Zinedine Zidane
One of the world’s greatest players is now Real Madrid’s most successful coach
The day he played his last game for Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu, Zinedine Zidane slipped out of the stadium without a word – which was a very Zinedine Zidane way of going. It was left for everyone else to celebrate him and for him to just play football.
When the teams came out they wore shirts with “Zidane, 2001-2005” stitched into them. All around the ground, fans wore his number five shirt. Giant screens replayed his best moments in white, including European Cup Final goal. And there were banners everywhere, with one begging: “Referee, please don’t blow the final whistle: that would be the signal for Zidane to leave us.”
Even before the referee had blown, Zidane had departed, withdrawn to a standing ovation three minutes from the end. He looked a little embarrassed by it, hiding in the tunnel, waiting patiently out of sight for the game to end so that he could swap shirts with Juan Roman Riquelme. Team-mates had to literally push him back out to where supporters were waiting to applaud him one last time. And then he went back in, got changed and left it all behind.
It was typical Zidane. He was always a strange, reluctant kind of galactico: quiet, humble, maybe even a little shy, not keen to be on camera. He didn’t want a fuss or a fanfare.
Zidane still had the World Cup to come. When Spain met France, one front page ran with the headline: “We’re going to retire Zidane.” He admitted he had seen it and been annoyed by it, and then left it looking daft as France beat Spain and went all the way to the Final. As they progressed, so the volume rose, with messages from Spain begging him not to retire. But Zidane knew it was time. Madrid hadn’t won a trophy in three years – and he admitted that he felt responsible for that – and he could see his own decline. He no longer felt as he once had; he needed to get away.
He was tired of it all: the hotels, the travelling, the pressure he piled upon himself, everything that went with the game. But not the game itself.
In retirement, Zidane was given a role at Madrid, but it was ill-defined and just there for the sake of being there. He eventually came to feel that there was something a little empty about it. The competition pulled at him. He had been away and he admitted that he wanted to do something more real. “You miss the adrenaline of playing: you’ll always miss that,” he said, “but not the rest of it.”
He went in to Valdebebas every day, watched the youth team, saw some players he liked, advised the president. But he wanted more. He missed being able to compete.
One thing often overlooked with Zidane was that he was a competitor above all else; you don’t come out of the Place Tartane in Marseille without being tough.
The very last day of his career, his 789th game, was the 2006 World Cup Final, a match which began with him chipping in a classy penalty and ended with him head-butting Marco Materazzi. Afterwards, Jacques Chirac called him a man of “heart and conviction”. On the day that Zidane: A Twenty-first
Century Portrait was filmed, he received a red card too, one of 14 in his career. That was part of his portrait, as was the sweat that would pour from him like someone had left a tap on. It was a telling image. He wanted to win. One day in Valladolid he famously performed a pirouette around the goalkeeper and then put the ball over. While the media and fans said that the fact that he missed made it even more beautiful – art for art’s sake – he just said: “I missed.”
People looked at the way he played, the grace and the elegance, and thought it was effortless, but it wasn’t. For all the talent, he always had doubts. And he worked endlessly at his game, running miles on the pitch and off it. He rejected