PSG had the money, Champions League football and a squad packed with stars. Yet it was never enough to convince Eden Hazard. Courted on numerous occasions by Paris, the former Chelsea player has revealed that he consistently turned them down for a very personal reason: he did not want to return to Ligue 1 wearing any shirt other than Lille’s.
Eden Hazard could have made his big return to France at the Parc des Princes. PSG long dreamed of signing the player who had lit up Ligue 1 with Lille between 2007 and 2012. The contacts were even more frequent than many might have imagined. “Every year, I had contact with PSG,” Hazard told RMC.
Hazard’s Loyalty to Lille Came First
But for the Belgian, joining Paris would have represented a break with his Lille history. After leaving for Chelsea in 2012, he had set himself one rule: if he ever played in France again, it would only be for LOSC. “When I left Lille, I told myself: ‘I won’t want to come back to France for any club other than Lille. If I ever come back one day, it will be to play for Lille, to finish my career there for example.’” Hazard nevertheless acknowledged the strength of the Parisian project following the arrival of QSI and Nasser Al-Khelaifi. “It was a great club. Nasser had arrived, there was a lot of money and they always had a team capable of playing in the Champions League,” the former Belgium international admitted.
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But his bond with Lille remained stronger. “For the people of Lille, for the North, I didn’t want to go and play for PSG.” And once Hazard had established himself among the Premier League’s best players with Chelsea, Paris had even less chance of convincing him. His objective was already clear: Real Madrid. “Things were going so well at Chelsea that my dream afterwards was to go to Real Madrid, not PSG and then Real Madrid.”
Hazard eventually joined the Spanish giants in 2019. PSG therefore tried their luck several times without ever truly being able to compete with two factors that mattered more to him than money: his loyalty to Lille and his dream of wearing the Real Madrid shirt.
