I t was just a garden in the beginning: a garden littered with footballs, a garden with a hedge at the bottom of it, a hedge with a wooden fence just beyond it, a wooden fence too tall to climb, but just tall enough for a small child to squeeze under. So under it he would squeeze: through the hole in the hedge, under the gap in the fence, and into a brilliant green world that to a five-year-old boy must have felt like taking a portal into a magical new dimension.

From dawn to dusk he would play there: on the pristine turf of Stade Brainois where his father Thierry had played before him, at the club that his grandfather Francis had set up in 1969. His father played to a decent amateur level; his mother Carine was a striker in the top flight for several years. Perhaps Eden Hazard was always destined to be a professional footballer. But back then, when it was just a garden and a small municipal stadium, all he really needed was a ball and a pitch and a wild, limitless imagination.

They were four boys – Ethan, Kylian, Thorgan and Eden – and from the start Thierry and Carine instilled insoluble values into them. Humility. Hard work. The idea that talent was a gift and not a birthright, a solemn contract that obliged its bearer to stretch every sinew in service of it. When he first began to make it big – first at Lille, then in the national team, then at Chelsea – Thierry would order him not to drive a flashy sports car when he returned to visit them in Braine-le-Comte, the small town 30 miles from the Belgian-French border where they still hang on his every move.

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And although he is now one of the most famous names in the sport, with an enormous profile and more money than he could ever begin to spend, Hazard remains unique among his generation of footballers in that he retains something of an idealistic bent. He doesn’t have a formal agent, instead trusting his family to negotiate his deals for him. Rather than offering beige platitudes, he tends to give a straight question a straight answer. As Jose Mourinho, his former manager at Chelsea and the man charged with thwarting him at Stamford Bridge this Saturday, once put it: “He is not from these times. He’s from the old times.”

On the pitch, too, Hazard plays with the unadulterated innocence of the kid roaming the wide open spaces of Stade Brainois: squeezing through gaps, ducking under challenges. Those short, quick strides that are so hard to interrupt legally; the unflinching nose for goal, for progress, for forward thrust; the instinctive urge to entertain. “I play without fear,” he once said in an interview. “I’ve done that since I first kicked a ball in my back garden. You have to enjoy it, go out to express yourself.”

So far this season, he has been expressing himself plenty. Ahead of United’s visit to Chelsea, Hazard sits atop the Premier League goalscoring charts with seven, at a rate of one every 82 minutes. New manager Maurizio Sarri has encouraged him to indulge his killer instinct, to focus his energies on the “last 25 metres of the field”, and insists that even after more than six years in English football, we have only seen a fraction of Hazard’s true potential. “If he is able to improve, he will be the best in the world,” Sarri reckons. “He’s a genius.”

Like Dries Mertens and Lorenzo Insigne, two forwards who were unshackled by Sarri’s tactical blueprint at Napoli and discovered new frontiers as a result, Hazard this season seems like a player liberated, even if his statistical profile – in terms of shot quality and dribbles – is largely similar to what it was last season. Even now, at the age of 27, it doesn’t feel outlandish to at least put him into the conversation as Chelsea’s greatest ever player.

Hazard leads the Premier League goalscoring chart this season (Getty)

And yet even as he continues to set new standards at Stamford Bridge, a certain equivocation accompanies him wherever he goes. Hazard, after all, has barely 18 months remaining on his current contract, and there are currently no talks about a renewal. Real Madrid, who Hazard has been rather unsubtly courting for around a year now, are circling with intent, and even if their financial clout is not what it was, their reputational pull certainly is. And so at present, Hazard’s every move is freighted with the possibility of what might follow.

The prevailing prognosis is that Hazard will want to be at a club that matches his skyscraping ambition. “I want good players,” he announced shortly after scoring the winning goal in last May’s FA Cup final, laying down a direct and very public challenge to the board to dig deep into the transfer market and pull out somebody better than Danny Drinkwater. That Hazard felt emboldened to make such a demand says plenty about his elevated status at the club, and there is a reason why when he was manager, Mourinho would secretly brief Hazard about his transfer plans in the hope of keeping him onside.

Follow this logic all the way through to its conclusion and you eventually come to a point – possibly well before the end of this season – where Hazard is weighing up a potential new deal from Chelsea against his assessment of just how competitive he feels the club can be in the long term. It’s no secret that Hazard covets the Ballon d’Or, and is desperate to improve on his record of just one Champions League quarter-final in more than a decade. Can he do all that at Chelsea?

There’s an alternative theory, of course, and it goes like this: far from being a bulging-eyed careerist, maybe Hazard actually doesn’t much care where he plays, as long as he’s enjoying himself. And you have to say that if Hazard really is itching for a move to Real Madrid, then he’s certainly going about it in a strange way. “Leaving or staying, I was going to be happy,” he admitted. “Chelsea were clear with me. I couldn’t leave the club. I accepted it.”

With just 18 months left on his Chelsea contract Hazard faces a big decision over his future (Reuters)

The entire history of Hazard’s career suggests a similar preference. Whether it’s a choice between running at a defender or playing a safe pass out to the flank, joining Di Matteo’s Chelsea or Ferguson’s Manchester United, staying at Stamford Bridge where he is adored and revered or signing up for Real Madrid’s high-stakes chess game, the evidence indicates that whenever Hazard is faced with a big decision, he has always plumped for the most enjoyable option rather than the most expedient. “It is easy to stimulate Hazard, as long as you let him have fun,” Sarri believes. “He doesn’t get influenced by the media and what happens around him. As long as he’s having fun, and he plays.”