Zinedine Zidane

Zinedine Yazid Zidane was born on 23 June 1972 in La Castellane, a neighbourhood in the 16th arrondissement of Marseille, in Southern France. He is the youngest of five siblings born to Algerian parents Smaïl and Malika, who had immigrated to Paris from the village of Aguemoune in the Berber-speaking region of Kabylia in 1953, before the start of the Algerian War. The family, which had settled in the city's tough northern districts of Barbès and Saint-Denis, found little work in the region, and in the mid-1960s moved to the northern Marseille suburb of La Castellane. In an interview with Esquire magazine, he stated:

I have an affinity with the Arabic world. I have it in my blood, via my parents. I'm very proud of being French, but also very proud of having these roots and this diversity. His father worked as a warehouseman and security guard at a department store, often on the night shift, while his mother was a housewife. The family lived a reasonably comfortable life by the standards of the neighbourhood, which was notorious throughout Marseille for its high crime and unemployment rates. Zidane credits his strict upbringing and his father as the "guiding light" in his career. It was in Castellane where Zidane had his earliest introduction in football, joining in at the age of five in football games that the neighbourhood's children played on the Place Tartane, an 80-by-12-yard plaza that served as the main square of the housing complex. In July 2011, Zidane named former…

Cannes

Zidane went to Cannes for a six-week stay, but ended up remaining at the club for four years to play at the professional level. Having left his family to join Cannes, he was invited by Cannes Director Jean-Claude Elineau to leave the dormitory he shared with 20 other trainees and to come and stay with him and his family. Zidane later said that, while living with the Elineaus, he found equilibrium. It was at Cannes where Zidane's first coaches noticed that he was raw and sensitive, prone to attack spectators who insulted his race or family. His first coach, Jean Varraud, encouraged him to channel his anger and focus on his own game. Zidane spent his first weeks at Cannes mainly on cleaning duty as a punishment for punching an opponent who mocked his ghetto origins. The occasional violence that he would display throughout his career was shaped by an internal conflict of being an Algerian-Frenchman suspended between cultures, and surviving the tough streets of La Castellane where he grew up. Zidane made his professional debut with Cannes on 18 May 1989 in a French Division 1 match against Nantes. He scored his first goal for the club on 10 February 1991 also against Nantes in a 2–1 win. After the match, during a party for all the Cannes players, Zidane was given a car by Cannes chairman Alain Pedretti, who had promised him one the day he scored his first goal for the club. On the pitch, Zidane displayed extraordinary technique on the ball, offering glimpses of…

Both France and Algeria consider Zidane a citizen. It was rumoured that coach Abdelhamid Kermali denied Zidane a position for the Algerian squad because he felt the young midfielder was not fast enough. Zidane dismissed the rumour in a 2005 interview, saying that he would have been ineligible to play for Algeria because he had already played for France. Zidane was a member of the French under-21 squad that won a bronze medal at the 1993 Mediterranean Games in Languedoc-Roussillon. He earned his first cap with France as a substitute in a friendly against the Czech Republic on 17 August 1994, which ended in a 2–2 draw after Zidane scored twice to help France erase a 2–0 deficit. After Eric Cantona was handed a year-long suspension in January 1995 for assaulting a fan, Zidane took over the playmaker position.

Euro 1996

Despite not being at his best during the tournament, France reached the last four. Zidane was not yet fully established in the French team and his level was quite average during the whole event, but he managed to score in the penalty shootout in both the quarter-final and semi-final. France was eliminated in the Euro 96 semi-finals in a penalty shootout against the Czech Republic.

1998 World Cup

The 1998 FIFA World Cup was the first World Cup that Zidane participated in; the tournament was held in his home country, France. The French team won all three games in the group stage, with Zidane setting up Christophe Dugarry's goal in the opening…

In November 2010, Zidane was appointed as a special adviser to Real Madrid's first team in response to an appeal made by then-Real Madrid coach José Mourinho for the former Real midfielder to work more closely with the team. In his new role, Zidane was expected to participate in Champions League events and functions and was also to travel with the first team on a regular basis and participate in pre-match gatherings, training sessions and meetings with the head coach. In July 2011, it was announced that he would become Real Madrid's new sporting director. In 2013, Zidane was appointed assistant coach to Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid.

Real Madrid Castilla

In June 2014, Real Madrid announced that Zidane would be the coach of Real Madrid's B team, Real Madrid Castilla. On 29 August, the director of the Spanish National Football Coach Education Centre (CENAFE), Miguel Galán, reported Zidane for acting as Real Madrid Castilla's head coach without the necessary coaching badges. According to Galán, "No one who has anything to do with the football world can be unaware that Zidane is acting as Real Madrid Castilla's head coach this season. It is a fait accompli that has been widely accepted, as shown by media reports, and Real Madrid do not deny it." While the official match report for Castilla's opening game in the Segunda División B lists Santiago Sánchez as the Los Blancos' head coach and Zidane as his assistant, Galán states, "This hierarchy only exists on paper. The…