Iron fist in a velvet glove: Zinedine Zidane and Real Madrid's 'philosophy'

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

The Glasgow Kiss

How could he, we wondered. Of all the people, how could he?

For nigh on two months, he hadn’t been playing football – he had been dancing. He had returned from retirement, rolled back the years and dragged an otherwise lackluster France to the World Cup final - pirouetting and sashaying his way through the likes of Spain, Brazil, and Portugal.

In the final, against Italy, he had opened the scoring with a Panenka-d penalty of incredible audacity against the best goalkeeper in the world. It was going to be the last match he ever played, for club or country, and immortality was within touching distance.

Then, Marco Materazzi insulted his sister.

When that unmistakable bald pate crashed into the broad chest of the Italian defender, time stood still. How could he, we thought

He who had brought us so much joy through the simple act of kicking a ball around, he who had made athletic endeavour look so utterly effortless, he of whom Sid Lowe once wrote ever so memorably, “He was football's answer to the Bolshoi Ballet. He was elegance above all else."... his last act on a football field was to smash his noggin’ into another’s chest.

Zinedine Zidane, grace personified, had ended his career with an act of unparalleled violence.

This violence was not a one-off, in a career that spanned seventeen years across Cannes, Bordeaux, Juventus, and Real Madrid - and Les Blues, of course – he amassed 14 red cards... 12 of which, as he himself admitted,” were a result of provocation.”

We had ignored it, throughout - there’s no genius who is as loved as flawed one, is there? - his anger and temper hidden behind the magic cloak that was his footballing ability. He was loved for what he could do with the ball, and how he did it, for doing the unthinkable – a Kabyle who united France – and for moments of brilliance that made us all stand and wonder... like that one in Hampden Park.

Only the greatest footballers get that one goal that defines their entire player career – Maradona had that goal against England, Pele had that bicycle kick against Sweden – and Zizou had his on a cold Glasgow night in 2002:

So when he ended his career with that Glasgow Kiss to Materazzi all we could think of was the one he’d given Bayer Leverkusen four years previously.

You see, it wasn’t the act, per se, that angered us so... it should have been enough, the sheer brutality of it was stunning... but the fact that it was he who did it.

How could he?

Was this the way we would remember Zizou?

It looked like it would be... through that particular tinge of nostalgia, regret, and pure love that cult heroes engender... until he decided to go ahead and put on a suit.

Eleven years after he hung up his boots for the last time, one and a half years after getting into his first job as manager of a senior football club, Zinedine Zidane has already started rewriting his legacy – as the manager at the helm of a Real Madrid team that is on the cusp of becoming an all-time great, era-defining team.

The iron fist in a velvet glove

That Glasgow Kiss in 2002 gifted Real Madrid their ninth Champions League victory, but between 9 and a historic 10, there was a wait of 12 years – which in Castilla felt like an eternity. When Sergio Ramos rescued the final in 2014 (before Messrs. Bale, Marcelo, and Ronaldo added the finishing touches) and Madrid finally claimed that elusive Decima, he was there, shouting, gesticulating, assistant to the great Carlo Ancelotti.

He had been appointed as advisor to the President, the newly re-elected Florentino Perez (the same man who broke the world record in 2001 to get Zidane to wear Los Meringues’ storied white jersey), in 2009 before being made special advisor to Real Madrid’s first team after then manager Jose Mourinho batted for him to work closer with the players in 2010. A year later he had been made Sporting Director before he could finally get his hands dirty as assistant manager to Ancelotti in 2013.

In 2014, he was given full control of the reins of a football team for the first time – Real Madrid Castilla, the club’s B side who play in La Segunda Division B – and did nothing of note with them. Then in January 2016, Perez and the Madrid playing squad decided that they had had enough of Rafael Benitez and the President appointed his great Galactico the head coach on a two-and-half-year deal.

All of this, the advisory roles, the jobs as the assistant to the senior team and head coach of the B team, even this one as manager of the senior team seemed to have been given to him because, well, he was Zidane... and Perez was merely indulging him like he would a favourite son. The general consensus was “I mean, come on, sure, Zizou was a fantastic player... but as a coach? Nah... he’s just lucky to get the job”

Six months in, he lifted Real Madrid’s 11^th Champions League title. They still called him ‘lucky’.

