Karim Benzema waited for super old age – Newspaper Kommersant No. 193 (7394) of 10/18/2022

The owner of the main individual award in world football was Karim Benzema. The Real Madrid striker won his Ballon d’Or, having experienced a fantastic take-off at an age when the vast majority of players’ careers are either declining or have already reached the end. At the same time, Benzema’s victory in the competition turned out to be absolutely indisputable: no one last season won so many valuable titles and scored as many important goals as the French veteran who broke stereotypes.

What will happen at the Châtelet Theater in Paris, when it comes to the presentation of the most valuable football award among the handed out football awards, of course, was prepared in advance by all the major media resources covering the most important game for mankind. And photos of Karim Benzema L`Equipe, Marca, a bunch of other publications have decorated the main pages of their sites since morning, making it clear: we know who won the competition this time. In the end, it is they, the experts of such publications, who, participating in the France Football poll, determine the winner. But still, this event was drawn to be called surprising for a completely understandable reason.

Among those who got the Golden Ball before, there were not so few players who crossed the 30-year milestone, but very few of those who crossed it not just, but for quite a long time, that is, indisputable veterans whose career peak, in theory, far behind, and career decline, on the contrary, is already near.

Karim Benzema received his prize on the verge of his 35th birthday – he will be so old in December. And this is, strictly speaking, something incredible.

The oldest among those who happened to get the Golden Ball, apparently, forever destined to remain the person who took it in his hands first, the Englishman Stanley Matthews: in 1956 he was already 41 years old. But, it seems, then Matthews was noted rather by the totality of his merits, for past accomplishments, at the same time paying tribute to the country that gave football to the world.

And after Stanley Matthews, that is, for six and a half decades, only two laureates at the moment of triumph were, like Karim Benzema, 34 years old – Lev Yashin in 1963 and Lionel Messi in 2021. Both the brilliant Soviet goalkeeper and the Argentine forward, who is a seven-time winner of the trophy, were still a little younger than Benzema.

But it’s not just about age. In fact, the entire period in the life of the French striker, thanks to which he happened to be in the center of attention of the whole world, is similar to an exceptional phenomenon that breaks all patterns and stereotypes – the “Benzema phenomenon”.

The fact that the history of football did not know such a career renaissance is a fact that is unlikely to be questioned by anyone, even if you shovel through all the sports encyclopedias for this.

Karim Benzema hasn’t dropped out of the list of top forwards since he moved from Lyon and Real Madrid in 2009. He has been a star all along, a player who fits the rigorous selection criteria of the Madrid giants. He was definitely a great player. But at the same time, whatever one may say, no one dared to put him on a par with, say, Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, who played for a long time with the Frenchman for Real Madrid – there were no superman features in the game, in the guise of Benzema. And in principle, the striker’s biography did not at all resemble a systematic movement towards the Golden Ball, to some very special status, with which, as a rule, all the previous owners of the trophy were associated. In the voting that formed the shortlists of applicants for him, Benzema was mentioned regularly, but in the final hierarchy he took places in the second or third ten – among the “ordinary” heroes, without the prefix “super”. A wonderful breakthrough in this sense could be considered the season before last. Three dozen goals for Real Madrid is a cool indicator, but again, not such that you go crazy with delight or be in the top three nominees for the Golden Ball.

However, as it turned out, the real miracle was ahead. A little older Karim Benzema gave not just an insanely successful, but an incredible, magical season in terms of productivity. He scored 44 goals in 46 matches for Real Madrid and another five in four games for the French national team, to which he returned after a long break associated with a conflict with coach Didier Deschamps. But starting from pure statistics here is not entirely correct, no matter how amazing it may look.

The thing is that Benzema just acquired that very special status – a person whose well-aimed blows, whose energy, whose great deeds bring prizes to teams.

For Real Madrid, he scored the most important goals in the most important matches on the way to the Spanish gold, and in the Champions League he simply pulled the club, which was not drawn to the favorite, to the title. It was thanks to his hat-tricks that Real Madrid survived the battles with PSG and Chelsea. It is thanks to his three goals in two semi-final matches, including the decisive goal in the overtime of the return game, that Madrid coped with Manchester City. In the final against another English giant, which was actually quoted much higher than Real Madrid, Liverpool, Benzema scored only from the recorded VAR “offside”, but without his passion, without his eternal focus on the goal, the goal that killed the opponents would have been clearly impossible Vinicius. As without Benzema’s goals, the heavy victory of the French team over the most powerful Belgians and Spaniards in the final tournament of the League of Nations a year ago in Italy would not have taken place.

This combination – bright numbers, gorgeous pictures and high-profile titles – provided some absolute certainty of Karim Benzema’s superiority in the legendary competition. This, for example, about how fair in the previous ranking Lionel Messi found himself higher than Robert Lewandowski with his grandiose goalscoring achievements, one could argue desperately, to the point of hoarseness. Now, before the ceremony at the Theater Chatelet, there was no talk of any disputes. And this, by the way, is also a rare case for the Golden Ball, which only adds flair and uniqueness to the “Benzema phenomenon”.

Alexey Dospekhov