Soccer: Zidane, the political footballer

At 11.14 on a recent Wednesday night in Paris, the fate of the French nation fell into the hands (or rather on to the right foot) of a shy, Muslim son of Algerian immigrants. He waited for five nerve-twisting minutes while his opponents protested (with some reason) against the penalty that would propel France to the final of the Euro 2000 soccer tournament.

Then — angular, handsome in a Mr Spock kind of way, balding, old-looking for his 28 years — the young man stepped forward and, with a crescent sweep of his right boot, sent the ball crashing into the top left corner of the Portugal goal.

Zinedine Zidane's startling performances in Euro 2000 (utterly transformed from the World Cup two years ago, when he did not play especially well until the final) have elevated him to the ranks of the greatest French sporting heroes. They have also confirmed his status as something far more important than that, something much harder to define.

Zidane is a significant political figure in France, even though he has never uttered a political sentence in public and refuses to be deployed for political ends, however benign.

To the four million French residents of North African origin — especially for the baggy-jeaned, reverse-baseball-cap-wearing young — Zidane is proof (maybe the only proof they have ever been offered) that you can be a "Beur" and a success in 21st-century France.

The French National Assembly has 577 members. None is of North African origin. Beur (second generation Arab) faces are still rare on French television. Apart from Zidane, there are few successful French-North African footballers.

French professional football and its outstanding national team — the champions of the world, its primacy confirmed with this week's enthronement as champions of Europe — owe much to the rich racial mixture of "Greater France," which has departments and territories on three continents.

No other individual has had the wider political and social impact of Zidane, partly because he is an incomparably elegant, inventive and intelligent footballer, maybe the best in the world. (After the Euro 2000 win this week, a major news agency renamed its category for the outstanding performer "Best player not called Zidane — Zidane lives on another soccer planet, so it would be unfair to let him collect all the awards.")

His influence is more important because he is of North African origin and, in France, the most active racial issue is still fear of Arabs. In a survey in March, an extraordinary 63 per cent said there were too many Arabs. Zidane was born in Marseilles but his family comes from the Kabyle community in Algeria (which is, technically and ethnically speaking, not Arab).

On the Corniche, the coastal road east of his home town, an advertising poster of Zidane's face is so big that it can be recognised from half a mile out to sea. When young couples of Arab origin get married in Marseilles these days, they have their picture taken, not down by the old harbour but in front of "Zizou's" picture.

Since the World Cup in 1998, tens of thousands of young Beurs have flocked to join soccer teams in the ghettos which ring Paris and other French cities. Amar, an Algerian-born youth worker who runs soccer teams in the Paris suburbs, calls this the "Zidane effect."

Amar says Zidane's high-profile presence in the French team (even when he was playing poorly) gave young Beurs a sense of French identity for the first time but also — just as importantly — an image of a successful North African in mainstream France for the first time.

To the great white majority — haunted by racial folk memories from the Algerian war and by suspicion of young Arab men — Zidane is a relief, a reproach, a counter-argument, a source of joy and pride.

His popularity is magnified by the fact that he seems such an ordinary, shy, level-headed, family-loving man. Off the pitch Zidane is shy, measured, almost cold, nothing like the joyful, exuberant player on the field.

All the more surprising, therefore, that Zidane should have become — to his own amusing consternation — a sex symbol. He was chosen by Christian Dior last year as its first male model. His face adorns Parisian bus-shelters, cheekily emerging from a polo-neck jumper, incarnating — according to Dior — the qualities of Eau Sauvage aftershave: "Virile, discreet and fresh."

Since the World Cup two years ago Zidane has been inundated with female fan mail. "Some say they are in love with me," he told an interviewer, with touching confusion, as if he was expected to reciprocate in some way. "But I'm married."

Extremely married, according to Gianni Agnelli, president of his club, Juventus of Turin in northern Italy, who is also the autocratic patriarch of the Fiat dynasty. When Zidane let it be known last year that he would like to leave Turin to be nearer the sea because his part-Spanish wife, Veronique, loved the sea, Agnelli exploded with indignation. "Zidane is not suffering from homesickness," he said. "He is suffering from being under the thumb of his wife."

Others might say that Zidane's attitude is further proof that he is not just a classy and unusual footballer but a classy and unusual man. If you watch him come on to the pitch with the rest of the team at the start of a match, you will see that he always kisses his wedding ring as a gesture of love for Veronique and his two sons, Enzo, aged 6, and Luca, 3.

Zinedine Zidane was born in 1972 in the notorious Marseilles suburb of Castellane (striker Eric Cantona was born not far away six years earlier). At home he was always "Yazid," not Zine-dine. He lived in an apartment in a tower block, so small that he and his parents, three brothers and sister had to sit down to eat in shifts. His parents were, by the standards of the neighbourhood, well off.

His father worked as a nightwatchman in a department store. Yazid had new basketball shoes from time to time, "new" until his pals had taken turns standing on them to make them look more acceptably used.

"I never suffered from racism when I was small because all my pals were North Africans or foreigners of some kind," Zidane says. "Afterwards [when he was a football apprentice] people weren't racist either. Now, from time to time, I come across them. When people ask me for an autograph I can tell which ones are the racists. But I sign anyway. I don't think about the parents, I think about the children, who will be happy to have my signature anyway…"

Zidane as a child was, according to his own account, less timid, less thoughtful than he is today. He took no interest in school, living only to be with his pals, playing violent games with a tennis ball which lasted for hours and stretched all over the quarter. The last person with the ball was beaten up by the rest.

"Everything I know about football, I learned in the street," says Zidane.

His parents, Smail and Malika, emigrated from Algeria in 1953, before the war of independence. Zidane attributes much of his success to his father, to whom he always refers as mon papa. He even gives mon papa credit for the sideboards, which are part of his good looks. His father would cut the family's hair once a month and insisted that the boys have long sideboards as a "sign of
virility."

Zidane's parents now live in a modest villa on the outskirts of Marseilles, bought for them by their famous son. "No," says Zidane, "Bought by mon papa, because mon papa, c'est moi."

Yazid left home at 13 to play for Cannes, then in the French first division. He made his debut at 17 in 1989, moved three years later to Girondins Bordeaux, where he formed a close friendship with French striker-winger Christophe Dugarry. The two own a restaurant together in Bordeaux.

In 1996 Zidane moved to Juventus, where he has been an outstanding player but has never succeeded in becoming an idol of the fans. Why? Racism? Zidane's rather un-Italian, or for that matter un-Algerian, surface coldness? What makes Zidane such a great footballer?

It is the exceptional nature of Zidane's talent which creates his importance as a political symbol, as a poster-child, not just for Dior but also a successful, multi-racial France.

The exceptional nature of his talent might also be read as a proof of continued French racial barriers. "An Arab immigrant's son is condemned to excellence to be recognised in France," says Kofi Yamgane, president of the foundation for republican integration.

And what of that figure of almost two in three French people with anti-Arab views two years after the World Cup and the start of the "Zidane effect"?

The importance of Zidane is that he offers young French people — brown, white and black — a different way of forming their prejudices. The views of the bulk of French people were formed years ago. Even Zidane's supernatural ankles will not change them overnight.

But he offers white French children a triumphant and gentle image of North Africans. He offers young Beurs a positive self-image which is not rooted in drugs, violence or rejection of the red, white and blue.

- INDEPENDENT