Zinedine Zidane

The last thing he did as a footballer was head an Italian defender in the chest in the 109th minute of a World Cup final, and get sent off.

Two days before that he had been voted the best player at the tournament. The day after it he was still voted the best player at the tournament — the Golden Ball was announced after the final, and the vote stood.

Both of those facts are true and neither explains the other. The career is like that throughout.

Zinedine Yazid Zidane was born on 23 June 1972 in La Castellane, a housing estate in the sixteenth arrondissement of Marseille. He was the youngest of five children of Smaïl and Malika Zidane, who had emigrated to Paris in 1953 from Aguemoune, a village in the Berber-speaking region of Kabylia in Algeria. His father was a warehouseman and a night security guard.

He was spotted at fourteen, at a training camp in Aix-en-Provence, by a Cannes scout named Jean Varraud.

He made his professional debut for Cannes on 18 May 1989, aged sixteen, against Nantes. His first professional goal came on 10 February 1991, also against Nantes. The Cannes chairman had promised him a car if he ever scored, and gave him one at the party afterwards.

He moved to Bordeaux in 1992, and to Juventus in the summer of 1996, immediately after they had won the Champions League.

France had never won a World Cup. They were hosting it, and in the group stage Zidane was sent off for a stamp on Fuad Anwar of Saudi Arabia — the first Frenchman ever dismissed in a World Cup finals match — and banned for two games.

He came back for the quarter-final.

In the final at the Stade de France, against the Brazil of Ronaldo, he scored twice with his head. Both came from corners: the first in the twenty-ninth minute, outjumping Leonardo from Emmanuel Petit's delivery; the second on the stroke of half-time, the ball going through Roberto Carlos's legs on the line. Petit added a third in stoppage time. France won 3–0.

He is a midfielder remembered for elegance and close control, and he won the biggest match in his country's history with two headers.

Two years later France won the European Championship as well, becoming the first team to hold both titles at once since West Germany in 1974. Zidane scored a bending free kick against Spain in the quarter-final and a golden-goal penalty against Portugal in the semi, and set up Thierry Henry against Denmark. UEFA named him the player of the tournament.

In 2001 Real Madrid paid 150 billion lire for him — about €77.5 million, paid in instalments. It was a world record and it stayed one for eight years.

On 15 May 2002, at Hampden Park, Real Madrid played Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League final. On the stroke of half-time a high, looping ball came in from the left, and Zidane, running onto it, hit it with his weaker left foot without letting it drop — a volley struck at shoulder height into the top corner.

Real won 2–1. It is routinely called one of the greatest goals in the competition's history, and the thing that makes it remarkable is not the technique but the decision: almost nobody attempts that.

He announced he would retire after the World Cup in Germany. France scraped through a group of two draws and a win, and then he played the best football of his thirties.

Spain in the round of sixteen: France won 3–1 and he scored. Brazil in the quarter-final: France won 1–0 and he set up Henry. Portugal in the semi-final: France won 1–0 and he scored the penalty.

In the final against Italy on 9 July, in the seventh minute, he took a penalty and chipped it — a Panenka, in a World Cup final, at 0–0. It hit the underside of the bar and went in. Materazzi equalised with a header on nineteen minutes.

In the 109th minute Materazzi pulled his shirt, said something, and Zidane turned and headbutted him in the chest. The assistant referee did not see it. The fourth official, Luis Medina Cantalejo, confirmed it over the headset, and Horacio Elizondo sent him off in the 110th.

Italy won on penalties, 5–3. David Trezeguet hit the bar.

More than a year later Materazzi confirmed what he had said: "I prefer the whore that is your sister." He has always denied insulting Zidane's mother.

Zidane's own explanation has never been an apology. In 2009 he said: "Let's not forget that provocation is a terrible thing. I have never been one to provoke; I have never done it." He also said he would rather die than apologise to Materazzi, while admitting that he could never have lived with himself had he stayed on the pitch.

And once, to Esquire, he said something that reframes the whole incident as a pattern rather than an aberration: "If you look at the 14 red cards I had in my career, 12 of them were a result of provocation."

Fourteen red cards. The most graceful footballer of his generation was sent off fourteen times.

These are the league figures Wikipedia carries in his profile; his all-competitions totals are higher. His last club match was on 7 May 2006, a 3–3 draw with Villarreal, and he scored in it.

He retired as the fourth most capped player in French history. He also played twenty times for the under-21s and won four caps at under-17 level.

Individual: Ballon d'Or 1998, second in 2000, third in 1997. FIFA World Player of the Year 1998, 2000 and 2003 — the joint most, with Ronaldo. World Cup Golden Ball 2006. Euro 2000 Player of the Tournament. Named the best European player of the previous fifty years by UEFA in 2004.

He is one of only five players to have scored in two World Cup finals, in 1998 and 2006.

His three goals in World Cup finals put him level with Pelé, Vavá and Geoff Hurst, a record until Kylian Mbappé passed it in 2022.

He also holds a share of a less flattering record: six cards in World Cup matches, level with Cafu.

Zlatan Ibrahimović: "Zidane was from another planet. When Zidane stepped onto the pitch, the ten other guys just got suddenly better."

Marcello Lippi, who coached him at Juventus: "I think Zidane is the greatest talent we've known in football these last twenty years."

Franz Beckenbauer: "Zidane is one of the greatest players in history, a truly magnificent player."

Roberto Carlos, who played behind him for five years: "He is the best player I've seen."

Sid Lowe wrote the line that gets closest to the thing itself: "Zidane was football's answer to the Bolshoi Ballet. Zidane was elegance above all else."

Ninety-five goals in five hundred and six league matches is a modest return for a career this size, and it is the wrong measure entirely. What he did was slow the game down. In an era when football was getting faster every season, he played as though there were more time available than there actually was, and the effect on everyone around him was that there was.

On his own background he said: "I have an affinity with the Arabic world. I have it in my blood, via my parents." A boy from a housing estate in north Marseille, son of Algerian immigrants, became the face of a French team whose victory in 1998 was read across the country as a statement about what France was.

Eight years later he ended his career by walking past the trophy on his way down the tunnel.