Raphael Varane: The Low-Key Defensive Rock With a Bulging Trophy Case

Raphael Varane has just completed his ninth season at Real Madrid. With it came his 18th trophy, a collection most players could never match in an entire career, let alone by the age of 27.

For a player who has only entered his peak in the last couple of years, Varane has already won it all multiple times over at club level. As an international with France, he collected the ultimate prize in 2018 when he was a major part of the country’s World Cup triumph.

The Frenchman joined Real in 2011 when he was just 18, securing a high profile move from Lens after only 24 professional appearances to his name. He was allowed time to adjust to his new surroundings in Madrid but still played 33 games in all competitions in his second season.

Varane was only a bit-part player as Real won La Liga in his debut year, while injury later hampered the first half of his 2013/14 campaign, but he has been a key player for club and country ever since.

His trophy tally stands at three La Liga titles, four Champions League wins, a Copa del Rey, three UEFA Super Cups, three Supercopa de Espana and four FIFA Club World Cups.

As such, he shares distinguished ground with Cristiano Ronaldo, Sergio Ramos, Luka Modric, Karim Benzema, Gareth Bale, Marcelo, Dani Carvajal and Isco in collecting winner’s medals for all four of Real’s Champions League successes in the 2010s.

Varane hasn’t been a passenger in that success. He played every minute in Champions League finals in 2014, 2017 and 2018, only missing 2016 through injury. The same injury also cost him a place at Euro 2016, with France going on to narrowly lose in the final. A ‘what if?’ moment.

At the 2018 World Cup, he played every minute as France lifted the trophy for the second time, including the group stage dead rubber against Denmark when there were wholesale changes.

That year, Varane was strongly touted for the Ballon d’Or and had the potential to become the first defender to be crowned best player in the world since Fabio Cannavaro in 2006.

Of all the top candidates, he was the only one to have won both the Champions League and World Cup, with the rest able to boast just one or the other – in the case of Lionel Messi and Mohamed Salah, both of whom finished above the centre-back in the final vote, it was actually neither.

Varane isn’t as widely celebrated as the likes of Virgil van Dijk or long time club-mate Ramos – he is happy to retreat from the spotlight and his 2015 wedding was a low-key affair – but former Real coach Jose Mourinho was prepared to label him the best defender in the world as early as 2014.

Around the same time, Real legend Fernando Hierro, a player to whom Varane has been compared in style, said similar, specifically commenting back then that he already had ‘maturity of somebody who has been playing for 20 years.’

According to France assistant coach Guy Stephan in 2018, Varane is ‘not afraid to fail’ and bears similarities in mentality to international colleague Paul Pogba in that “…they keep on trying, look forward and never lose their composure.”

Recent mistakes in a decisive Champions League game against Manchester City won’t define him and it showed incredible strength of character that he was able to publicly front up to his errors straight afterwards: “This defeat is my fault, all mine. I have to accept that. I am sorry for my teammates and all the effort they put in.”

He will work to put the game behind him and it won’t happen again.

It is a sign of how esteemed and revered a player is when clubs strive to unearth the ‘new’ or ‘next’ version of them. The ‘new Raphael Varane’ is a tag that has already been dished out to youngsters in France, including new Arsenal defender William Saliba. Varane wouldn’t get that treatment if he wasn’t among the very best and a remarkable success story to aspire to.

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