Two-and-a-half weeks before his 19th birthday, Achraf Hakimi made his debut in the most celebrated competition in club football, the Uefa Champions League.
He was picked at right-back for Real Madrid, promoted from the club’s academy, and presented with a daunting task. The opposition were Tottenham Hotspur, which meant tussles with Harry Kane, and, going forward, facing the combative Jan Vertonghen.
These were tough duels, though not intimidating ones for the teenager. Early in the 1-1 draw, Hakimi eked out space for a cross that Cristiano Ronaldo headed against the Spurs post.
He was widely praised for his performance and for his showing in the games that followed until the experienced Dani Carvajal returned from injury as Madrid’s first-choice right-back.
Less than a month before Hakimi’s European premiere, meanwhile, Liverpool gave a Champions League debut, in Moscow, to a prospect named Trent Alexander-Arnold.
He was 11 days shy of his 19th birthday. He also impressed for the club he had grown up at. In his next fixture, against Maribor, Alexander-Arnold scored his first Champions League goal.
In those autumn weeks, it turned out, two brilliant, parallel careers were being almost simultaneously launched. That season, 2017/18, ended with Madrid beating Liverpool in the Champions League final, although Hakimi would receive his winners’ medal later, still deemed a little too junior to make the matchday squad for the Kiev showpiece.
Alexander-Arnold played the full 90 minutes for a Liverpool let down by their goalkeeper Loris Karius, whose anxiety to play out quickly from the back gave away a careless goal and reminded that, in teams where defenders are urged to push high up the field, the keeper can be left feeling very exposed.
But in the modern game, that’s the fashion: Modern full-backs are taught to turn their minds to attack as soon as their goalkeeper is in possession. And very few elite full-backs have learned to master those requirements as brilliantly as Morocco’s Hakimi and England’s Alexander-Arnold.
On Wednesday evening in Paris, they will share a pitch for the first time, two 26-year-olds who are heroes for their respective clubs, Hakimi at Paris Saint-Germain, Alexander-Arnold still of Liverpool, and role models for tens of thousands of aspiring right-backs who have grown up regarding a position once considered the game’s least glamorous as a position that carries endless possibilities for flair and expression.
Look only at the creative numbers, Achraf and Trent – fans call them by their first names – bring into Wednesday’s first leg of PSG-Liverpool. It is the Morocco captain’s 58th Champions League match.
In that time, he has accumulated a dozen direct assists. Statistically, Alexander-Arnold is his twin: 12 assists from his 58 games so far in the competition. Hakimi is ahead on goals, with six to Alexander-Arnold’s two.
In their domestic leagues, both feature in the top 10 of assist providers for the current season. This, remember, from players designated as defenders and, through their early 20s, footballers who have had to develop thick skins against criticism that the swashbuckling, attacking part of their game comes at the expense of proper attention to space left vacant behind their backs.
It is a difficult balance. To be as bold as they are needs the confidence of a brave coach. The former Liverpool manager, Jurgen Klopp, who first brought Alexander-Arnold into the senior team, says he still feels exasperated, eight months after having departed Liverpool, at hearing pundits bemoan the player’s lapses in defence: “They [the critics] still don’t understand it,” Klopp said in January. “If they would make the same fuss about him when he does play well as when he doesn’t, that would be a really cool planet [to be on].”
The PSG manager, Luis Enrique, has described Hakimi as the “best right-back in the world.” That means a right-back who wants to command the entire right flank and, going forward, the inside right channels too. He likes it that “when Donnarumma [the PSG goalkeeper] has the ball, Achraf plays as an attacker, a winger and if he was any further forward he’d be in the crowd!”
No coincidence that the form marksmen coming into Wednesday’s tie are Mohamed Salah, most effective coming off a Liverpool right wing where, for the last seven years, Alexander-Arnold has been his best ally; and Ousmane Dembele, whose understanding with Hakimi on the right for PSG has been a forte under Luis Enrique.
“My obsession is to attack,” Luis Enrique says of his approach. “But also that every player knows how and when to defend. I think Achraf Hakimi has adapted perfectly to the characteristics of this team.
“On a human level, he’s open, with a strong personality and has real status in his national team. He’s a leader. I can lead with what I say, but it’s on the pitch and in practice that you see who the true leaders are.”
Experience makes a leader and Hakimi has gathered it hungrily through his career. He played his first senior matches with Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Luka Modric and Sergio Ramos among his teammates.
He went on to provide crosses, while at Borussia Dortmund, for Erling Haaland and, at Inter Milan, for Romelu Lukaku.
In his time at PSG he has counted Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe as colleagues. The eager market for his myriad talents meant that by the time Hakimi was 22, he had already played Champions League football for three clubs that have won European Cups and collected major domestic prizes in Spain, Germany and Italy.
By 24, he had added the first of his three French league titles at PSG and reached a World Cup semi-final with Morocco.
Alexander-Arnold’s path has been straighter. Liverpool, so far, have been his only employer, although with his current contract up for renewal in July and no signature yet on any extension, the growing expectation is that his progressive football, his precision passing, his mastery at delivering set-pieces, will become assets in the service of another club next season.
The leading suitors? Real Madrid, where there’s always been an eagerness for full-backs who think like wingers or playmakers. The same Real Madrid where, seven-and-a-half years ago, one of the very best, Achraf Hakimi, was launched on to the big stage.
