The Beur Man‟s Burden:

The Downfall of Zinedine Zidane

ZINEDINE ZIDANE‟S HEADBUTT punctuated my World Cup

trip, which was itself supposed to be the punctuation of my
adolescence. After a month of Eurail travel, Doner Kebabs,
Weissbier, impromptu pick-up games, languid reflection, and fervent,
myopic soccer watching, I stood clinging like a refugee to a chain-link
fence in Berlin‟s Fan Mile. Allegedly 7000 of us had gathered to
watch the World Cup final in this jiving, thronged, literally mile-long
shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, and in the 112th minute of
overtime, all 7000 looked on in terror as big-screen Zidane rammed
the life out of Italian defender Marco Materazzi and his own career.
“But why? But why?” wailed the French commentator. A few
knowingly shook their heads. A young girl, the tricolor painted on
each cheek, comforted her crying father. The Brazilians stopped
their samba dancing. Camus, rolling in his grave, found grim
inspiration for another novel. Even the Germans, forgetting
Versailles, the Alsace-Lorraine, and their own elimination, sobered up
in reverence. Nauseated and dazed, I looked on with the abhorrence
and slow understanding of a young son finding his father in bed with
another woman.
 Everything after the headbutt formed a denouement I took no
interest in. The red card, the penalty shootout, the tabloids‟
damnations, Materazzi‟s coy denials, the FIFA hearings, the
condescending editorials of Sports Illustrated 1hacks—it all annealed
into a meaningless fast-forward panorama like billboards flying by on
subway tunnel walls. At the time the moral dilemma of the
situation—was Zidane justified?—seemed futile banter, especially in
the man‟s funeral wake. Even FIFA‟s decision to still award him the
Golden Ball, the award for the tournament‟s best player, seemed
bleak, posthumous consolation. Of all the articles I read the next
morning, only one line interested me, and it had nothing to do with
the headbutt. Minutes prior to the headbutting incident, Zidane had
nearly won the game for France with a stunning header, but, as one
British tabloid theatrically put it, “Buffon2 wasn‟t reading the same
fairy tale!”

I HAD PARALLED MY WORLD CUP trip by reading a different

fairytale, Patrick Leigh Fermor‟s A Time of Gifts. Fermor‟s 1978
memoir recounts the foot journey he undertook some 45 years prior,
at age 18, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (the books
covers his journey as far as Hungary; the rest is recounted in a second
volume, Between the Woods and the Water). Along the way, Fermor
encounters brownshirts at the Hofbrauhaus, Dutch sailors on the
Rhine, Austrian counts in Salzburg, and a European spirit of
camaraderie and gentility towards wayward pedestrian scholars that
trumped the familiar nationalistic fault lines of 1930s Europe.
Seventy-three years hence, in an age of blitzkrieg eight-countries-
in-three-days European tours, Internet blogs, iPod-sedated train
travel, globalization, and the lingering fear of terrorism, I found those
same genteel sensibilities present in my own hosts. As a meandering
college sophomore with vague writing ambitions, enough money for
enough beer, and a doting array of German third-cousins overjoyed
to finally meet me, I could not help but compare myself with Fermor
(for his sentiments, not his literary ability). As one traveling
companion reminded me as I sulked after the U.S.‟s elimination,
when else would we have the chance to squander an entire afternoon
playing pick-up with barefoot Croatians in Munich‟s English
Gardens? This summer had been our own Time of Gifts, Separate Peace,
slightly clichéd coming-of-age saga.

1
Two editorials summarize Sports Illustrated’s paternalistic attitude towards
soccer. The first trivializes the whole episode with a history of the “Yo Mama”
insult. The second evangelizes it, discounting one of soccer’s legends with this
holier-than-thou last line: “…Zidane didn’t acknowledge the trophy, much less
touch it. Good thing. He didn’t deserve to” (Grant Wahl, “The Surreal World,”
Sports Illustrated).
2
The Italian goalkeeper, and Zidane’s former teammate at the Italian club
Juventus, who first demanded Zidane’s expulsion and then comforted the
besotted Frenchman as he trudged toward the tunnel.
 Never did I feel more gifted, more peaceful and content than
when, as I walked down the Munich streets in my France jersey,
strangers began to chant Allez Les Bleu! Allez Les Bleu! And never did
I feel so cheated, so abandoned and belligerent as when, after the
final, those cheers sinisterly morphed into Adieu Les Bleu! Adieu Les
Bleu! Whenever I heard these jeers, especially if they were uttered by
a gaggle of greasy-haired Italians, I would run headlong into their
midst and mock-headbutt them, half with irony and half with virility.
My time of gifts, by trip‟s end, had become a time of loss, and I
neatly stenciled in Zidane as my Indian giver.

