Zinedine Yazid Zidane

About Zinedine Yazid Zidane

The first thing to say about Zinedine Yazid Zidane's career is how tidy it looks on paper: four clubs, two of them French, then Italy, then Spain, and nothing after. Born in 1972, he signed his first professional terms with Cannes in May 1989 — a modest club on the Côte d'Azur, not a grande of French football, and exactly the sort of place where a teenage attacking midfielder gets minutes rather than promises. He stayed three seasons, until June 1992.

The move to Bordeaux in July 1992 was the first real step up. Four years in the Girondins shirt, from 1992 to 1996, took him from prospect to the central figure of a side built around him, and it is the period that explains everything that followed: an attacking midfielder given the licence to hold the ball in the most crowded part of the pitch, and the physical courage to keep asking for it after every foul. By the time he left France in the summer of 1996, he had never played for a club outside his own country.

Italy came next, and it came at the hardest possible moment to arrive. Zidane joined Juventus in July 1996 and spent five seasons in Turin, through to June 2001 — five years in a Serie A that was then the most tactically severe league in the world, where a number ten was expected to defend, to run, to survive contact, and to do his creative work in spaces the size of a doormat. That Zidane thrived there rather than merely coped is the clearest possible evidence of what kind of footballer he was. The Italian years hardened a player whose gifts had always been obvious.

In July 2001 he crossed to Real Madrid, and the final chapter of his playing career ran in the Spanish capital until May 2006, when he retired at 33. It was a return to a stage that suited him: more space, more freedom, more of the theatre that a player of his particular elegance seemed built for. He never played for another club afterwards, and never went back to France as a footballer.

The totals across those 17 years read 681 appearances, 125 goals and 126 assists — a near-perfect symmetry between finishing and providing that tells you precisely where he operated. Roughly a goal or an assist every two and a half games, from a midfield position, across France, Italy and Spain. A French international throughout, and a player whose route — Cannes to Bordeaux to Juventus to Real Madrid — traces the standard escalator of the 1990s European game, climbed by someone who never once looked out of place on the next step up.