The availability of more and more football matches on live TV has been a benefit to a lot of players, allowing them to showcase their best moments to a wider audience more often.
However, it has also harmed a certain type of footballer: The maverick, whose best moments are up there with the best of anyone else in the game, but who hasn’t always been able to deliver them with regularity.
Hatem Ben Arfa might well have been one of the best-regarded players in the world if his peak had come in the 90s, when all most of us saw of players on the continent was the odd Champions League game in midweek and the occasional weekend highlights show.
But in an era where everything you do is pored over by a non-stop news cycle, it’s harder and harder to make it as a maverick hoping to get by on your talents alone.
But Ben Arfa has given it as good a go as anyone.
What are your fondest memories of Hatem Ben Arfa? Have your say in the comments section
Ben Arfa’s career began in the time honoured fashion of wonderkids emerging at the start of the century: a starring role on a Football Manager edition, accompanied by a simple expectation from fans still prepared to romanticise a mercurial talent.
Surely he couldn’t be that good, however high his ceiling. But what if he was?
It was at Lyon where he emerged, breaking into that special team including the likes of Juninho Pernambucano and Michael Essien, with a young Karim Benzema breaking through at the same time.
In some senses, you couldn’t have asked for many better places for Ben Arfa to establish himself - a winning side, with the chance to learn from talents who would endear themselves to European football fans - and there were plenty of high points.
This was a player with that winning combination of a powerful shot and phenomenal close control, and it was the former on show as a first-half double helped Lyon beat Paris Saint-Germain at the Parc des Princes in 2007.
However, it had already become clear that Benzema - not Ben Arfa - was the A-lister, and the playmaker ended up leaving in 2008, joining Marseille in the same summer which saw Samir Nasri’s leave the club for Arsenal.
At Marseille, we saw some more of Ben Arfa’s quality, but his time there was overshadowed by much-publicised fallings-out with teammates.
That’s the thing about Ben Arfa, though: if you’re going to rub so many people up the wrong way, you need to be on a different plane of ‘good’ to maintain a career in spite of it all. And he very nearly was.
Manager Eric Gerets addressed his frustration early on, explaining there were “more lows than highs” from the mercurial talent, and things came to a head in October 2008 when Ben Arfa - by this time a senior France international - refused to warm up after being named on the bench by the Belgian.
“No player has ever done that to me in all my years as a coach and he will get what's coming to him," Gerets said after the incident, though the pair made up afterwards.
It was one of a number of disputes involving Ben Arfa at the Stade Velodrome, with Modeste M’Bami, Djibril Cisse and Mathieu Valbuena among the others in the firing line.
Any other player would have surely been forced out much earlier, but there was always a sense - not just at Marseille - that Ben Arfa’s quality meant the upside to straightening him out would be worth all manner of misbehaviour. Indeed, it was only after Gerets left the south of France, and Ben Arfa fell out with his successor Didier Deschamps, that a move was finally sanctioned.
“Technically, he was above everyone,” Gerets would later say . “He was super fast. He knew to score goals. But for him, it didn't work anywhere, in the end.
While Gerets may be right that it didn’t work anywhere for an extended period of time, plenty of Newcastle fans have fond memories of the short period when it did work for Ben Arfa at St James’ Park.
The 2011-12 season was a memorable one for the Magpies, and it was a season in which a number of Francophone talents brought some wonderful football.
In Ben Arfa’s case, there were a number of stunning goals. There were some powerful left-footed efforts to evoke memories of another Frenchman in former Newcastle man Laurent Robert, but the most special were the solo runs and finishes against Blackburn Rovers and Bolton Wanderers over the space of a few months.
At times, there’s nothing you want to see more than a player who knows he is better than anyone else on the field and knows exactly how to demonstrate it. Against Blackburn that meant teasing the opposition defence, willing them to show him onto his left foot before reminding them they had no choice in the matter, while the effort against Bolton was more or less a straight-line run, letting defenders clear a path for him without even realising they were doing so until it was too late.
Ben Arfa suggested a move away from France had helped him, without the obvious spotlight overshadowing his play, and manager Alan Pardew seemed to agree at first.
“Hatem has shed his bad-boy image,” Pardew said in March 2012. “He has been exemplary here. He is low maintenance, trying to learn, trying to understand the way we play.
“He is now in a place where he knows it is a very important part of his career and he knows he has good people around him.”
By 2014, though, things had changed.
"If the manager says he doesn't believe in me for next season I don't care,” he said , having fallen out of favour as results under Pardew tailed off.
“I want to stay because I'll show him I can play here but if the president wants to sell me I have to go."
A loan move to Hull City followed, with Ben Arfa used sparingly as the Tigers went down under Steve Bruce, and that meant it was time to give Ligue 1 another shot. This time around, though, he produced arguably the best season of his career.
Sometimes it’s impossible to predict which managers will get the best out of certain players - especially in Ben Arfa’s case, where often those who saw him at his best also saw him at his worst - but Nice manager Claude Puel acted as the Hatem-whisperer for 12 glorious months.
"My relationship with Claude Puel is like that of a father and son, in the sense that he wants to accompany me and wants me to progress,” said Ben Arfa , who was 28 when he moved to the French Riviera, but still felt like a young man.
"And it works because his message seems to be getting through. I'm very happy to have met Claude Puel, he has helped my career get back on the right track so I'm really very happy and grateful.”
Ben Arfa ended the 2015-16 season with 17 goals in Ligue 1, helping Nice come within two points of Champions League football; only three players found the net more in Ligue 1 that season.
A France recall followed, with a 90-minute run-out in a friendly against England, but he fell just short of a spot in the Euro 2016 squad after West Ham's Dimitri Payet got the nod instead.
Still, the form at Nice caught the attention of big-spending Paris Saint-Germain. But if Puel was the perfect manager for him, though, Unai Emery was the exact opposite.
France Football reported that the bad blood between the pair came to a head after PSG threw away a 4-0 first-leg lead to lose to Barcelona in the 2016-17 Champions League, with Ben Arfa reportedly telling the manager he would never pass the quarter-finals of the competition “even with the best team in the world”.
Ben Arfa was an unused substitute for the 6-1 loss at Camp Nou, and a late appearance from the bench in Ligue 1 four days later would end up being his last game for the club.
In April 2018, still on PSG’s books but no closer to another appearance, he celebrated a year out of the side by buying a cake and lighting a single candle - the behaviour of a player who, for all his talent, knew he no longer had to worry about his manager’s opinions.
Since leaving Paris in 2018, Ben Arfa has had ups and downs in France and Spain, famously laughing at old foe Emery while playing against the Spaniard’s Arsenal side for Rennes but also suffering a couple of false starts with Valladolid and Bordeaux.
After being linked with a move to his father’s homeland Tunisia over the summer, the veteran was instead handed a Champions League chance with Lille, joining the Ligue 1 side in January and coming off the bench in their last-16 defeat against Chelsea.
If the latest short-term deal doesn’t lead to anything more, we’re left with the question of how people will look back on Hatem Ben Arfa’s career.
At his best, he had few equals, but plenty will consider him a wasted talent in a way they might not if all we had in front of us was the highlight reel.
That’s not how Puel saw him, though, and we’ll give the last word to the manager who arguably unlocked the version of Ben Arfa we hoped we’d see for much longer.
“I met a calm person, who loved football,” Puel said in 2020 .
“He followed other games, he had ideas about the game. I found him to be a peaceful person, contrary to the image people are given about him: unmanageable, hostile.
“I didn’t see somebody who was messed up, that’s the most important thing.”
