The season Eden Hazard spent in France's fourth tier

A debut season that went backwards as often as forwards

Hazard signed his first professional contract with Lille in May 2007, aged 16, but there was no academy base at Luchin ready for him yet. Instead he spent the 2007-08 season split between Lille's under-18 side, playing in the Coupe Gambardella, and the club's reserve team in the Championnat de France Amateur, the fourth level of the French football pyramid, a world away from the Ligue 1 stage he would soon make his own.

His amateur debut came on 1 September 2007, as a substitute in a 3-1 defeat to Racing Club de France. A week later he made his first start, in a 1-0 loss to Lesquin. These were not glamorous occasions, but they were the games that built him.

A brief call-up, then straight back down

In mid-November, with several senior players away on international duty, manager Claude Puel pulled Hazard into the first-team squad. He appeared as a substitute in a friendly against Club Brugge, impressed enough to be named in an 18-man squad for a league match against Nancy on 24 November, and came off the bench in the 78th minute to make his professional debut.

It did not lead to a breakthrough just yet. Hazard returned to the reserves for December, then came back into the first team in January for substitute appearances against Metz, Sochaux and Paris Saint-Germain. After the PSG match he was demoted back to amateur level, playing concurrently for the reserve side in the fourth division and the under-18s in the Gambardella.

Eleven games, one goal, and a foundation for what followed

Hazard's solitary amateur goal came on 17 May 2008, in a 3-2 win over Vitré. He finished that amateur campaign with 11 appearances and the single strike, as Lille's reserve team finished fifth, the best placing among any professional club's reserve side in the group.

It is an almost absurdly modest line for a player who would go on to be named in FIFA's World 11, lift the Champions League and captain Belgium to a World Cup semi-final. But it mattered. Rudi Garcia took over as Lille manager that summer and promoted Hazard to the first team permanently ahead of the 2008-09 season, and within weeks he had scored his first senior goal, against Auxerre, becoming the youngest goalscorer in Lille's history.

Why it is worth remembering

The spell lasted a single season and produced nothing that would make a highlight reel. There was no trophy, no individual award, not even a settled role, Hazard was shuttled between three different levels of competition inside the same campaign. But it is the missing chapter in the story most fans tell about him: the version of Eden Hazard who hadn't yet arrived, who was still being tested in the Championnat de France Amateur before Garcia decided he was ready for Ligue 1. Without that unglamorous, stop-start year in Lille's lower ranks, the rest of the career, Chelsea's wing wizard, Real Madrid's record signing, Belgium's World Cup captain, simply does not follow in the way it did.