At several points in the Iliad, the elderly Greek king Nestor offers advice to the younger members of the Greek contingent besieging Troy. His retellings of the exploits of an older generation of heroes he was fortunate enough to know are attempts to cool the tempers of their more hotheaded successors. As Nestor says to Achilles: ‘None of the mortals now upon earth could do battle with those men’ (Book I, 271–72).
The feeling that things aren’t what they used to be is nothing new. Your roving correspondent tries to avoid nostalgia but sport can be an exception, especially as it’s difficult to look forward to the World Cup taking place in the United States later this year. Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, has declared that ‘the world will stand still’ for the competition. But could it be that the creater of the FIFA Peace Prize – first recipient President Trump – is not well attuned to world events?
However Rakewell couldn’t help being cheered by the reports that France is already looking past the post-competition retirement of Didier Deschamps, the most successful manager of the national team and one of only three men to have won the World Cup as both a player and a manager. Last week, the president of the French football federation told Le Figaro that he knew the name of Deschamps’ successor and, if the reports are correct, the name is that of his former teammate, Zinedine Zidane.
After phenomenal success as manager of Real Madrid, Zidane seems to have been resting since 2021, perhaps waiting for the call from France that was always going to come. It remains to be seen whether he can replicate club success at the national level. But, as a figure of footballing legend, who can compete with Zidane? The film Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno made about him as a player, following him in real time for the course of a match, is that rare thing: a great work of art about sport that captures the intensity of its subject. The end of Zidane’s playing career by red card in a World Cup final was deplorable – Rakewell is not condoning bad behaviour here – but headbutting Marco Materazzi was clearly a moment of madness. A moment that probably didn’t need to be commemorated in bronze, although the Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed went ahead and did it in 2012.
In the small but growing gallery of art about footballers, Zidane has pride of place as a subject. Other contenders for inclusion might be his much less gifted near, and not so near, contemporaries Roy Keane, David Beckham and Eric Cantona. (The latter, it can be argued, has taken matters into his own hands by turning singing into performance art.) But even the most casual observer will notice these men are all in their fifties. Can the age of footballing heroes and anti-heroes have passed so quickly?