I DESPERATELY WANTED TO write off the headbutt as an

anomaly, a freakish blemish on an otherwise immaculate career. But
the headbutt was not anomalous; rather it was the maximum
extension of Zidane‟s tragic flaw on the world‟s biggest stage, like a
runner‟s fissure of a shin splint snapping into a compact fracture in
the Olympic 5K. Were Zidane‟s career a novel, the ending would
come as a surprise, but not a cheap or contrived one. In a career
otherwise characterized by cool detachment, Zidane‟s 14 career red
cards (most of them for retaliations), his adolescent passion for judo
(Tom Humphries, “End of a Journey Nonpareil,” The Irish Times),
and his lesser-known headbutting of a Hamburg midfielder in a 2000
Champions League match provide ample foreshadowing for his
downfall.
Heavy literary analogies abound—Crime and Punishment, The
Stranger, Paradise Lost—but for Zidane the 2006 final was “Babylon
Revisited.” The story begins eight years ago, in 1998, when Zidane
led France to World Cup triumph on home soil. For Zidane, who
played poorly until the final, that triumph was shrouded by the dark
ramifications of another red card, this one coming against a well-
beaten Saudi Arabia in the last match of the first round, when he
raked his studs over the back of the supine Saudi captain.
Yet this foul hardly tarnished the luster of the ensuing trophy-
laden boom years. A European Championship, FIFA World Player
of the Year and European Player of the Year honors, and Champions
League victory at Madrid made Zidane better decorated than
Napoleon. Then came the crash: an injury-plagued cameo in
France‟s 2002 World Cup campaign, three trophy-less seasons at Real
Madrid, and the press‟s increasing speculation over his retirement. At
34, playing poorly by his own admission, Zidane looked a more likely
recipient of a social security check than a World Cup winners‟ medal.
Somehow, after another abysmal first round, another suspension,
and, having been substituted after said suspension, a wrathful kick
that left cleat marks on a steel locker room door, France‟s prodigal
son hobbled his way back to Babylon, the 2006 World Cup final. At
stake was not only the Jules Rimet trophy, but also Zidane‟s
canonization among the sport‟s holy trinity: Pele, Maradona, and Di
Stefano. Victory would anoint him among their ranks; defeat would
condemn him to the second tier of associate soccer gods amid the
Beckenbauers, Platinis, and Cruyffs. Like Fitzgerald‟s Charley Wales,
Zidane returned to an old haunt looking for his honor3, and, having
come close enough to touch it, unraveled all his good work with a
split-second regression into his violent past.

THE OPERATIVE THESIS HERE IS that something in addition

to Zidane‟s tragic flaw caused the headbutt. A dark megalomania
may well have driven the man‟s passionate performances (Gopnik),
but external variables—political, cultural, historical—created a
powder keg of potential energy waiting for a catalyst. That came in
the form of Marco Materazzi, the tattooed mafioso of a center-back
who may well play the next Bond villain. Despite the temptation to
vilify Materazzi, his trash talking no more caused Zidane‟s downfall
than the Serb assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused World
War I. Both merely lighted the fuse that had long been seeking a
match.
There‟s no room here for debating whether or not Zidane‟s action
was wrong (it was), or whether or not he should be forgiven. This
essay focuses on the causes of Zidane‟s explosion, specifically the
danger of burdening a man with the problems of a nation, of
streamlining, politicizing, commercializing, vilifying, canonizing, and
deifying an athlete as resistant to classification as Zidane. But it‟s
hard not to. His play demands to be romanticized.

