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The availability of more and more football matches on live TV has been a benefit to a lot of players, allowing them to showcase their best moments to a wider audience more often.

However, it has also harmed a certain type of footballer: The maverick, whose best moments are up there with the best of anyone else in the game, but who hasn’t always been able to deliver them with regularity.

Hatem Ben Arfa might well have been one of the best-regarded players in the world if his peak had come in the 90s, when all most of us saw of players on the continent was the odd Champions League game in midweek and the occasional weekend highlights show.

But in an era where everything you do is pored over by a non-stop news cycle, it’s harder and harder to make it as a maverick hoping to get by on your talents alone.

But Ben Arfa has given it as good a go as anyone.

Ben Arfa’s career began in the time honoured fashion of wonderkids emerging at the start of the century: a starring role on a Football Manager edition, accompanied by a simple expectation from fans still prepared to romanticise a mercurial talent.

Surely he couldn’t be that good, however high his ceiling. But what if he was?

It was at Lyon where he emerged, breaking into that special team including the likes of Juninho Pernambucano and Michael