Achraf Lazaar left Newcastle United on loan in the summer.
Achraf Lazaar has revealed to The Chronicle that he decided to leave Newcastle United on loan in the summer due to a lack of first-team football under Rafael Benitez.
The 25-year-old defender joined Newcastle for £3 million 18 months ago but did not make a single Championship start last season, only coming off the bench four times.
The Magpies’ promotion to the Premier League was likely to make Lazaar’s first-team prospects even bleaker and consequently the left-back decided to join Italian side Benevento on a season-long loan.
Nevertheless, Lazaar, who joined from Palermo, reveals that Benitez did not want him to leave, but felt a departure was in his best interests.
“Furthermore I can tell you one thing: Newcastle didn’t even want me to go away on loan. It was me,” he told The Chronicle.
“I let them understand that I really cared about playing more minutes. The most important thing, in my opinion, for a football player is playing the more minutes possible, in order to have the right concentration, the right focus that you have on the matches.”
If Benitez did want him to stay, it’s probably because Paul Dummett was ruled out for a few months and such an absence meant that Newcastle were short on left-back options.
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