Jean-Michel Vandamme is considered as the man who discovered Eden Hazard. The 63-year-old returned to Lille as the director of the youth academy a few months ago, the club where he has spent most of his career -- including 40 years as a coach as well as several years working in various positions within the youth setup.
In 2005, he was charged with integrating a 14-year-old Eden Hazard into the Los Mastines training system and has followed the Belgian midfielder’s development throughout his career. As such, it’s safe to say he knows the player better than most. In 2011, at just 20 years old, Hazard, along with several other of his Lille academy peers, was part of the team that secured the club’s first league title since 1954. Lille went on to lift last season’s Ligue 1 trophy, although with a very different-looking team to the one that scooped the title in 2011.
"That [2011] team had 50 percent homegrown players. Now we have won another Ligue 1, but there was hardly anyone from the academy,” says Vandamme, who, after working at Club Brugges, has returned to Lille to revitalize one of the most important youth academies in Europe. Apart from Hazard, other talents to have emerged from the Lille academy in recent decades include Franck Ribery, Benoît Cheyrou, Jean Makoun, Yphan Cabaye, Mathieu Debuchy, Adil Rami, Idrissa Gueye, Lucas Digne, Divock Origi and Benjamin Pavard.
"Eden was from La Louviere, on the Belgian side of the border but very close to here," recalls Vandamme. "He came to our academy when he was 14 years old, he was a very small and thin boy who at first did not seem to stand out much.
“But he had one very important thing: a footballing brain. More or less, we got him out of his shell and in a few years he became technically better and faster than anyone. At 15, he had to be stopped, because he was beginning to gain muscle and could have injured himself. At 17, when he debuted with the first team, many of us here thought he was going to become one of the best players in the world.”
