Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema replaced Cristiano Ronaldo, and now he’s replacing Lionel Messi in LaLiga.
Earlier this week, Brazilian legend Ronaldo — the Ronaldo, to anyone born before 1990 — said what a lot of people are thinking: “Karim Benzema? He deserves the Ballon d’Or. I’ve been saying it for years and they’ve criticized me, but he deserves it. He’s a great striker.”
Now, R9 might be a little biased on Benzema. In the same interview, he called his former club, Real Madrid, the “favorites” to win the Champions League — despite both Liverpool and Manchester City harboring significantly shorter odds at all sports books. But he’s also not wrong.
Anyone can see why, really. There was the hat trick against Paris Saint-Germain in the second leg of the round of 16 in the Champions League. Then there was the hat trick in the first leg against Chelsea in the quarterfinals. Then there was the winning goal in the second leg against Chelsea. All in all, Benzema has scored 38 goals in 38 games this season — a career high with a month still to play. Ten more goals than anyone in Spain, an additional 12 in the Champions League, a goal a game, a good chunk of which came at decisive high-leverage moments: What more could you want?
Well, that’s the thing about Benzema’s season; there’s lots more. While his goal scoring alone makes him a worthy candidate for the Ballon d’Or, what really makes him the best player in Europe this season is everything else he does.
A couple of fun alternate histories to consider: What if Real Madrid never signed Cristiano Ronaldo from Man United in 2009? Or, what if Benzema left Real Madrid instead of Gonzalo Higuain in 2013?
The story of Benzema at the Bernabeu with Ronaldo is that the former sacrificed his own game in order to facilitate the latter. The Frenchman did the defensive work, dropped deep to aid buildup play, and made all the decoy runs in the final third — all at the expense of his own scoring numbers. Benzema scored 20 goals in a LaLiga season just twice with Ronaldo at the club, while Ronaldo averaged 35 league goals a year in his nine seasons in the Spanish capital. Real Madrid won the Champions League four times during this stint, so it’s impossible to argue with the results. But it’s also hard not to wonder what Benzema’s career might have looked like had he always been the attacking focal point.
In his past two years playing with Ronaldo, Benzema scored 11 and then five league goals. Those were his final two seasons in his 30s, and so it seemed like Madrid needed to turn the whole thing over. Instead, Benzema just became the Ronaldo replacement. After seeming like he’d fallen off the age cliff, he’s scored at least 20 league goals in all four seasons since the 2018 World Cup. To reiterate: He scored 11 goals in a season, then he scored five goals in a season, then he turned 30 … and now he can’t stop scoring.
As he became Madrid’s team’s main goal-getter — and for the first couple of years, their only goal-getter — some of the softer skills that had defined Benzema’s game began to fade into the background. The team couldn’t afford to have him so far from goal, and as he aged into his 30s, it seemed unlikely that he would still be physically capable of both facilitating attacking play and finishing it off.
Until this season, that is. At age 34, not only is Benzema scoring more goals than he ever has before, he’s involved in everything that happens before the shot, too.
Possession passing
This one’s pretty simple. In LaLiga this season, Benzema is both attempting more passes (38.1) and completing a higher percentage (85.5%) of his passes than ever before. As you can see here, the majority of his passes are made from the left channel and the left half-space.
He tended to drift toward the same side when he played with Ronaldo — and that created space for Ronaldo to crash into the penalty area from his starting position on the left wing. This season, it’s where he combines with Vinicius Junior, who’s scored more goals this year (17 in all competitions) than in his first three seasons at Madrid put together.
While Benzema’s tendency to drift left has aided Vinicius’ breakout season, he’s also benefited from it, too. Just take the first goal at Stamford Bridge:
IT’S THOSE TWO AGAIN! VINI JR FINDS KARIM BENZEMA WHO SCORES IN HIS SEVENTH STRAIGHT GAMES. 🎯 pic.twitter.com/6vKqmu6JDs
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) April 6, 2022
Benzema drops deep to play Vinicius through down the left — and then Benzema breaks late into the box to finish off the chance created by the Brazilian winger.
Ball progression
There are two ways that a striker can aid his team’s buildup play. The first: Make runs to both create space for his teammates underneath and to give his midfielders and full-backs an option to play the ball forward. The second: Drop deep, and then pass and carry the ball forward yourself. This season, Benzema has done the latter — which, again, makes his goal-scoring explosion even more impressive.
