I’ll be training again soon, says Zidane. Which team could he lead?

Zinedine Zidane can’t do things by halves. He ended his football career as one of the few at the top, and he sticks to the motto of less and better quality in his coaching career. Now, however, he could return to the bench.

The French phenom started his coaching career as an assistant to Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid and was there for the Champions League win in 2014. He then moved on to Castilla as head coach, only to be promoted to the A-team in 2016 after the sacking of Carlos Benítez.

And what he did, no coach in the world will probably ever repeat. He won the Champions League three times in a row with Real Madrid, yet no team in history has been able to defend it even once. He turned Los Blancos into a winning machine and retired, like the player, on top in 2018.

However, he returned to the Santiago Bernabéu in the winter of 2019, won La Liga a year later, then reached the semi-finals of the Champions League in the 2020/2021 season, finishing a point behind Atlético, and ended up at Real again, not feeling enough trust from the management amid media pressure.

Now he hasn’t trained anywhere for a season and a half and is enjoying a sabbatical. But it may not last long. He himself has hinted that something is wrong.

“I’ll be back soon. Wait a little longer. I’m not far away from training again,” Zidane told RMC Sport.

And where could he be headed? The most speculated for a long time is the French national team. Zidane himself has confessed that coaching his country is his dream, plus there has been quite a lot of dissatisfaction with Didier Deschamps recently.

It is the Gallic national team that could be ideal for Zidane. the 50-year-old elegiac is not the type of coach like Guardiola or Klopp, who would be too tactical and need to work with the team on a daily basis.

Zidane has huge authority, he is a coach for big teams where he can tame egos for the benefit of the team, as he did at Real Madrid. He is not too concerned with tactics, but rather making the team work as a unit. And the issue of big egos is a big problem in the French national team in particular.

There was also talk of a PSG or Manchester United connection in the summer, but neither engagement worked out. If it was really about club level, it’s hard to guess where Zidane could be heading.

Source: RMC Sport