Nice: Puel reveals why he blocked a January return for Ben Arfa

Nice really did weigh a Ben Arfa comeback. In an interview with Nice-Matin published this Friday, Claude Puel confirms that a return of Hatem Ben Arfa was discussed in January, while he was managing the club through a serious crisis. Back in the president’s chair since December, Jean-Pierre Rivère had turned survival into the mission and put Puel on the bench, nearly ten years after the end of his first spell (2012-2016).

Thirty minutes off the bench, for almost nothing

The proposal, detailed by Nice-Matin and relayed by RMC Sport, had three parts:

• the club would first help Ben Arfa regain the fitness of a professional footballer;
• it would then use him in spells of 20, 30 or 40 minutes at the end of matches;
• the stated aim was to help Nice win the Coupe de France, for close to no pay.

Puel did not shut the door straight away. “I agreed that we could see where he was at,” he said in L’Équipe.

“It could have been a horror”

Reservations appeared inside the club, then Puel buried the project. “It could have been a horror,” he said, and “the risk was not opportune”: his first fear was the false hopes such a comeback would have raised. He knows the man: under him, Ben Arfa produced the most prolific season of his career in 2015-2016, 18 goals and 7 assists in 37 games. Nice finished fourth.

Today Ben Arfa is 39, without a club since he left Lille in 2022, and has not formally retired: he plays padel, well enough to sit among the 750 best players in France. On where the idea came from, the accounts differ: So Foot writes that “Puel and the club” considered it, while RMC Sport puts the initiative with Rivère and the opposition with Puel.

None of it changes anything for Sunday: ninth in Ligue 1, Nice travel to Lyon with the current squad, not with their 2016 icon, and our match preview covers the fixture at Groupama Stadium.