Zinedine Zidane will take charge of France for the first time on Friday, when the national team meet Turkey in the Nations League. It is a fixture that begins to address a question which has followed Zidane throughout his coaching career: what, precisely, is his idea of football?
His record at Real Madrid is, on paper, close to unimpeachable. He won the Champions League three times, which places him among five coaches to have lifted the trophy on three or more occasions, alongside Bob Paisley, Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique and behind only Carlo Ancelotti. He is the only manager to have won three successive Champions Leagues. Yet across the same period he claimed just one La Liga title.
Zidane left Madrid five days after the third of those European crowns, citing vaguely the club’s need for change. He returned the following March, after the inglorious reign of Julen Lopetegui and Santi Solari’s attempt to pick up the pieces, and added another La Liga title across the two full seasons that followed. That amounts to two league titles in four full seasons, alongside three Champions Leagues in his first two and a half.
The statistical case for him is striking. He lost eight of his first 100 games, a record, and his side scored in 73 consecutive matches. They won a joint-record 16 La Liga games in a row and a record 13 successive away fixtures. But the accumulation of those numbers has an odd effect: Zidane’s Madrid were crushingly dominant, and the question becomes whether they were dominant because of his genius, or whether he appeared a genius because of their dominance. The Champions League runs themselves offer surprisingly little clarity. In 2016 Madrid beat Roma and Wolfsburg, edged past Manchester City on penalties in the semi-final thanks to a Fernando own goal, then beat Atlético Madrid on penalties in an unmemorable final. The following year was more impressive, with an extra-time surge against Bayern and Cristiano Ronaldo-inspired demolitions of Napoli, Atlético and Juventus. In 2018 there was carelessness again, notably when Madrid let a three-goal lead slip against Juventus in the quarter-final before a late penalty rescued them, and the final win over Liverpool arrived after Mohamed Salah injured a shoulder in a challenge with Sergio Ramos, a terrible error by a possibly injured Loris Karius and a Gareth Bale wonder goal.
It is hard to isolate any one moment in that success that could definitively be assigned to Zidane’s coaching. He did not create the midfield three of Casemiro, Luka Modrić and Toni Kroos, and he did not find some new role for Ronaldo or Bale. He may have been an elite whisperer of elite players, coaxing them towards habitual greatness, but from outside it was impossible to tell. Real Madrid coaches run into this problem regularly: great players do great things, and philosophies and structures seem subservient to their talent. Ancelotti has often been underappreciated in the same way, seen as a man who simply lets his players be — which is probably unfair, and even if it were not, might itself be a skill. Plenty of coaches at Madrid have been unable to let their players express their innate superiority. Zidane, at the very least, has an aura, and some hands carry more authority than others on a touchline.
France present a different kind of test. They are a squad so deep in talent that a second string would be serious World Cup contenders, and under Didier Deschamps they reached three major finals with a persistent sense of unfulfilment, progressing without ever really entrancing anyone. That changed at this summer’s World Cup, where they attacked with gusto and were overrun in midfield by Spain in the semi-final. Deschamps’ caution was frequently questioned, although in that semi-final he was not cautious enough. What he did do across 14 years in charge was prevent the kinds of disciplinary breakdown that had undermined his predecessors, in a national team that became notorious between its two World Cup triumphs for ill-discipline, from the scandals of Seoul in 2002 to the strike at Knysna in 2010.
This France squad may not be as troubled as some of the past decade, but Zidane has already signalled an appetite for control, taking the unusual step of banning the press from covering the arrival of players at the Clairefontaine base. His squad contains a number of new faces; this is not continuity Deschamps. National coaches enjoy greater autonomy than their club counterparts, and that freedom may be where the true nature of Zidane the coach finally emerges, and the great enigma develops a face.