Zinedine Zidane finally has the France job he turned down every club to wait for

Zinedine Zidane

Photo: Hadi Abyar / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 23, 1972 16th arrondissement of Marseille
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	World Cup · Eurocup · Champions ×3
Individual awards	World Cup Golden Ball · FIFA World Player of the Year · L'Équipe Champion of Champions

A packed Stade de France turned up on a Friday night to watch a man in a dark suit stand almost still. Zinedine Zidane was on the touchline as France coach in front of a home crowd for the first time, and the visitors were Italy, the side he last faced as a player before walking past the World Cup trophy in Berlin with a red card behind him. Michael Olise smashed a free kick in off the crossbar, Alessandro Bastoni equalised, Dayot Upamecano was sent off late, and the night ended level. The scoreline was almost beside the point.

For five years Zidane waited. He has said that clubs called during that time and that he refused every one of them, because the only job he wanted was the national team he had carried to its first world title. The waiting is the story. A footballer whose great chapters tended to end abruptly, with a headbutt in one case and an open letter to a newspaper in another, chose for once to sit out the clock until the door he wanted opened.

The road starts in La Castellane, a housing estate on the northern edge of Marseille, where Zinedine Yazid Zidane was born on 23 June 1972 to parents who had come to France from Aguemoune, a Kabyle village in Algeria. Cannes took him into its academy at 15, and he made his first-division debut for the club against Nantes in May 1989, a few weeks before his 17th birthday. Around the same time he met Véronique Fernández, a dancer, who would become his wife.

Bordeaux signed him in 1992 and turned him into the player Europe travelled to watch: a playmaker who seemed to slow the game down around him, all sole-of-the-foot control and the 360-degree spin that became known as the roulette. Bordeaux reached the UEFA Cup final in 1996 and lost it to Bayern Munich, and Juventus bought him that summer. In Turin he won Serie A twice and reached two Champions League finals, losing both, to Borussia Dortmund and then to Real Madrid.

His country got the best of him first. In the 1998 World Cup final at the Stade de France he scored twice against Brazil, two headers from corners, in a 3-0 win that gave France its first world title, and he won the Ballon d’Or the same year. Two years later he was named player of the tournament as France won Euro 2000, a run in which he settled the semi-final against Portugal with a golden-goal penalty.

Real Madrid paid a world-record €77.5 million to bring him to Spain in 2001. The defining image of those years arrived within a season: the volley that beat Bayer Leverkusen in the 2002 Champions League final, a looping ball met with his weaker left foot before it touched the grass. He was named FIFA World Player of the Year for a third time in 2003.

The tidy version of Zidane is pure grace, with Berlin filed away as a single lapse. The record does not support it. He was sent off 14 times in his career, including at the 1998 World Cup itself, for stamping on Saudi Arabia’s Fuad Anwar in the group stage, a suspension served in the middle of the tournament he would go on to decide. Even the art world caught the pattern: when Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno filmed him with 17 synchronised cameras for Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, following one Real Madrid match against Villarreal, the film ends with him sent off after a brawl. The 2006 World Cup final, in which he scored a penalty, drove his head into Marco Materazzi’s chest in extra time and watched Italy win the shoot-out without him, came weeks after he had announced his retirement, and he was still named the tournament’s best player. The temper came with the touch.

The coaching career began quietly, as Carlo Ancelotti’s assistant at Real Madrid and then in charge of Castilla, the club’s reserve side. When the club handed him the first team in January 2016, few predicted what followed: three consecutive Champions League titles, the third won in Kyiv against Liverpool, plus the Spanish league in 2017. Five days after Kyiv he resigned. He came back in March 2019, won La Liga again in 2020 and left a second time in May 2021, this time with an open letter in the sports daily AS saying the club “no longer has the faith in me I need” and complaining that talk of his dismissal had been leaked to the press.

Then he stopped. Five years passed without a club, while Didier Deschamps kept the France job into a 14th year and one last World Cup in North America, which ended with a semi-final defeat to Spain and a 6-4 loss to England in the third-place play-off in Miami. On 28 July 2026 the French federation named Zidane as Deschamps’ successor on a four-year contract that runs to the 2030 World Cup. “For me it’s a continuity, a dream,” he said at his presentation.

The start has been close to ideal on paper. Kylian Mbappé scored the only goal in Türkiye on 25 September, making Zidane the first France coach since Aimé Jacquet in 1994 to win his opening match, although Mbappé hurt his knee in the process. Three days later Olise came off the bench against Belgium and ran from inside his own half to score the late winner. The draw with Italy on 2 October, in front of 77,118 spectators, leaves France top of their Nations League group with seven points from three games.

Zidane married Véronique in 1994, and the couple have four sons, Enzo, Luca, Théo and Elyaz, all of whom went into football. Luca, a goalkeeper, chose Algeria, the country of his grandparents, and played for the Fennecs at this summer’s World Cup, the same tournament at which his father’s future team fell short.

Belgium come to the Stade de France on 5 October, with Italy away on 12 November and Türkiye at home three days later. Beyond them lie Euro 2028 and the 2030 World Cup, the tournament his contract was written around. For a man whose best years tended to end in an abrupt exit, the France job asks for something he has rarely offered a team: staying.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, Kylian Mbappé, Real Madrid, football managers, Didier Deschamps, France national football team, Zinedine Zidane, Juventus