Former member of the 1998 world champion French team, Christian Karembeu also made the news when he arrived at Real Madrid. A moment that Fernando Morientes did not appreciate.
Under the orders of Aimé Jacquet, and alongside Zinedine Zidane, Fabien Barthez, Didier Deschamps and other Thierry Henry, Christian Karembeu entered the history of French football one evening in July 1998. Crowned world champion with the Blues, However, the native of Lifou (New Caledonia) was not his first feat of arms. A few weeks earlier, the man who had been crowned champion of France in 1995 with FC Nantes, won the Champions League with his club Real Madrid. Arrived in December 1997 with the Merenguethe midfielder left a certain memory in the memory of Fernando Morientes.
Present in the Madrid locker room, the former Spanish international, now aged forty-seven, did not necessarily appreciate everything that surrounded the arrival of Christian Karembeu. If he did not accuse the Frenchman in any way, Fernando Morientes nevertheless regretted the soap opera-like episode that the Real locker room experienced at the time, and which he opened up about this Thursday in the columns of A.S.. A memory that he linked to the rumors which today surround the potential recruitment of Kylian Mbappé by Real Madrid. “ In my time, I remember Karembeu. Was he going to come to Madrid? Was he going to sign for Barça? He was on the cover of all the newspapers. It is clear that the circumstances are different, that football has changed a lot and that they are also two completely different footballers. »
“We had enough”
However, Fernando Morientes confirmed one thing: “ I remember that in the locker room, we talked about it daily. And we were tired of all this speculation. » But quickly, Christian Karembeu blended into the group and into a Real team which adopted him. Weighed down by an ankle injury, his second season was truncated and he did not start in the C1 final won against Valence FC. He left Madrid in the summer of 2000, tired in particular of the media treatment surrounding the couple he formed at the time with the model Adriana Karembeu.
