Hatem Ben Arfa appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. It is approaching three years since the mercurial Frenchman played what proved to be his final game for Lille. It has been even longer since the former Newcastle United attacking midfielder posted on social media.

However, Ben Arfa has not vanished. Far from it. The veteran has found a second love - padel - and even climbed to 821st place in the French Tennis Federation's rankings. For context, more than 70,000 padel players are below Ben Arfa in the standings. That's how good he is.

Yet you suspect Ben Arfa could still do a job with the ball at his feet. After all, this was a player who was the very definition of a streets won't forget footballer, a maverick so 'unbelievably' talented that Papiss Cisse referred to his former team-mate as his 'Messi'.

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"If he was serious, Hatem could have been up there because he was an unbelievable player," the ex-Newcastle striker revealed to ChronicleLive. "Everything you think Messi can do, Hatem can do easily. I don't know why he was not there - only he knows - but if you're training with him every single day, you just say, 'Wow'."

It is quite a statement but one tellingly paraphrased by so many who shared a pitch with Ben Arfa during his time on Tyneside. Tim Krul recalled how Ben Arfa had the 'X-Factor to go past five, six, seven players' that would have put him 'up there at the top' while James Perch remembered how his team-mate 'could just turn it on come Saturday and win us the game'. However, that was not always the case as Davide Santon explained.

"Hatem was a crazy guy," the former Newcastle defender told ChronicleLive. "Crazy in a good way. He was very friendly, but he was living in his own world. You could never expect what he could do. That was him. One game you would think, 'Is this Ben Arfa or his brother?'"

"But he was unstoppable in other games and looked like [Diego] Maradona. He could dribble - he could do anything he wanted to - but he needed to have motivation. If he didn't have that, sometimes, he was useless and we used to play 10 against 11 rather than 11 against 11.

"But when he wanted to, he was one of the best players I ever played with. Trying to stop him in training was impossible sometimes."

Therein lies the enigma of Hatem Ben Arfa. The maverick was so gifted that when Alan Pardew watched a replay of his full debut, the former Newcastle boss urged club chiefs to make the loan move permanent despite never previously working with the injured Frenchman before. By the end, just a few years later, Ben Arfa's discipline and attitude frustrated Pardew to such an extent that the attacking midfielder would be banished to the reserves.

Although Ben Arfa could 'rub people up the wrong way', Perch got on 'really well' with his team-mate and offered his own unique perspective after sitting beside him in the dressing room.

"He was a really funny guy," Perch recalled to ChronicleLive. "I thought he was brilliant because he was such a nice guy to me. I know he could rub people up the wrong way but, to me, he was sound.

"He had an attitude where he didn't look like he was trying and everything came so easy for him, which made it frustrating, because you knew how good he could be and I was there trying 110% every game or every training session and was getting nowhere near him! It looked like he was doing it at 50%.

"We knew come game day he'd turn it on. In training, he wasn't always at it but that's just what he was like, his character."

It has been many years since Ben Arfa last set foot on Tyneside, but the veteran remains so influential that Allan Saint-Maximin and Mo Diame were among those players who picked the brains of the Frenchman before moving to Newcastle. Ben Arfa, tellingly, told the pair to join the club without a second thought and spoke highly of his time at St James' Park and the club's fanbase.

It is a new era now, but you can be sure if another French speaker reaches out to Ben Arfa, the 37-year-old will do likewise. Once he has put down his racket, of course.