Using data from Statsbomb, the site FBref defines a progressive pass as: “Completed passes that move the ball towards the opponent’s goal at least 10 yards from its furthest point in the last six passes, or any completed pass into the penalty area. Excludes passes from the defending 40% of the pitch.” In his last season with Ronaldo, Benzema received 10.6 progressive passes per 90 minutes. This year, that number is at its lowest since 2017-18: 7.9 (which still ranks in the 78th percentile for LaLiga forwards.)
Instead, Benzema is the one playing the progressive pass. He’s averaging 4.9 progressive passes per game, a pass-and-a-half more than in any season since 2017-18. That leads all forwards in LaLiga. While Madrid used to have a world-class midfield, center-backs, and especially Marcelo at full-back to help move the ball forward; now it’s an aging, much-more limited version of the same midfield and they’re getting little to no ball progression from any of their defenders. So, Benzema has filled the void; only Toni Kroos, Luka Modric, and Casemiro have completed more progressive passes for the club this season.
It’s not just passing, either. The other way to move the ball forward? Do it yourself. These are all of Benzema’s carries, defined by Stats Perform as any time a player moves the ball at least five meters with his feet.
Again, it’s heavily tilted to the left, but beyond the morass of sideways movements, you can see a pattern of driving, out-to-in dribbles on both sides of the field. FBRef also records progressive carries, which are similar to their progressive passes but only require the player to carry the ball five yards. Benzema is completing 6.2 progressive carries per match, which ranks in the 94th percentile among LaLiga forwards and is once again more than he’s recorded in any season since 2017-18 (the first year for which FBref has advanced data.) Among Real Madrid players, only Vinicius, who’s done it more than any other player in Europe this season, has carried the ball forward more often than Benzema.
Chance creation
All right, so this guy is helping his team keep possession, he’s playing a key role in pushing the ball up the field and he’s finishing chances in the penalty area. So, there’s no way he’s also moving the ball into the box and creating chances for his teammates? If he’s doing all that other stuff, it must all be kind of like that first Chelsea goal, where he helps push the ball forward and then makes a late run into the penalty area to finish it all off … right?
Wrong! Benzema is completing just over three passes into the penalty area per match, which, once again, is his best mark since 2017-18 and, once again, leads all LaLiga forwards. He’s living in both half-spaces on either side of the box, slipping in through-balls to wingers bursting in from the sideline or reverse passes to midfielders making inside-to-out runs behind the defense.
On top of moving the ball into the most dangerous area on the field, he’s also frequently playing the final pass for his teammates. He’s averaging just over two key passes per 90 minutes — broken-record alert: the most of his Madrid career and in the 98th percentile among attacking midfielders.
This image — all of his chances created in LaLiga this season — is a miniature encapsulation of what Benzema has done this year: everything. There are the deeper passes that clearly came against higher defensive lines during transition. There are the slipped-in balls from the edge of the box and the diagonal passes from the edge of the area that both break down deeper defenses. And then there are the square balls and pullbacks after he’s found space in the penalty area and then found a teammate in a better position to take a shot.
That array of creative skill has added up to 11 assists in the league — one behind his career high with seven games still to play. He is tied for the league lead with Barcelona‘s Ousmane Dembele, and on a per-90-minute basis he’s created the most expected assists (0.29) of any player in the league. Like with every other advanced stat we’ve already cited, that’s also his highest number since 2017-18.
So, it’s not just that Benzema replaced Ronaldo; he’s now also replaced Lionel Messi. It used to be that Messi would be the one to score the most goals and create the most chances and do everything else in LaLiga. Perhaps there was a single player who could match him in a single category, but no one could do all of the things that he was doing at the same time. While LaLiga president Javier Tebas has openly spoken about his desire for Messi to return to the league, a different version of the same kind of player is already there … he’s just playing for Real Madrid.
This year’s iteration isn’t a vintage Real Madrid team by any means; it’s the same midfield as always, just older and not quite as good. Vinicius has made the leap, but he’s no Ronaldo, and the opposite wing is still waiting for its Gareth Bale replacement. The full-backs aren’t the dynamic two-way forces they used to be or that used to be there, and the center-backs don’t have the same kind of decisive impact as Sergio Ramos and Raphael Varane did. Instead, Real Madrid have one thing those other sides never did and one thing that neither Liverpool nor Manchester City currently do, either: this version of Benzema, better than ever before.
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