Zidane to lead France for first time as Nations League hosts Turkey on Friday
Zinedine Zidane will lead France for the first time on Friday when the national team play Turkey in a Nations League fixture, a high-profile debut that reunites an enigmatic coach with a squad frequently described as perplexing.
Even as a player Zidane was often read as unknowable, and that sense of distance has grown in his managerial career; he won three Champions League titles with Real Madrid without offering a clear public picture of his tactical identity, and France arrive with a pool of talent whose depth has long confounded expectations. The country’s national side has reached three major finals under Didier Deschamps yet carried a sense of unfulfilment, while this summer’s World Cup saw a side that attacked with gusto but was ultimately overrun in midfield by Spain.
Zidane stands among a small group of managers with sustained European success: he is one of five coaches to have won the Champions League on three or more occasions, ranking alongside Bob Paisley, Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique and behind only Carlo Ancelotti, and he is the only manager to win three successive Champions Leagues. Within that period he captured a single La Liga title, left Real Madrid five days after the third consecutive Champions League triumph citing the club’s need for change, and later returned in March after the brief reigns of Julen Lopetegui and Santiago Solari, subsequently winning another La Liga title across the two full seasons that followed.
The statistical ledger from Zidane’s first spell at Madrid is striking: his side lost eight of his first 100 games, scored in a record 73 consecutive matches, recorded a joint-record 16 La Liga victories in a row and set a record with 13 successive away wins. Those figures sit alongside more qualitative questions about how much of the success was down to managerial innovation and how much to the resources and individual brilliance available at the club.
Examining the three Champions League campaigns under Zidane exposes similarly mixed signals. In 2016 Madrid beat Roma and Wolfsburg, edged Manchester City on penalties after a Fernando own goal in the semi-final and then beat Atlético Madrid on penalties in what the article describes as an unmemorable final. The 2017 run featured an extra-time surge against Bayern Munich and emphatic, Cristiano Ronaldo-driven victories over Napoli, Atlético and Juventus, while the 2018 campaign included a quarter-final against Juventus in which Madrid relinquished a three-goal lead before a late penalty secured progression and a final win over Liverpool that followed Mohamed Salah sustaining a shoulder injury in a challenge with Sergio Ramos, an error by Loris Karius and a decisive Gareth Bale goal.
Those episodes feed into the recurring question noted in the piece: did Zidane create the structures and roles that produced these results, such as the midfield three of Casemiro, Luka Modrić and Toni Kroos, or did he instead manage a roster of exceptional players whose performances were the primary engine of success? The article raises the possibility that Zidane operated as an effective interpreter of elite talent—an influence difficult to quantify—while remaining deliberately inscrutable in public.
Comparisons with other high-profile coaches surface in the analysis: Carlo Ancelotti is suggested to have experienced similar underappreciation for a style sometimes equated with letting players express themselves, and the write-up concedes that allowing top players freedom can itself be a managerial skill. At the same time, the piece notes Zidane’s apparent personal authority, arguing that even critics who see him as a peripheral figure must acknowledge the force of his presence.
France’s recent history of disciplinary problems between their World Cup triumphs is recounted, citing the scandals of Seoul in 2002 and the strike at Knysna in 2010, while Deschamps’s 14 years in charge are credited with preventing such breakdowns. The article also records that Zidane has taken an early step to impose control by banning the press from covering players’ arrivals at the Clairefontaine base and that his France squad contains a number of new faces, marking a departure from the exact continuity of Deschamps’s selections.
Friday’s Nations League meeting with Turkey will be Zidane’s first match in charge of France and the first concrete chance, the article argues, to observe the practical shape of his management at national-team level and to see whether the coach’s private methodology translates into a visible public identity for this particular, mercurial squad.