'Rebooted' Raphael Varane Eyes New Summits with Real Madrid and France
Raphael Varane is driving home from the Bernabeu after a night game and fretting about how much sleep he is going to get.
Still wired from his exertions beneath the floodlights, he is worried about "insomnia" and says that he will be lucky if he falls asleep before 4:30 a.m. Even then, with his baby son, Ruben, certain to be awake early, he knows a restful night is likely to be a forlorn hope.
Professional footballers often struggle to get to sleep after playing in evening matches, but Varane has a lot preying on his mind.
His Real Madrid team have just been beaten 3-0 by Barcelona in the Copa del Rey semi-finals, nixing their hopes of domestic silverware for the season, and he has inadvertently played a prominent role, turning Ousmane Dembele's low cross into his own net for Barca's second goal. For good measure, he is caught on the leg by Madrid team-mate Dani Carvajal as he attempts to clear Dembele's cross, leaving him with a set of bloody red stud marks on his left knee.
The match in February 2019 was a microcosm of Varane's season with Madrid. After five years in which he had hit the heights with dizzying regularity, 2018-19 was the campaign in which everything came crashing to earth.
The scene in Varane's car occurs in the second episode of a three-part documentary about his life entitled Varane: Destin du Champion ("Varane: Destiny of a Champion"), which launches on Amazon Prime Video this week.
Had he made the film a year earlier, it could have culminated in him winning the Champions League with Madrid for the fourth time before going on to achieve World Cup glory with France. But he has no regrets about the fact it captures a more challenging period in his career.
"It allows you to show something else," Varane told Bleacher Report during an interview in Paris. "Calling yourself into question when things go badly. How does a high-level athlete react to an extremely difficult week in their career? You also see the victories, so you get the highs and the lows. I think it provides a more complete picture."
The problems that bedevilled Varane last season can be traced back to the weeks that followed his World Cup triumph with France in Moscow. Madrid's incoming coach, Julen Lopetegui, granted him only around 10 days of holiday after the tournament, which meant he returned for pre-season training having had precious little time to rest and recover.
And it showed.
Varane was a shadow of himself in the season's early weeks, and his dismal form mirrored that of his team, which succumbed to four defeats in five La Liga games between late September and late October. The last of those games was a stinging 5-1 reverse away to Barcelona, during which Varane sustained an adductor muscle tear that kept him on the sidelines until the middle of November.
It was also the game that cost Lopetegui his job.
After Varane finished seventh in the voting for the Ballon d'Or in December, the second part of the season brought yet more on-pitch misery as Madrid were dumped out of the Champions League by Ajax and trailed home 19 points below Barca at third place in La Liga. He saved his worst for last, turning in a dismal performance as France lost 2-0 to Turkey in a Euro 2020 qualifier in Konya at the beginning of June.
Looking back now, he is convinced that after spending so many seasons at the top, he and his Madrid team-mates simply ran out of gas.
"I think I needed a bit of a reboot. I'd played so many seasons with so many matches and so much intensity. We won four Champions Leagues in five years, we played more matches than the other teams, and each year the level of intensity went up," he said.
"Psychologically and physically, we'd been going to the well for so many years that having a more difficult season was probably something we had coming. At some point, you need to have a proper rest. This summer I had a good rest."
Varane put some distance between himself and his football over the summer, visiting the French Caribbean island of Martinique, from where his father hails, with his wife, Camille, and two-year-old Ruben. They also spent time on holiday in the United States.
With a full pre-season behind him, he now looks back to something like his old self.
While he was powerless to prevent Madrid crashing to a 3-0 defeat in last week's Champions League opener against Paris Saint-Germain, he produced an excellent display in Sunday's 1-0 win at Sevilla in La Liga. The 26-year-old also turned in an impressive performance in France's recent 4-1 win over Albania at Stade de France, twice using his supposedly weaker left foot to superb effect in the build-up to goals by Kingsley Coman and Olivier Giroud.
Varane's ease on the ball has been apparent from the moment he made his debut for Lens as a gangly 17-year-old in a Ligue 1 game against Montpellier in November 2010. Zinedine Zidane was appointed as a special advisor at Madrid the same month, and one of his most successful early contributions was helping persuade Varane to move to the Bernabeu the following July (for what now seems a remarkably low fee of €10 million).
The documentary shows the moment Varane touched down in Madrid that summer, looking more than a little bewildered by all the attention as he steers his luggage through a throng of journalists and photographers in the arrivals hall at Madrid–Barajas Airport.
Tall, quick and elegant, Varane has always looked like the prototype of the modern centre-back, and he believes he has become a "much more complete" defender since arriving in Spain. Asked which of his contemporaries has impressed him the most in recent months, he picks out Virgil van Dijk, citing the Dutchman's "remarkable season" with Liverpool.
The modern centre-back, he explains, must be a jack of all trades.
"What's for sure is that the profile of the central defender is evolving," Varane says. "At one time it was all about the stopper and the libero. Today, central defenders have to be more complete."
By his own admission, Varane is not a big talker, and he confesses that opening up to the camera was a challenge.
"I'm quite shy and quite reserved," he says. "But when things start heating up, I don't hesitate to show my character, whether that's in good moments, like when we won the World Cup, or more difficult moments."
It was during the World Cup that Varane first met Theo Schuster, the director of his documentary, who was making a film about Les Bleus' march to glory in Russia. Varane was the only member of Didier Deschamps's squad who was on the pitch for every single minute of the competition, notably heading in the opener in France's 2-0 win over Uruguay in the quarter-finals.
The goal was a form of personal deliverance for the Lille-born defender, who had been blamed for Mats Hummels' victorious header in Germany's 1-0 win over France at the same stage of the 2014 tournament.
Two weeks before arriving in Russia, Varane became one of only 31 players in the history of the game to have won the European Cup four times or more. Yet in spite of all that he has won, his peak years are theoretically still ahead of him. He describes himself, intriguingly, as having reached "a crossroads between youth and experience."
Having already scaled the very highest peaks for both country and club at the age of just 26, how does he stay motivated?
"It's the desire to keep winning," he says. "Each season the counters are reset to zero. You've either got a title to defend or one to go and win. We want to keep making our honours list longer."
Varane committed his immediate future to Madrid in May following reports in the French press that he was thinking about looking for a new challenge somewhere else. A central figure in Madrid's four most recent Champions League triumphs (although he missed the 2016 final through injury), he will be one of the cornerstones of Zidane's rebuilding project and has played every minute of the club season to date.
With Zidane determined to bring some sparkle back to the Bernabeu and Deschamps eyeing the second World Cup and European Championship double of his career, this season could yield even more honours at club and international level for Varane.
If it does, he might even get some decent sleep.
