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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
