I went to find out what Eden Hazard does now – it was a seriously weird night

Eden Hazard still garners a lot of love from Chelsea fans, almost seven years after he left having helped the club win two domestic titles and the Europa League.

So much that when he staged a UK launch of his signature wine range, almost 200 people paid £100 each to sit in the same room as him, drinking a complimentary glass of his Italian hooch (I chose the white option; it was warm) and tucking into a mass-catered meal in a Southampton hotel which once hosted first-class passengers before their voyage on the Titanic.

I went because it sounded weird. An evening with a former Belgium international and one of the Premier League’s greatest wingers, who hooked up with an Italian wine producer who releases bottles emblazoned with players’ names as part of his “Wine of Champions” range. And for some reason, three ex-Southampton players who are now better known for their beliefs about vaccines, the World Trade Centre attacks and 15-minute cities than their playing careers, were also invited.

It was not a high-end event, even though there was a live tenor, who belted out Nessun Dorma, among other opera favourites. The hefty, visible and vocal security presence put paid to any illusion of a refined atmosphere. But it did give an insight into what footballers do after they retire. After all, there are only so many coaching jobs or pundits’ chairs to go round, but there are thousands of players who want to keep themselves busy after they hang their boots up.

So Hazard plugs his wine – as well as charging people 20 quid for a picture with him. He had no shortage of takers and to his credit, he seemed affable and maintained a wide smile throughout. The Chelsea fans at my table, who spent a lot of the time taking videos of the room, were ecstatic that they managed to snaffle a free picture with the man himself after the official photo session.

Hazard’s wine wasn’t even served cold (Photo: Getty)

If anyone wanted a refill of his wine, they could, at £12 a glass. As much as I wanted to find out what the red was like (at least it was supposed to be served at room temperature), for a drink north of a tenner, I want a sparkler or at least a tiny parasol.

There was another side to retirement in Matt Le Tissier, one of the ex-Southampton players at the do. He had been a long-time pundit as one of Sky Sports’ Soccer Saturday crew, before they made a martyr of him by letting him go. He has said that he was fired for one or all of the following reasons : he didn’t meet their new diversity policy, he refused to wear a Black Lives Matter badge or because he “had doubts about the propaganda the news channel was producing and I asked myself, ‘do I really want to be part of that?’”

And now he attends speaking engagements and appearance sessions, in between subscriber-funded dives into conspiracy-laden rabbit-holes on fringe social media platforms like Rumble and Gettr. It’s a living, I guess. He still had a steady stream of fans wanting to press the flesh at Hazard’s big wine launch. And for a man who is so averse to the “poison” of vaccines entering his body, he was quite happy to knock back a few pints of mass-produced lager.

Sorry, back to Hazard. The germination of his wine range all sounded very simple. A winemaker, Fabio Cordella, contacted him, he spent two days in Italy talking about label design (from the look of it, he wanted a late-1980s wine cooler vibe) and hey presto, a white, red and rose all with his name on it, to join similar ranges from Ronaldinho, Wesley Sneijder and Roberto Carlos.

Hazard was gleefully ignorant when it came to the nuances of the wine. “Just drink it, you’ll see it is good,” he told the room full of fans in between chants from the floor of “Eden, Eden, Eden”. And when pressed on the tastes, he added: “I am from Belgium, so it’s more about the beer there.” Cordella was behind a display board at the time, but his face was no doubt a picture.

We had been promised a Q&A with the four ex-players – the other two were Rickie Lambert, who is on a similar path to Le Tissier when it comes to conspiracy theories, and James Beattie, who is a coach at Reading. Oenology aside, there were so many topics to cover. With Hazard, his thoughts on the World Cup , perhaps, with the Saints players their opinions on Spygate maybe.

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Or if we wanted to get into off-pitch matters, Le Tissier’s take on the riots in Southampton instigated by far-right agitators and politicians after the murder of Henry Nowak would have been interesting. Especially as he has said in the past he has never found anyone good enough to vote for. One wonders whether he has found anyone worth voting for now, in this splintered, polarised world.

But sadly the only questions were from the MC, along the lines of “wow, it must have been great being a football player, w…