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A role model on the pitch: Karim Benzema
Photo: JUAN MANUEL SERRANO ARCE/Getty Images
Stade de France: For Karim Benzema, the venue makes the evening's Champions League final even more special.
Great performances at home don't come often for a striker who has played abroad at Real Madrid for 13 years.
And now, at 34, he has reached the height of his creativity.
Benzema has scored 44 goals in 45 games this season.
Ten alone in six knockout games against three of the strongest sides on the planet: Paris St Germain, Chelsea, Manchester City.
If he also scores against Liverpool today (9 p.m., TV: ZDF), he would hold the only season record for goals from the round of 16 ahead of his former team-mate Cristiano Ronaldo.
Behind Ronaldo (450), he is already the second-best goalscorer in real history with 323 goals, equal to Raúl, ahead of Alfredo Di Stéfano.
If he wins his fifth Champions League title in Paris, he will no longer be able to take the world footballer's Golden Ball from him.
Probably not even if you lose.
At Real Madrid, he's not just a goal-getter, but also the linchpin of the entire offensive with his understanding of the game.
"We're addicted to Benzema," says coach Carlo Ancelotti, "and I'm very happy about it."
Benzema has become a soul of the club over the years.
He not only plays his role particularly elegantly, but also always noble.
In 845 matches for Olympique Lyon (until 2009), Real (since then) and the national team, he did not receive a single dismissal and only 17 yellow cards.
He doesn't fiddle like Ronaldo, he doesn't act like Neymar, he doesn't dive into sticky situations like Lionel Messi.
Nor is he hot-tempered like Zinedine Zidane, the idol of all French footballers of his generation, especially those with Algerian roots like himself.
If all footballers were like Benzema, the pitch would be a better place.
He only has problems on the side;
but that quite often.
The scandal involving the services of an underage prostitute in which he was involved with Franck Ribéry.
Wrecked cars and nods to macho gang culture like pimping in a rap video.
And then »L'affaire de la sextape«: His accessory to the attempted extortion of national team colleague Mathieu Valbuena – last November with a year's suspended sentence.
He was banned for five years, between 2016 and 2021, in connection with the »Les Bleus« affair.
The next pitfall is already there.
The event that shook France and Madrid like no other in sport for a long time was only a week ago.
Kylian Mbappé extended his contract at Paris St. Germain - although they were so sure at Real that he would succumb to their own sirens.
Benzema himself sang in a prominent role.
When he returned to the national team last summer, he immediately developed a fraternal relationship with Mbappé, who was 13 years his junior.
In play, the highly gifted instinctively sought and found each other, and they never missed an opportunity for mutual flattery.
Benzema, the Frenchman in Madrid, also dreamed of an alliance at the club.
Now he obviously feels betrayed.
A few hours after Mbappé's pledge of loyalty to Paris, Benzema published an Instagram story on Sunday night with a photo of gang star rapper Tupac Shakur next to a confidant.
Tupac was shot dead in 1996.
To this day, the legend has grown that it was orchestrated by a traitor from his circle of friends.
Mbappé as a traitor, his career decision as a sneaky attack, the world in a friend-foe pattern like the rappers of the east and west coasts once did?
During Real's "Media Day" for the Champions League final this week, Benzema reassured: "It wasn't a photo with a message." Tupac is his favorite musician, he often posts things from him, everyone is welcome to check it out.
But there is another interpretation, it is circulating in all debates about the Mbappé cause.
She fits into the image of Benzema, who comes from the Lyon suburb of Bron, which he and his buddies, including a sextape blackmail middleman, like to stylize as a ghetto.
Pride is a big thing, admitting mistakes is not.
So the long duration of the national team's exile is explained less by the affair itself, which soon calmed down after Benzema was eliminated for the 2016 European Championship, than by an interview in the Real house newspaper "Marca", in which he said Didier Deschamps Kipping called the »racist part of France«.
The coach was then pilloried by many;
and didn't forgive it for a long time.
Will Benzema return to »Les Bleus«?
France is now eagerly waiting to see whether Benzema and Mbappé will quickly get their relationship sorted again.
From next week they see themselves for the Nations League, but above all the World Cup is coming up in November.
There Benzema will play for his place in the history of the »Bleus«.
Without him, France reached the final in 2016 with much praised team spirit and became world champions in 2018.
With him it never went further than the quarter-finals in major tournaments.
The fact that enemies can sometimes become friends again will probably be observed again in the evening.
In the end, it was Benzema who scolded teammate Ferland Mendy against young, erratic winger Vinícius ("He's playing against us").
A year and a half later, Vinícius is playing close to the world class, his duo with Benzema is among the best in Europe - and the two are familiar as teachers and students.