Lassana Diarra and the Curse of Makelele

"I am compared to Claude Makelele, but I am not Makelele, I am Lassana Diarra".

In the end, the only way he could escape the comparisons was to escape being talked about at all. Once one of Europe's most hyped young midfielders – forever touted as heir to the throne of the canonised defence-shielder – Diarra has spent the past three years teetering on irrelevance. In fact, it's over a year since he has set foot on a football field at all. Sacked by Lokomotiv Moscow last summer, Diarra has been out of employment ever since. It's been a fall from grace of Lohanian proportions.

Looking back, it should have been obvious from the outset. As soon as any bright young footballer acquires the label of 'the new' anyone, a death knell may as well be sounded above their head. Once the curse has struck, the process cannot be reversed or escaped: impossible hopes soon become unmatched expectations, which eventually give way to miserable (if merely perceived) failure.

It's a path followed diligently by, among others, Abou Diaby (Arsenal's perennial 'new Vieira' is now a free agent in what should be his peak years), Giovani dos Santos (whose early 'new Ronaldinho' tag led him not to samba-suffused greatness, but to LA Galaxy via Ipswich Town and Racing Santander) and the legions of 'new Maradonas' – there's an entire Wikipedia page devoted to them – who shrivelled in the shadow of their ludicrous billing.*

And yet with Diarra, things really did seem different: the comparisons actually made sense, the tag seemed truthful. The lazy, surface-level parallels were all there, of course, but the young Diarra tackled with his forerunner's bite, passed with his purpose and generally demonstrated the same intangible qualities – dead-eyed efficiency, a blithe disregard for the over-elaborate – for which Makekele's very name had become shorthand. The narrative was obviously driven by circumstance – the two being at the same club aided the crude passing-of-the-baton tale – but that helped the youngster's cause, too: who better to learn from than the grand master himself? Socrates and Plato, Obi-Wan and Luke, Don Vito and Michael. Makelele and Diarra.

But a decade on from Diarra's Chelsea debut, after having established himself at Real Madrid via Arsenal and Portsmouth, his career has undergone an ugly implosion. Having relocated to the relative backwaters of the Russian Premier League in the summer of 2012, he was fired last August after refusing to train under coach Leonid Kuchuk. The 12 months since have told a tale of contract disputes, proposed transfers and the various administrative issues standing in their way – but not of football.

The Makelele baton, once tightly in his grasp, now lies discarded on the tarmac. Once again, the billing has proven an affliction.

Diarra is only 30, so it may be slightly too early to call in the coroner. But it certainly needs to be asked where in god's name it all went so wrong for a player once described by Jose Mourinho as "incredible in every aspect". And the short answer is: Dagestan.

When billionaire industrialist Suleiman Kerimov, a native to the region, used his monetary muscle to buy his hometown club Anzhi Makhachkala in 2011, the midfielder was one of a number of A-listers to clamber merrily aboard the well-oiled bandwagon. But Kerimov's project was to be no Chelsea mk II, and Diarra soon tasted the flipside to hanging one's career on the whims of a despot.

Two years after his takeover, Kerimov decided that he had better uses for his cash than blindly pouring it into the bottomless pit of professional football, and Anzhi's subsequent downscaling saw Diarra, along with a cluster of other sullen superstars, bundled out the back door to anyone who was willing to pick up his not-insubstantial wage packet.

Given how it was Roman Abramovich's dubiously acquired rubles which in 2005 propelled Diarra's rise from obscurity, fans of schadenfreude will have been pleased to note the grim symmetry in it being another Russian oligarch – rich on natural resources, low on patience – who sent the Frenchman's burgeoning career into a wild tailspin.

For Diarra, the abandonment of Project Anzhi meant destination Moscow. And perhaps unsurprisingly, this unplanned chapter of being passed between such footballing outposts quickly gave way to angst. Three red cards within his first three months provided one bookend for his lone season in Moscow, the other being the inevitable endgame for any fed-up footballer: the managerial fall-out, the nonattendance at training. And for Diarra, the indignity of being fired, too. Since that, nothing.

His being 'without a club' for the past year is mildly deceptive. Like Lee Bowyer, Marlon King and countless others before him have demonstrated, flagrant indiscipline rarely provides a barrier between an able footballer and his continued employment, and there have been willing takers for Diarra, too. An ongoing wrangle with Lokomotiv saw FIFA block a January move, but that's now been resolved and this summer will see him sign on a dotted line for someone. The strongest reported interest, though, comes not from Europe's crème de la crème, but from clubs like Celtic, West Ham and Newcastle.

At the end of all of this, it would be easy to look at Diarra's crumbling career and chuckle. Because, if you were being especially harsh, you could say that at least five of his six career moves have carried a strong whiff of dollar signs. Many onlookers would simply write his latter-day hardships down as karma's answer to years of bulging pay packets from the likes of Abramovich, Kerimov, and former Pompey owner Alexandre Gaydamak.

It would be an oversimplification, though. Overlooking the fact that footballers, like all other humans, are perfectly entitled to seek an improved salary, the money-grabber accusation is actually an easy one for Diarra to shoot down. (And not just with a sharp reminder that Makelele himself faced the very same allegations. Before his Mourinho-led Indian summer ensured him cult-hero immortality, Makelele went on strike from Real Madrid in order to force through a move to nouveau riche nobodies Chelsea. "A man shaped by money, envy and perhaps an inflated sense of his own worth," were the words of one broadsheet writer).

For Diarra, as a precocious 20-year-old playing in France's second tier, accepting Mourinho's advances was a no-brainer, and the subsequent defection to Arsenal was plainly to seek the chances denied to him on the Kings Road. When that didn't go as planned ("All Arsene Wenger taught me was how to doubt myself"), a willingness to prove his worth at midtable Portsmouth was laudable. And his four years of first-team hijinks at Real Madrid – one more than Makelele clocked up – speaks for itself.

In fact, it is only really the one move, from Real Madrid to Anzhi, that could have been motivated by cash and cash alone. And even there, that his weekly wage was a modest-by-comparison £55k (Samuel Eto'o was earning five times that) strengthens the case for the defence.

Only three years ago, Diarra boarded the plane to Dagestan clutching a newly bestowed La Liga winner's medal, won with perhaps the world's most prestigious club. Now that his best hope of liberation from Moscow lies in playing alongside Carl Jenkinson, he will need no reminding that his relocation to Russia was a mug's move. But does it really warrant the sentence of having to play out the remainder of his years within the bloated midriff of the Premier League. Is it really worthy of consigning Diarra to soulless, Anelka-esque nomadism?

After all, the likes of Eto'o and Willian made similar beelines for Dagestan in 2012, and managed to come out the other side with careers intact and reputations unscathed. What has Diarra done differently to so offend the gods of fate?

As his prime years tick away before his very eyes, bequeathing him either irrelevant football or no football at all, Lassana Diarra could be forgiven for looking back and concluding that perhaps it wasn't his move to Anzhi that did for him. Perhaps it was his move to Chelsea.

After all, that was the move which stood him next to Makelele, which summoned the comparisons and demanded the label. That, maybe, was when the curse set in.

*(Lionel Messi is excepted from this rule, as he apparently is from most laws of nature)

@a_hess