Who Broke Eden Hazard?

Eden Hazard has two goals to his name in a Chelsea FC shirt this season. Everyone can see the Belgian is stalling. But who is responsible?

With one match left until March, Eden Hazard has scored zero goals in the Premier League. He’s only avoiding all zeros in all competitions this season thanks to two recent goals in the FA Cup. The first was a penalty on the last day of January against a club founded in 2004; the other was a free kick that bewitched Manchester City’s B-team goalkeeper Willy Caballero.

These numbers, though, aren’t necessary to convince that this version of Chelsea’s Little Belgian Tank With Digitigrade Locomotion isn’t firing properly. The complex optical wiring behind your eye is the only filter required to diagnose the attacking midfielder with a serious problem. But who’s responsible?

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The first culprit one might suggest is the club’s ex-ex-manager, Jose Mourinho. An egomaniacal tinkerer who far too often sabotages personal relationships in exchange for miniature dynasties that, when over, result in messy splits and arduous reconstruction. In the span of time it’s working, Mourinho serves as a lightning rod for the bulk of his players, shielding them from as many direct hits to their psyche as possible.

For his main star(s), however, the lightning rod becomes a substation through which jolts of criticism are carefully transferred at first — and then not so carefully. It makes sense at least in the short-term, as great footballers typically come fully stocked with enough ego to spawn multiple Kanye West’s if fed after midnight.

Ego in the thing you do better than all but a handful on the planet isn’t a bad attribute. In fact it’s a necessary one to sustain form throughout high-profile dips and losses. As such, Jose’s barbs are typically absorbed as small challenges, giving his talented player(s) the moving targets required when “just” being the best that day isn’t good enough. It works until it doesn’t. Perhaps Eden Hazard grew weary of failing to prove Mourinho a prophet by climbing onto the goalscoring plateau of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

Speaking on British TV channel ITV, Roy Keane had a more damning theory. While some Chelsea fans were still celebrating the (say it with me) vital away goal in a 2-1 Champions League loss to Paris St. Germain, Keane likened Hazard to “a spoiled child” for positively responding to the question of a summer move to PSG. Keane, continuing to do his pundit duties, had a suggestion:

"If I was a teammate of his, I’d kick him up and down the training pitch. Some of the senior players have to get a hold of him."

Everyone knows nothing keeps +£80-million players around like good old-fashioned, well-intentioned corrective mobbing.

if doing is easy, then doing more is merely a matter of effort. This is a faulty oversimplification of what it is to be human

Theories on Hazard’s lost form range from plausible to the ridiculous (i.e. apathetic mutineer). Maybe it’s time we look at the person we’re trying to figure out.

In 2014 Eden Hazard was interviewed as one of FIFA 15’s cover players. When asked about being Chelsea’s answer to Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, Eden quipped, “It’s too much for me, actually. I don’t like it. … Chelsea is not just one player. It is not only me.”

Last year in an interview with Sport/Foot Magazine in Belgium, Hazard offered a measure of introspection.

"I ask myself what I can do to become like Messi and Ronaldo, and score 50 or 60 goals in a season, I try but I realize that I will never be a true scorer…It is not in me. It is mainly mental. Sometimes I still think after a goal, ‘that’s enough’. 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."

He’s been rejecting the pressures of a top three player for quite some time.

What Eden Hazard is is a delightful footballer, and one whose inclusion would markedly improve any team. What he isn’t, though, is Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Neymar, or Paul Pogba. Hazard’s instincts are to create rather than kill, which isn’t to say he’s averse to doing the dirty work. He’s been the most fouled player in the league since the year he first put on a Chelsea shirt (325 called fouls and counting).

This, then, is who he is.

Declining to separate his immense talent from his deferential mindset is our fault, not his failure. It’s something we’re terrible at in sport. We see a person with the skill to make it look easy and surmise that, for them, it is. Therefore, if doing is easy, then doing more is merely a matter of effort — which is a faulty oversimplification of what it is to be human.

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Understanding persona in personnel is something Chelsea’s board doesn’t do well either. Their plans to loan and sell players like Pokémon cards never takes into account the jigsaw puzzle that is a team’s ethos. Chelsea, then, need to decide if they’re willing to accept Hazard for what he is and place complementary talent around him. If they do one without the other, he’ll remain broken. If they choose neither he’ll soon leave, or worse, do whatever Nemanja Matic has been doing all year. If he leaves he’ll likely end up with PSG or Real Madrid, both of which spend incalculable gobs of cash to ensure challenges won’t be ones of overreliance.

Hazard’s fourteen goals of yester-season were a distant second to Diego Costa’s twenty; add the supplementary relief of seven from Loïc Rémy and six from Oscar, and the man named Hazard was free to be one. Currently, half of Diego Costa’s ten Premier League goals have come since the calendar turned to 2016, and no other Chelsea player has more than 4.

After the 5-1 FA Cup trouncing of Manchester City’s sacrificial baby lambs, Fabregas and Hazard participated in a joint post-match interview. As Hazard answered a question about Oscar’s missed penalty, the BBC Sport interviewer, hearing a mumble from Cesc, moved to the Spaniard to elaborate. “I told him: he has to take it,” said the former teammate of Lionel Messi and Thierry Henry.

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Then Fabregas turned to Eden and said, “You score one, you have to want more, man.” Hazard broke eye contact with Cesc, scratched a side of his nose, and looked toward the ground until it was over.