To football fans lucky enough to have watched him in his heyday, Zinedine Zidane was, quite simply, God. His best performance? Take your pick. The two headers that helped France to victory against Brazil in the 1998 World Cup? His unforgettably stunning left-footed volley against Bayer Leverkusen, the goal that won Real Madrid its 12th Champions League title? Or maybe it was just the graceful tricks and flicks that made him so watchable on any day and so indispensable to club and country.
Now as he gets ready to take up his challenging role as coach of Real Madrid, it is perhaps worth recalling that the former attacking mid-fielder is much more than an insanely talented footballer attracting worshipful crowds wherever he goes. The footballing world has no shortage of those, in any case. Much beyond footballing stardom, Zidane represents everything that is best about the sport by virtue of being who he is.
At a time when Europe in general and France in particular is being roiled by an ugly resurgence of racism and xenophobia, Zidane is a symbol of the innate multiculturalism and equality of opportunity that has made Europe the world's most dynamic footballing industry.
Today, ironically, when Muslims (and Africans in particular) are being condemned under the universal rubric of "terrorist" and overt racism is considered politically acceptable, few French people have difficulty feting Zidane and claiming him as one of their own. Or, to put it another way, the French choose not to highlight the fact that he is actually Algerian by origin (though born in France) and he comes from a family of economic refugees, not so unlike the desperate millions who are crowding into Europe today. Zidane's parents emigrated to France in 1953 from the former French colony of Algeria, just ahead of the outbreak of the debilitating Algerian war of independence. Zidane's father worked as a watchman in the port city of Marseille, and he grew up playing football in a neighbourhood where unemployment and crime were high.
Nor did Zidane ever repudiate his roots. After France's 1998 World Cup victory, he made it a point to talk of the many nationalities and ethnicities that made up the Cup-winning squad - Senegalese, Ghanians, and several from former French colonies in the West Indies. In the first edition of a book co-authored with team-mate Christophe Dugarry, after the World Cup victory, he wrote: "It was for all Algerians who are proud of their flag, who have made sacrifices for their family but who have never abandoned their own culture".
It is interesting, however, that this telling quote was dropped from the second edition of the book as being "too political". By then, Zidane's image managers had taken over. In a perceptively critical 2009 essay titled "The Commercialization of Zidane's Image after 1998" Sara Murphy and Alex Tschumi suggest that the motive for this careful image-building was to create the "acceptable" face of the immigrant to maximise his commercial interests.
Unlike the traditional hard-drinking, womanising, "bad boy" image that had become mandatory for footballing stars in those days (Diego Maradona, Paul Gascoigne, George Best to name just some), Zidane was projected as the responsible Family Man, promoting Good Causes and so on. It paid off too. The ultra-conservative Christian Dior saw no dissonance in appointing Zidane its first male model. Adidas, Danone, France Telecom and Generali France have at one time or another signed him on for campaigns (if the saintly image was marred by that infamous head-butt in that last miserable World Cup Final, fans resolutely chose to remember his many great performances).
Football has produced many stars but management has been the graveyard of many reputations, none more than those who have managed the Galacticos, the descriptor for Real Madrid's habitual galaxy of stars. Who knows, whether Zidane will succeed or fail. Who cares. To most of us, he'll always be Zizou, the poor Algerian boy with divine talent.
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