Six months after that he lifted the Club World Cup. They still called him ‘lucky’.

It didn’t help that in that one year at the helm he hadn’t said much in press conferences, he hadn’t outlined a ‘strategy’ or discussed the tactical intentions of his sides. He hadn’t tried anything new – sticking to Madrid’s time honoured 4-3-3 or switching to a regular 4-4-2 diamond when one of either Cristiano Ronaldo or Gareth Bale were not available – and he most certainly hadn’t inverted his full-backs or falsified his number 9.

“Ah! Anyone can win with Real Madrid”, they said.

Except not everyone had been able to. They had won just one La Liga in 8 years, and that was 5 years ago.

So when he won Real Madrid their first La Liga triumph in half-a-decade, people stood up and stopped with the “he’s just lucky” “he has the job because he is Zidane” line. When he followed it up by becoming the first manager since the great Arrigo Sacchi to retain the Champions League... well... people didn’t know what to make of it. They couldn’t understand how he’d done it.

You see, they had... we had... forgotten just what had made Zinedine Zidane a winner.

We had forgotten that the behind all that lazy elegance there was a fighter of unnatural ambition, that the velvet glove we all saw hid an iron fist that was driven by an implacable will, a desire-to-win that overrode everything else.

He’d always hated the fact that it was his elegance, and his class, that was always talked about – it made him feel like people didn’t appreciate the effort he had put in –

“I reached this level by sheer dint of hard work, toiling away at scores of tricks and experiments. I used to play with the ball from dawn till dusk and just kept practising.

“If I wasn't playing matches, I was trying out on-on-one or two-against-two with a tennis ball. Then I used to try aiming at certain targets. That's the only way to learn. And if I missed the target, I kept trying until I scored”

– and to tell you the truth, most of us didn’t see it. In the process of making his craft look so effortlessly easy, he’d hid the training, the hard work, and that will-to-win that drove him on so well that we just thought it all came to him naturally.

It was the same when he became the manager. His team won all the time but it always looked so simple, so straightforward, so lacking in ‘tactical complexity’. The fact that his players were so good didn’t help things.

It is a mark of how much he has matured as a man that he doesn’t seem to care. As a player he would constantly strive to underline the effort he put in while talking about his game, he would constantly get offended by even the slightest provocations – whether it was decking an opponent while playing for the Cannes youth team for insinuating less-than-pleasant things about his La Castellane upbringing or putting the hurt on Materazzi in a World Cup Final - and he would show his frustration all the time.

Zidane the player cared about what others thought of him... Zidane the manager?

Ah! He doesn’t give a f***.

Behind that smiling, calm, visage, he appears to have won a battle that no Real Madrid manager has done till date – stand up to the Chairman’s wishes.

Carlo Ancelotti got alienated because of his refusal to give Gareth Bale (another Perez galactico) a more central role. Rafael Benitez got sacked because he tried to play Carlos Casemiro ahead of the much more attacking, much more marketable, James Rodriguez and Isco Alcaron. And because he made the mistake of trying to get Cristiano Ronaldo to rest and play less.

Zidane’s made Bale stay put on the wings, and given him extra defensive duties to boot. He’s played Casemiro in every single match of any import. Ronaldo has never clocked up so few minutes since joining Madrid in 2009.

“I have played seven, eight games fewer than previous seasons and that showed at the end: we have managed it more intelligently,” Ronaldo, who turned 32 this February, said. Actually, it’s 11 games fewer. “I have been saving myself: it is these games when titles are decided” he added, talking about the ones he did play – the ones he scored bucketloads in, the games, and goals, that won Madrid the Champions League and La Liga.

Zidane has smiled, nodded, listened to everyone and everything – and then gone and done what he decided was right. He is democratic and open... listening to all his players, discussing things with them, hearing out his President’s wishes, imposing nothing... but in the end, it was as Brian Clough had once famously said – “We talk about it for twenty minutes and then we decide I was right.”

