Karim Benzema and France part ways. They had had a turbulent relationship for years

Here was a player who was barred from the French team in 2015 after his involvement in a blackmail scandal involving a teammate’s sex tape—a charge he has always denied. He was finally allowed back into the national side in 2020, and immediately lifted France to the title in the European Nation’s League in 2021.

He's a player who, in the 2021-22 season, eclipsed everyone on the planet with his brilliance in the attacking third, where he was equally adept at scoring goals and creating them, where he was Madrid’s standout player by a mile in a season where they won both La Liga and the Champions League.

Alongside the blazing comet that is Kylian Mbappe, the grit and selflessness of Olivier Giroud, the visionary midfield marshalling of Antoine Griezmann and the dazzle of Ousmane Dembele, Benzema was supposed to work his magic in France’s quest to become the first team since Brazil in 1958-62 to defend their world title. Instead, the French forward of Algerian descent was ruled out of the tournament the day before it started in Qatar, after a thigh injury during a training session.

It is nothing short of a miracle and a testament to France’s barely believable depth of talent that despite losing a player who had easily put even Mbappe in the shadow, not to mention Lionel Messi, with his performances for Madrid in the season leading up to the World Cup, France still made the final. In fact, France coach Didier Deschamp was without the services of many of his key players even before the World Cup started—along with Benzema, N’Golo Kante, arguably the best defensive midfielder ever, and Paul Pogba were also ruled out with injuries, before first-choice left-back Lucas Hernandez was sidelined for the rest of the tournament after an injury in the opening game, and half the French side were laid low with a virus 48 hours before the final. In effect, Deschamp’s France was largely a second team, that too washed out by a virus, when they pushed Argentina to the brink in the final in a sensational display from both sides, before the tie was decided on the Russian roulette that is the penalty shoot-out.

Imagine then, what it may have been like if Benzema and Mbappe were partners up front, raiding the Argentine goal. Or if Griezmann had Kante for company in controlling the midfield.

There is little doubt that a fit Benzema would have taken Qatar by storm. He was coming into the tournament carrying the best form of his shining career. Benzema, who had joined Madrid in 2009 from his childhood club Lyon, had two distinct phases to his career with the vaunted Spanish club. The first, which lasted almost a decade, was as a foil for Cristiano Ronaldo, the reserved and serious Frenchman who thrived in Madrid’s extreme high-stakes, turbulent and high-pressure environment, while operating from the shadows, setting the stage for Ronaldo to shine and set record after record. A classical number 9 in a withdrawn position, making clever movements to draw the defence away with him, opening up space for Ronaldo, or helping find the target man with brilliant passes threaded through gaps visible only to him, or simply using his physicality and control to hold the ball in the box to lay off to an onrushing striker.

And while Real Madrid’s brilliant team was racking up Champions League titles (four between 2009 and 2018) and getting somewhat less success in their domestic league (two La Liga titles), Benzema’s relationship with France soured the moment the blackmailing incident came to light in 2015.

Briefly, this is what happened, according to court testimonies. Four people acquired a sex tape from France defender Mathieu Valbuena’s phone and began to blackmail him. Valbuena refused to pay. One of the four, Karim Zenati, a childhood friend of Benzema’s, asked the player to try and convince Valbuena. Benzema spoke to Valbuena, and though there was discussion of money in that conversation, Benzema urged Valbuena to meet Zenati to come to a solution. Valbuena went to the police instead. Benzema was a target for the French right as soon as the case came to light—not only was his Algerian descent a problem, but he also sometimes refused to sing the French national anthem La Marseillaise (a no-holds-barred martial tune written in 1792, the refrain goes: To arms, citizens/Form your battalions/March, march!/Let an impure blood Water our furrows!). So began his long exile from a French national side known both for its brilliance and its diversity, a team that won the 2018 World Cup.

But his powerful run for Madrid continued apace, and the same year that France won the World Cup, Benzema found himself centrestage at the big club with the exit of Ronaldo. The eternal understudy (for France, he was often a foil for the brilliance of Thierry Henry) was in the spotlight.

He bathed himself in glory. Unleashed by Madrid’s astute manager Carlo Ancelotti in a free-roaming role in the attacking third, Benzema became a No 9 and No 10 rolled into one—in Ancelotti’s words, “not just a forward, but a complete player”.

Benzema once said in an interview that he dislikes looking at football through a statistical lens. For the purposes of a written piece, there is little choice though but to lean on those numbers. Benzema is now the second most prolific scorer in Real Madrid’s history with 327 goals, behind Ronaldo’s 450, and the best in the club’s history when it comes to assists (160). In the 2021-22 season, he was in the best form of his career, scoring 44 goals and providing 15 assists across all competitions for Madrid, finishing as La Liga’s top scorer and second-best assist provider (only one player, Lionel Messi, has ever topped both), as the player of the season in both the Champions League and La Liga, and scoring back-to-back hattricks in the Champions League’s knockout stages.

What would it have been like for France to have a player in the great tradition of the legends who could do it all—Zinedine Zidane, Andres Iniesta, or Messi—a man equally sublime as a playmaker and a goal-scorer, to partner the dazzling Mbappe in Qatar?

We will never know, but one thing is for sure, when Benzema looks at his glittering trophy cabinet, he will sometimes feel a pang of regret, or perhaps a stab of sorrow, that it does not contain a World Cup.