He played as if the game were happening slightly slower for him than for everyone else. Then, roughly once a season, something would snap and the same man would be walking off the pitch early. Zinedine Zidane was both of those players, and refusing to separate them is the only honest way to tell his story.
He was born in Marseille in 1972, the youngest of five children of Algerian parents from the mountains of Kabylie. The family lived in La Castellane, a housing estate in the north of the city, and the football was played on a concrete square between the blocks, where a heavy first touch meant chasing the ball into traffic. He has said that the square taught him to control a ball in one movement because there was no room for a second.
An unlikely apprenticeship
A scout spotted him at a regional tournament and he left for Cannes at fourteen, a small club on the coast and a long way from home in every sense. Bordeaux followed, then Juventus in 1996, where he won two Italian league titles and lost two European finals in three years. By his late twenties he was admired across the continent and had still won nothing on the biggest stage.
What people noticed first was the way he moved. Zidane was a large man, broad across the shoulders, not especially quick over distance, and he glided. The ball seemed to arrive at his feet already calm. He had a turn - a full spin with the sole of each foot in turn, now usually called the roulette - that he used not as a trick but as a way of buying half a second in a crowded midfield.
Paris, 1998
His home World Cup began badly. He was sent off in the group stage for a stamp on a Saudi Arabian opponent and missed two matches. France got through without him, he returned, and in the final against a Brazil side nobody expected to lose he scored twice with his head from corners before half-time. A country that had never won the tournament won it 3-0, and the man from La Castellane became the face of a France that had spent the decade arguing with itself about who counted as French.
Two years later the same group won the European Championship, this time with Zidane at the centre of everything rather than arriving late. For a short period he was, by general agreement, the best footballer alive.
He was not the quickest player on the pitch, and almost never the loudest. He simply took the ball in places where it should not have been possible to take it.
Madrid and the volley
Real Madrid signed him in 2001 for a fee that set a world record at the time, adding him to a squad already full of expensive attacking players. The signature moment came the following May at Hampden Park in Glasgow, in the Champions League final against Bayer Leverkusen. A long, looping cross dropped out of the floodlights towards the edge of the area; Zidane adjusted his feet, waited, and hit it on the volley with his weaker left foot into the top corner. It is routinely called the best goal ever scored in a European final, and the argument against it is not strong.
The turn most associated with Zidane was not invented by him. Versions of it had been used by earlier players, including Diego Maradona, but Zidane performed it so often and so calmly under pressure that it became attached to his name.
Impossible to mark
Coaches spent a decade trying to work out how to stop him, and the answers were all unsatisfactory. Man-marking failed because he simply walked into areas where the marker could not follow without wrecking his own team's shape. Pressing him failed because he took the ball facing his own goal and turned away from pressure with the roulette or a simple drop of the shoulder. Leaving him alone failed for obvious reasons.
What made it worse for defenders was his first touch, which almost always took the ball into the space he wanted rather than merely stopping it. In a congested midfield that half-metre is the whole game. He was not a great tackler, he did not cover huge distances, and he scored a modest number of league goals for a player of his reputation. None of it mattered, because the team that had him controlled the tempo of every match he played in.
Berlin, and the ending
He retired from international football, then came back for the 2006 World Cup and dragged an unfancied France all the way to the final. In Berlin he opened the scoring with a penalty chipped gently down the middle, off the underside of the bar and in - the most arrogant way to take a penalty, in the biggest match there is. In extra time, after an exchange of words with Marco Materazzi, he turned and drove his head into the Italian's chest. Red card. France lost on penalties, and the last act of one of the great careers was a long walk past the trophy.
Strangely, the journalists had already voted him the tournament's best player. The award stood. People argued about it for years, and still do, which is perhaps the point: he was never a player you could summarise.
The coach nobody expected
Few assumed he would manage, and fewer assumed he would be good at it. He took over Real Madrid in 2016 and won the Champions League three seasons in a row, something no coach had done since the competition was reformatted. His method was not a system so much as a temperament - he protected his players publicly, made ruthless decisions privately, and left when he judged the cycle finished rather than waiting to be pushed. Then he came back, won a league title, and left again on his own terms.
Elegance and fury, right to the end: the quietest manager in the room, running the loudest club in the world.
