Why the 3 players Real Madrid are open to selling won’t leave this winter

Real Madrid are planning for 2022, and that includes arrivals as well as departures. Of course, Real, as an entity, needs to handle its finances and recover the money spent from player sales and revenue in the long run, which should happen, but according to reports, they are willing to start the whole procedure even before making a signing for next summer.

According to a report from MARCA, Real Madrid would be listening to offers for Luka Jovic, Mariano Diaz as well as Eden Hazard in the winter transfer window itself.

Now, none of these three players is really a starter. Hazard was, to an extent, until he started getting injured very frequently and those injuries started taking a toll on his body, which gave Vinicius Jr the game time he needed to really shine as a footballer.

Luka Jovic and Mariano are back-ups for Karim Benzema. Really, only one of them is needed, but we somehow still see both of them on the bench. And since they are back-ups of one of the best strikers in the world, they rarely get to play.

Eden Hazard, Luka Jovic and Mariano are all on huge contracts at Real Madrid

Playing time matters a lot, for sure. There’s no doubt about that. Every player wants to play as much as he can, but sometimes it’s not feasible. And sometimes, when the club you’re playing for offers you a lot of money in the hopes of seeing you eventually become a starter, you feel inclined towards the money. That’s what is happening here, in my opinion.

Let’s start with the big fish first. Eden Hazard is on one humongous contract. He’s earning a lot of money and that contract is now becoming a burden. It won’t really be classified as Real Madrid’s mistake because at the time of signing him, Hazard really was an incredible player. He was one of the best in the world easily, and it made sense, at the time, to offer him this much money. Now, he won’t earn this much money anywhere else, and he has said a couple of times that he wants to prove himself at the club. I don’t think he’d get many chances to do that now, but again, why would he go to any other club? He’s earning more money than he ever will in the future, he might as well stay on for some more time before leaving for a different team.

The main thing I would say is that Real could’ve offered him a shorter contract in duration. Giving him a five-year contract was not a big deal back then, but he still would’ve turned 33 by the end of it, and we’ve known for a while that Hazard is not the most hard-working player in the world, so it was likely that he wouldn’t have been a top-level player by the time he turned 33.

But again, retrospect has a part to play in that, and we can’t really blame Real for it. But, we can blame Real Madrid for offering Mariano a contract that simply no other club in the world would offer him. He had a good campaign with Lyon in 2017-18 and it was enough to convince Real Madrid to pay up for him and offer him around 5-7 million euros a year.

That doesn’t seem like a huge amount of money for a player who scored 18 league goals in the previous season, but whether that player is good enough to play for a club like Real Madrid is a completely different conversation. There are some aspects of his game that I feel are just too bad for Real to even consider him a player worth that money. No disrespect to him at all, of course.

Mariano would be a decent goal-scorer for a mid-table side but I don’t think it gets much better than that for him. And which is why he just wouldn’t want to leave. Think about it, if you’re being given a contract that you might not get offered again, you would sit down and think about whether to stay for the money or not. If you’re earning well, you’d think about your family, and you would want to get as much as possible before going to a different club to get to play regular, first-team football.

But then, Mariano has been doing that for a couple of years now, so maybe it finally is time for him to leave. I’m just saying that, if he ends up staying for at least another six months, you can’t blame him. You blame the club for offering him a contract that’s too good to turn down and close up shop for.

With Jovic, it’s tricky. He certainly hasn’t lived up to expectations, he has flaws in his game, has attitude issues but he also has the time and talent to change all that. I think that he is still a good back-up choice for Benzema, and even though the number of opportunities he gets is few and far between, he’d be worth keeping around if, well, he is kept around. He does earn a lot of money at Real Madrid, and he might be tempted by that, but he does have the talent to succeed somewhere else, it just depends on what he prioritizes.

I really hope all this is something Real Madrid’s higher-ups think about before offering huge contracts to players, because it ends up having a lot of weightage in the long run, if it doesn’t work out for them as well as they’d want to.