3 Reasons Why Zinedine Zidane Is Already One Of The Greatest Managers In World Football

#2 Prioritises winning titles over the course of the season

Real Madrid Celebrate Winning La Liga in 2017

If you want to be a manager who is able to ingrain his philosophy and style of play in the team, you need to give more importance to the processes than the results. It takes some time for the players and the team to get used to the way the manager functions, and the league provides the perfect opportunity to try and put that into action.

Knockout cup competitions have the added pressure of being vulnerable to an exit, which forces coaches to employ tactics that'll make sure they don't lose, rather than making sure they win. And when this happens, football loses out.

Cup competitions are often decided in the course of 10 matches or less, but in the league, the team needs to contend with nearly 4 times that number of matches.

When a team wins a cup competition they are often vulnerable to judgement that implies that the team got lucky. That is never the case for league champions, as winning a title after contending with 38 matches has a lot more to do than with just luck.

Barcelona have managed to win 7 out of the last 10 league titles while Real have managed just two in the same time. One with Mourinho in 2012 and the other with Zidane just last season. Even Carlo Ancelotti failed to land the La Liga title in his stint as Real manager. So did Rafa Benitez, who always tends to make his mark in knock-out competitions.

Despite winning three Champions League titles, Zidane has repeatedly made his feelings clear - of wanting to win the league more than European glory and that sounds like a man who knows what he is talking about. Of course, he does! It's Zinedine Zidane for God's sake.