? It depends on how you see football. For me, a modern striker is not just a goal. You have to participate in the game, open spaces for others, give assists”.
Four months before the renovation, he left in the Calderón the move that has served him very often to exemplify the inability of many to grasp the meaning of what he did. With a maneuver between escapist and tightrope walker, Benzema outwitted Savic, Godín and Giménez on the baseline and made a back pass that Kroos finished off. Oblak stopped and Isco scored. “Is it the most beautiful thing I’ve done in the Champions League? The way I see football, yes; but perhaps not as you see it, if you say that it was not counted as a goal or as an assist, ”he lamented in an RMC documentary.
Statistics, like his father, were slow to capture the value of stocks like this. Only in recent years have data companies developed models that begin to measure what they contribute beyond goals and assists. Like Statsbomb’s On Ball Value, which puts numbers on how much each offensive move brings the goal closer, or how far each defensive move moves away. With this metric, for example, it is beginning to be possible to put numbers on that almost magical play: Benzema took the ball from a position in which there was a 1.75% chance that the play would end in a goal, to another in which there were four times as many. Even so, they acknowledge that the model is not yet capable of quantifying the full value of that genius.
The Frenchman was still flying under the radar, like when he played for Cristiano Ronaldo. But he had already begun to take off until he became the flag of the team, a leader on the field, an example outside. A person who has seen him work in his early years and in recent years without Cristiano describes a profound transformation: more work, more dedication off the pitch, more determination.
The 2020/21 season Benzema already performed at a very high level, evident to anyone, but the Ballon d’Or was awarded to Messi, ahead of Lewandowski, Jorginho and the Frenchman. Perhaps he missed the Champions League, where he stayed in the semi-finals against Chelsea.
This time there was no doubt. In addition to being the top scorer in the League, he was the captain of the European Cup for comebacks, with three goals against PSG in the round of 16, four against Chelsea in the quarterfinals and three against City in the semi-finals. In the first leg of this tie, he left the stamp on the field and out. He scored a Panenka-style penalty that kept them alive (4-3) and at the end, something unthinkable in his early years, he became the first spokesperson for the latest comeback: “At the Bernabéu we are going to do something magical, which is gain”.
This Monday the world of football recognized his genius, with an individual award, but which he considers collective: “It’s the people’s Ballon d’Or.”
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