We are in the era of the great coaching brands, the distinctive approaches that define the big men of the age. The School of Guardiola, Kloppism, the Simeoneists, the Tuchelites, the small, fervent, Church of Poch, battling against the heretics. In the midst of it all is another who is no less significant but defies the modern super-coach’s zealotry for a big idea.
By achievement alone, he was the great Champions League coach of his day — carving three in a row out of a competition where no one had managed back-to-back titles since its relaunch. Before Zidane, there was a notion that the Champions League had become too big for the dynasties that existed in previous decades. That the great expansion from compact knockout to 13-game, eight-month, continental Gazprom epic was too much for one club to dominate.
Then Zidane won it three times in three years with virtually the same XI, like a school team — albeit the most expensively assembled and lavishly rewarded school team in history.
What those three Champions League trophies with Real Madrid mean, as well as the two La Liga titles, is critical. Zidane is in the conversation now at Manchester United as they hurtle towards the possibility of a mid-season reckoning for Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
There is much about Zidane that fits the bill for a club addicted to a notion that winning is a concept that can simply be transferred from place to place. As a figure in football, Zidane is easily big enough for the throne of Old Trafford’s troubled kingdom. Yet, at the same time, he feels a risk greater than appointing a solid Everton manager or an irascible Dutchman, or Jose Mourinho and all his self-pity.
If the Solskjaer emergency becomes too great to ignore, then Zidane is available immediately, without requirement for compensation, with a track record the equal of any of his peers. This should be easy, and yet he comes with so much uncertainty.
All United’s appointments post-Alex Ferguson have been made without any notion of a first choice or the strategy that, for instance, meant Manchester City worked their way towards the Pep Guardiola coronation.
Zidane would be another. A near-perfect résumé and yet also an empty crater when it comes to his likely style of management. Cristiano Ronaldo seems to like Zidane. There is also a significant French contingent at United, including his former player Raphael Varane, not to mention Paul Pogba and Anthony Martial. It might be important, but it is hard to say.
As a coach, he feels elusive, even his press-conference Spanish is halting. At Real, they said he galvanised and united the divergent egos and ambitions of a dressing room of the best players in the world. At United, he could perhaps do the same, although it would be hard to argue he would even have the best players in Manchester.
His Real team barely changed across the three seasons they won the Champions League in his first spell at the club. In those consecutive finals of 2016, 2017 and 2018, only 13 players featured in the three starting XIs. They were exceptional teams, blessed by the vintage years of Ronaldo, but they were not a dominant side in the usual sense.
Twice they finished second in the group stages, and in all three years, they lost knockout games that took them close to the brink. In 2017-2018, they finished third in La Liga’s traditional two-horse race. Yet through it all they found a fluency in the biggest competition of all.
In those years, Real’s famous coach, and his players, seemed to be privy to a Champions League secret known to only a few. A kind of confidence that the world orbited around them and all stars would align if only they could stay in the game long enough.
Zidane returned to Real in March 2019 to a diminished side, without Ronaldo. They conceded fewer goals than anyone in his second title-winning season of 2019-2020, a stripped-down version of the original that had to compensate for a less potent attack, but showed the coach had another way.
When they tried to persuade Zidane that Mariano Diaz was a suitable replacement for Ronaldo, he, naturally, got into arguments and eventually left.
Indeed, Zidane has never truly been in control of a transfer budget, more a Real coach placed in charge of the managed decline of the club’s last superstar era — and what a decline it was. At United, he would have that financial clout at his disposal. But the challenge again would be to build the club and their style, as has been done at United’s big Premier League rivals.
Create the culture, cut out the non-believers, set the course, be the face of an otherwise faceless club. These are big challenges for a man we cannot be sure even speaks the language of the monoglot English football nation.
Solskjaer stumbles on after another horror show yesterday, while in the wings waits this giant of the 21st-century game.
First a mesmerising footballer who could, with a single touch or flick, make a defender feel like he had arrived at the wrong stadium on the wrong day.
Then a coach who achieved in three seasons a Champions League record that Ferguson never managed in three decades.
It should be obvious what Zidane is and what he offers — but no one knows for sure.
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