He appeared intermittently on French satellite channel Canal Plus’ football coverage for major tournaments, and was the face of Danone, Adidas and even Lego. Still based in Madrid, he visited his parents’ roots in Algeria and invested his time and no little money in a number of charities from Bangladesh to Switzerland. “I wanted to dedicate myself to something else.” “When I retired, I didn’t want to be a coach,” recalled Zidane. Yazid had the warrior quality of his impoverished community. “He spoke with the ball,” Varraud once recalled. Jean Varraud, the scout who discovered Zidane and brought him to Cannes, was stunned. The fifth child born to Algerian parents Smail and Malika in La Castellane, a working-class Marseille suburb plagued by high unemployment, drug trafficking and prostitution, he first started kicking a ball with his brothers around the Place Tartane beneath the family’s high-rise apartment block. Yes, it took time – first at Cannes, then Bordeaux – to mature into a World Cup and Champions League winner, but the talent was obvious from an early age. Zinedine Zidane has always been loath to admit it, insisting he became a great through hard work, not pre-ordained talent, but this was a footballer whose prodigious gifts were always evident. But can this natural introvert really inspire a group of players? Can he control the temper that resulted in 14 red cards as a player? And, most importantly, could he really afford another season like 2014/15 to succeed on the bench in the way he did on the pitch? After all, patience isn’t exactly a virtue associated with Florentino Perez.
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