Fort - Zidane

Get inside the mind of footballs most enigmatic icon.

Zidane is the master Pele

One of modern footballs most brilliant players and one of its most iconic and mysterious figures Zinedine Zidanes football career is the stuff of legend. A World Cup-winner with France, he became the worlds most expensive player in 2001 when he moved from Juventus to Real Madrid for 46million, where his exceptional talent earned him a reputation as one of the greatest players of all-time. His playing career concluded explosively when he retired after being sent off for head-butting Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final.

But his football career was far from over. After a spell coaching in Spain, he was appointed manager of Real Madrid in 2015 and immediately demonstrated that his skill as a manager matched his talent on the pitch, leading the team to successive Champions League victories and establishing him as one of the new managerial greats.

Rarely speaking to the press, Zidane is known as a man who speaks only with the ball. In this definitive biography, Patrick Fort and Jean Philippe take us behind the scenes of his exceptional career, revealing the man behind the legend.

Patrick Fort
Patrick Fort is a leading French sports journalist.

Jean Philippe
Jean Philippe is an acclaimed journalist who has followed Zinedine Zidanes career since its earliest stages in the French football leagues.

In memory of Jean Varraud, without whose help and encouragement this book would never have been written.

Five thousand people: more than could sometimes be found at the Stade Coubertin in La Bocca when AS Cannes were playing in the Premire Division. Only slightly less than the population of Marseilles La Castellane district.

Five thousand people: that was the estimated number of spectators who attended Real Madrids first-team training session on 5 January 2016. On the eve of the Epiphany, a public holiday in Spain, it was the only training session of the year open to the public. More importantly, it was the first to be overseen by Zinedine Zidane.

The day after his appointment as a replacement for Rafael Bentez, the former Real Madrid number 5 visibly embraced a vocation he had been extremely sceptical about ten years earlier, when he brought his career as a player to an end. But he did eventually become a manager, someone who no longer wears a numbered shirt but has numerous responsibilities on his back instead.

He may have already been managing for two and a half years, but not in such an exposed fashion. He was now in charge of the first team at the most successful club in the world and in UEFAs terms the best, ahead of Barcelona and Bayern Munich as well as the richest.

Football is no longer a sport; it is a huge market, an economic sector in its own right, a spectacle with coveted audience shares, and a subject of passionate debate. Not everyone plays football, but everyone talks about it, particularly in Spain.

In Barcelona, for example, two days after Baras defeat at the hands of Real following an unbeaten run of 39 matches, talk of football even encroached into the corridors and lounges of the luxurious Majestic Hotel at the top of Las Ramblas. On the roof terrace, the hotels French general manager, Pascal Billard, pointed out the Camp Nou Stadium, home of FC Barcelona. He explained that it is almost impossible to avoid football here; in early April 2016, the name of Madrids new manager was on everyones lips, including those of its rival, Barcelona. The name of the coach who had just won his first Clsico was famous. Even better, he was respected.

In the land of passion, Zidane was attractive and he could sell. In Real Madrids stores, Zidanes shirt was still a force to be reckoned with, bearing his name and the number 5 he wore as a player.

Ten years after hanging up his boots, the novice manager had rekindled the memory of the champion he had been, a genius passer of the ball and goalscorer, elegant and virtuous, successful and legendary. The eagerness for images on this January day revealed what the public were subconsciously waiting for: to see the player again. A subtle flick of the ball from him caught on camera during a training session was enough to trigger hundreds of thousands of views online. A piece of unexpected ball control at the edge of the pitch during an official match resulted in applause from the crowd and slow-motion replays for television viewers.

But the player would not return. If his style reappeared on the pitch, it would only be by proxy in the movement of his team.

He might play no longer, but he continues to be a playmaker when he coaches. He is not unaware of the laws of the sport, of the market. He manages, confronted by the risks of the new profession he has chosen for himself. Victory is a reprieve; defeat the beginning of a challenge.

Madrid, the Valdebebas training centre. Enough tiresome drills. The time to play has come.

Come on, lets have some fun! He coaches with plenty of spirit. When he started out as a player he was still a child, and hes a man who never lost the energy of that youthful innocence.

When he started out as a manager he was unquestionably an adult, a father to four boys, a father who has often reflected and acted by thinking of his own father, aware of the efforts and demands that sport at the highest level requires. But also the immense joy the game can bring just like life.

It was cold. It was winter 1953 in Saint-Denis. Ammi Smal Zidane had just left his native Kabylie, where he had been an agricultural labourer. He had come to work on a building site in the Paris banlieue, far from his village of Aguemoune in a mountainous region of Algeria where the economy was based mainly on agriculture, olive harvesting in particular. Smals daily life was gruelling. Homeless, he sometimes slept in makeshift shelters on the building site, exposed to the cold. This life lasted for three years, swallowing up his youth. But he pushed on.

Ten years later, Smal started a family with Malika also originally from Kabylie with whom he emigrated first to Paris, then Marseille. She gave him five children. First, three sons, Madjid in 1963, Farid in 1965, Noureddine in 1967, and a daughter, Lila, in 1969.

The youngest of the brood arrived on 23 June 1972. They named him Zinedine. At the time, the family was living in an apartment in La Castellane, a housing estate in the north of Marseille. The baby slept in the same room as Madjid, better known as Djamel.

When he was old enough to decide, Zinedine preferred to be called Yazid, which was his middle name, and so that was what they called him. He was doted on by the family, as the youngest often are. He would sometimes fall asleep clutching his football. A lively child, he was passionate about the game. As in working-class neighbourhoods all over the world, life for many children in La Castellane revolved around the round ball. Football was both their primary occupation and preoccupation.

Yazid grew up in a relatively new housing development, one with a reputation for hardship. In such a delicate social setting he was at risk from any number of dangerous influences. With his mother constantly keeping an eye on him and surrounded by his brothers, Yazid spent hours playing in Place de la Tartane, particularly after school.