After all, the velvet glove had always hidden an iron fist.

His famous compatriot, the great Napoleon had once declared “Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide” and that’s what has been Zidane’s greatest asset in his still nascent career as the man in the suit, just as it had been when he was a player dancing around the pitch - the decisiveness of a man who refuses to lose.

The ‘Philosophy’

When Pep Guardiola had gotten appointed at Barcelona, they hadn’t really doubted him the way they did (and still do) Zidane. The Frenchman, after all, had not been groomed by footballing minds of the calibre Johan Cruyff and Bryan Robson (under whom Pep was given quasi-assistant coach duties), he hadn’t spent a whole night talking with modern football’s greatest tactical mind – Marcelo Bielsa – before accepting his coaching offer, he hadn’t booted out the superstar egos in his team overnight so that he would get a team of compliant players, he hadn’t – and still doesn’t – talk about a ‘way of playing’.

It’s in the inevitable comparison with Guardiola that Zidane suffers the most. In fact, at first glance, put next to the Catalan, Zizou is a veritable simpleton.

Guardiola is all about philosophy– what Thierry Henry called the three Ps... Play, Possession, Positioning – he talks constantly about the “way of playing”, about the importance of “passing the ball”, he inverts his full-backs and demands his players be in a particular position during a particular phase of play.

He goes through and makes everyone go through, a whole host of videos. He talks intelligently and animatedly about the technical aspects of the game – with players, with the press, with anyone who’ll listen. For most connoisseurs, he is the ultimate thinking man’s manager.

Zidane, on the other hand... with his empathy (Benitez tried to make Luka Modric stop passing with the outside of the boot stating that it was less accurate, Zidane went up to the Croat and told him he admired the skill), his insistence that players are in no mood to look at blackboards or videos that are longer than 10 minutes, his press conferences where instead of talking about the importance of having inverted wingers, he talks about how his “players arrive at the match with the spirit and physicality of motherf******”... well, that guy stimulates no one intellectually.

He downplays his own importance, saying it’s all about the players. He’s said that if he and Ronaldo had played together, the Portuguese would be the main man. He’s insisted again, and again, that there’s a ‘star’ somewhere guiding him. It’s easy to see where the ‘lucky’ tag comes from, why we don’t regard his managerial skills highly.

That is, though, because we forget what Real Madrid – and Zinedine Zidane – are all about. When he took charge, the press asked him what success constituted - pat came the response: "Winning everything".

They speak of attacking football, of entertaining the masses, but really...the one thing the Bernabeu values above all else is winning. And no one in their storied history has won quite like Zizou– his win percentage of 76% is higher than anyone before him. He has lost just 7 matches in 87.

His team has scored in every single game this season – and they’ve scored all sorts of goals – counter-attacking, passing-the-ball-around-patiently, long-ball, set-piece, scrappy... everything. Just when you stop their plan-A, they seem to be able to bring up a plan-B and a plan-C and a....

They’ve scored so frequently that they hold the world record for scoring in the most number of games consecutively (65 and counting).

He has won two European Cups (that’s as much as Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, and Pep Guardiola), one La Liga, one UEFA Super Cup and one FIFA Club World Cup.

And he’s been in charge for just 18 months.

The man’s just getting started! You can see this Real Madrid side dominating European football for as long as they want, can’t you? You can see this ageing Ronaldo continue to hoover up Ballon d’Or after Ballon d’Or, can’t you?

The one thing you really can’t see is someone beating this team – when they are on their A-game, they are nigh on unstoppable.

With Zidane in charge, they always seem to be on their A-game.

So, what is his philosophy, you ask? What will this Real Madrid team be remembered for as the years pass them by? What is Zinedine Yazid Zidane’s greatest attribute as a manager? What has Zizou’s legacy now become all about?

Winning.

In the end, isn’t that all anyone gives a damn about.

P.S. When Real Madrid and Florentino Perez get fed up because he could win only two out of three trophies – and they will, make no mistake – Zidane might just be the perfect choice for Les Bleus, the France national team, and that massively politically divided ego-centric dressing room. As they would say in Paris... Allez, Zizou!