It is apt that the most perplexing football country will now be guided by the most enigmatic of leaders
Even in his playing days, Zinedine Zidane seemed unknowable. As a manager, the sense of distance has only grown. He won three Champions Leagues with Real Madrid without ever giving a sense of what his idea of football looked like.
France are perhaps the most perplexing football country: a squad that teems with such talent that a B team would be serious contenders at a World Cup, that reached three major finals under Didier Deschamps with a sense of unfulfilment, a team that progressed but rarely entranced, or at least didn’t until this summer’s World Cup, when they attacked with gusto and ended up overrun in midfield by Spain.
On Friday, the two come together as Zidane, for the first time, leads France in their Nations League fixture against Turkey, an enigmatic coach leading a mercurial squad.
Zidane is one of five coaches to have won the Champions League on three or more occasions, ranking alongside Bob Paisley, Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique and behind only Carlo Ancelotti. He is the only manager to win three successive Champions Leagues and yet few would consider him one of the game’s elite coaches. In that spell he won one La Liga title.
He left five days after the third of those Champions League successes, vaguely citing the club’s need for change. Like so much else in his career, his motivations were opaque. But he returned the following March after the inglorious reign of Julen Lopetegui and Santi Solari’s attempt to pick up the pieces. He won another La Liga title in the two full seasons that followed.
How to assess a coach in the modern world? Two league titles in four full seasons. Three Champions Leagues in his first two and a half seasons. In another age, in another country, that would have marked Zidane as indisputably elite, but in Spain in the past decade? Domestically, his achievements feel about par.
Madrid and Barcelona win everything, so for a Madrid coach to win half the league titles available is essentially what would be expected. But he lost eight of his first 100 games, a record. His side scored in a record 73 consecutive games. They won a joint-record 16 La Liga games in a row. They won a record 13 successive away games.
They are stats that seem unanswerable, but their accumulation has the opposite effect to that which might be expected. Zidane’s Madrid, in his first spell, were crushingly dominant. But were they dominant because of his genius or did he appear a genius because of their dominance? What comes to matter, then, is not the how many, but the how. Did Madrid win with dashing football of fitting elegance? To which the answer is, again, a shrug: they were fine.
Those three Champions League wins in a row, equally, offer surprisingly little evidence for Zidane’s greatness. Madrid have always had a tremendous capacity for achieving European success in the shadows, as though they are the default, the club that wins when nobody else is quite inspired enough to do so. Rarely has that been felt as acutely as in 2016, when they beat Roma and Wolfsburg, then edged by Manchester City on penalties in the semi-final thanks to a Fernando own goal before beating Atlético Madrid on penalties in an unmemorable final.
The following year was more impressive: the extra-time surge against Bayern and Cristiano Ronaldo-inspired demolitions of Napoli, Atlético and Juventus. But 2018 was a return to curiously ordinary success. Yes, Ronaldo and Luka Modrić were often brilliant, but there was also carelessness, notably in the quarter-final win against Juventus when they let a three-goal lead slip before a late penalty rescued them. Victory over Liverpool in the final came after a shoulder injury sustained by Mohamed Salah in a challenge with Sergio Ramos, a terrible error by a possibly injured Loris Karius and a Gareth Bale wonder goal.
It was hard to isolate any one moment in the success that could definitively be assigned to Zidane’s coaching genius. He didn’t create the midfield three of Casemiro, Modric and Toni Kroos. He didn’t find some new role for Ronaldo or Bale. Perhaps Zidane was some elite player whisperer, coaxing them to habitual greatness, but it was hard for an outsider to tell. Being Zidane, he was inscrutable, a cipher into which observers could read whatever message they wished.
Real Madrid coaches often run into a similar problem. They have great players. Great players do great things. Philosophies and structures always seem subservient to their talents. Ancelotti, like Zidane, has often been underappreciated, seen as somebody who essentially lets the players be. That is probably unfair and, even if it were not, perhaps that, too, is a skill. After all, plenty of coaches at Real Madrid have not been able to let the players express their innate superiority.
At the very least, it can be said that Zidane has an aura. Even those who accused him of being little more than a pair of hands clapping on the touchline must acknowledge that some hands are more authoritative than others. That may turn out to be an essential quality with France, a national team that became notorious between their two World Cup triumphs for ill-discipline, with the scandals of Seoul in 2002 and the strike at Knysna in 2010.
Whatever doubts there may be about whether Deschamps’s caution was counterproductive – until at the last, in that semi-final against Spain, he wasn’t cautious enough – over his 14 years in charge he prevented the sort of breakdowns of discipline that had undermined his predecessors, despite some extremely challenging situations.
Perhaps this is not such a troubled or troublesome France squad as some of the past decade have been, but that Zidane has taken the unusual step of banning the press from covering the arrival of players at their Clairefontaine base suggests he is eager to make a bid for control early.
His squad features a number of new faces. This is not continuity Deschamps. In the greater autonomy national coaches have compared with their club counterparts, perhaps, with France, the true nature of Zidane the coach will emerge and the great enigma will develop a face.
