EUROPA CONFERENCE LEAGUE – PAOK Salonika – OM – Opinion: Dimitri Payet, the power of emotions

It’s been a week since his recovery lit up the Vélodrome and we may not see anything more beautiful this season. A goal like only him and a few are capable of scoring. This week, we also celebrate the four years of his raid in the defense of Leipzig concluded by an outside in the middle of the skylight. A magic trick, a stroke of genius and, above all, a signature. Dimitri Payet is a certain idea of ​​football. Beauty at the service of the game, unless it’s the other way around. And if, at 35, he hasn’t won anything, if his record rings hollow and comes down to a Coupe de la Réunion, he will leave a mark that certain world champions and certain winners of the Champions League will be able to envy him in when the light goes out. It is precisely this immense chasm between the extreme dryness of his collective accomplishments and the dazzling glow of his individual flashes that makes him so special.

His incorrigible mania for disappearing for many months during a career where the ups followed the abyss, and vice versa, nurtured an elusive character. One of the last romantics of a football today abandoned to serial scorers, stats machines, but not always emotions, athletes with unique physical characteristics, golgoths carved in flawless stone and without a black hole. With Payet survives the idea that talent is fragile and therefore precious. The idea also of all or nothing with all the excesses that that suggests. Tantrums, a fluctuating weight, evenings crossed like a shadow but also a tenacious impression that anything can happen on an evening when the stars are aligned.

A Marseille figure

As such, at the top of his form, not many of them can look him in the eye. “During my career, I have evolved with talented players, I have three in mind: Daniele De Rossi, Edin Dzeko (at Roma) and Jamie Vardy (at Leicester). But Dimitri Payet is perhaps the most talented“, Cengiz Under said of him again this week in the columns of La Provence. The 17th for the Ballon d’Or 2016 never had the consistency that would have allowed him to settle for good among the best players in the world. We could blame him for it, like his international career which should never have been reduced to Euro 2016. But the intensity with which his creative genius is expressed – remember the first round of this same European championship and his praline in the middle of the Romanian skylight which launched the adventure of the Blues – obliges us to remember his achievements first rather than his missed meetings like that of the summer of 2018, in Russia.

This uneven and powerful career makes him a great Marseille figure. He, the Réunionnais of Saint-Pierre, resembles this city in its excesses and in its excess. The way Payet became attached to Marseille and his club, without overplaying but with real sincerity, now enshrines him in Marseille’s heritage even though the club is not going through its best period. Because if, with him, OM won nothing, he vibrated, he roared in Ligue 1 and in the European Cup. There, where everything is multiplied by 100, where emotion dominates reason, Payet, machine of emotions, reigns especially since Jorge Sampaoli taught him regularity again.

Free kicks, a tifo, a derby, a song

The Vélodrome dubbed him one evening at the Coupe de France: Payet, the King, displayed the impetuous Olympian stadium as a nice thank you after eight years of serving the club and its interests. Payet will remain OM’s man when he hangs up, but we must not forget the memories he left everywhere else. In Saint-Etienne, where his free kick in the skylight of Hugo Lloris put an end to 16 years of failure against OL one evening of the 100th derby, in West Ham where, as a legacy of his 18 months in England, he will have left a compilation of exceptional goals, a title of London player of the year and a song: “We have Payet, Dimitri Payet / I don’t think you understand / He’s the man from Super Slaven / He’s better than Zidane / We have Dimitri Payet!“No title but memories. And memories never gather dust.