WHEN YOU WATCH ZIDANE PLAY, taking in all his cheeky

chips and insouciant flicks, his field-marshal strut and aristocratic
canter, you begin to formulate an equally extravagant personal life for
him. I like to think of him sauntering into one of Ronaldo‟s famous
Madrid parties escorted by a pair of sleek young Mediterranean
things, trailed by an entourage of die-hards and hangers-on. He‟s
wearing a crushed velvet suit, linen shirt, and paisley cravat. Plenty of
epigrammatic witticisms for the press. Dinner parties at Sartre‟s.
Scattered affairs. Ten-game suspension for blow. Tolerates referees.
The toast of Europe.
It‟s sadly untrue though. The fifth child of poor Algerian
immigrants, Zidane has never read Sartre and probably wouldn‟t care
to. Though French women recently voted him the sexiest
Frenchman of all time, he cowers in the camera instead of basking.
His entourage, if you would call it that, consists of his buddies from
the Marseilles slums—“butchers, bartenders, waiters, a fruit-and-
vegetable guy”—whom he flies out to extravagant galas and

3
Before the France-Spain second round fixture, the Spanish press had called on
its team to “retire” the arthritic looking Zidane (who had played very poorly, by
his standards, in the first round), turning that fixture and the rest of the
tournament into a vendetta for the Frenchman.
ceremonies (Vincour, The New York Times Magazine). He‟s Aladdin,
the pauper-turned-prince, he‟s married a sexy Jasmine figure, and
now he doesn‟t quite know what to do with his celebrity kingdom.
During his years playing for Juventus of Turin—Italy‟s hedonistic,
vaguely sinister4 version of the Yankees, famously backed by the
Agnelli family—Zidane confounded fans, teammates, and even
Gianni Agnelli himself by refusing to indulge in the “pleasures” of
the Turin night scene (Hussey, The Observer).
Strangely, this awkward reticence has given Zidane a unique
marketing appeal. Every time he appears on a billboard endorsing a
bottle of shampoo, or in an Adidas commercial trimming the grass of
a soccer field, his uneasy eyes and stilted smile become endearingly
self-effacing. By appearing in a commercial, Zidane automatically
becomes a parody of himself, doing something that he would never
do of his own volition. As he clumsily stalks the screen, his eyes
bashfully gravitating away from the viewer, Zidane looks like he‟s
been forced to market diapers or something equally preposterous,
making the commercials rather absurd and thus tremendously
popular in France.
Adidas and Dior are not the only ones who want Zidane as a
figurehead. After he led France to its first ever World Cup triumph
in 1998, on home soil no less, France decided it wanted Zidane to
symbolize its new and integrated multiculturalism. According to the
1999 French census, first generation immigrants totaled 4.3 million of
France‟s 58.5 million metropolitan population, or 7.4 percent. The
same census estimated France to be home to between four and five
million Muslims, with some three million of them from North Africa
(“A Question of Color, A Matter of Faith,” The Economist).
A glance at the 1998 French World Cup roster confirms those
statistics. The squad resembles a news anchor team in its diversity.
Team captain Didier Deschamps, sweeper Laurent Blanc, and
charismatic goalkeeper Fabien Barthez represent Francais de souche—
“of French stock”—meaning that that they are born of French
parents and grandparents (“A Question of Color, A Matter of Faith,”
The Economist). But the full-blooded Frenchmen are outnumbered by
an Armenian, a Senegalese, a Ghanaian, a French-Argentine, and a
French-Algerian by name Zidane. Zizou, as the French press cutely
took to calling him, became the symbol of this multicultural
revolution, both for his sublime skill and for his status as a beur, or
French-born Arab. Here was evidence that the wounds of the
French-Algerian war of the 1960s had finally healed, and that the
beurs had not only integrated themselves, but had enriched France. It
was like a Jew leading Germany to World Cup triumph.

4
Last season Juventus was convicted of match-fixing, resulting in the club’s
relegation to the second tier of Italian soccer, Serie B, where they started the
season with the handicap of negative seventeen points.
 After the World Cup honeymoon, however, the national
consciousness gradually sobered off. Mouloud Aounit, a human
rights activist, described the multicultural spirit as “a roman candle
that lasted as long as the festivities” (Vincour 35). It was as though
America had been celebrating the predominant blackness of the
Dream Team as a triumph of affirmative action. But outside of
O‟Bama we have few recognizable black politicians, and France still
has no beurs in its parliament. The xenophobic, far right National
Front party of Jean Marie Le Pen (a Holocaust revisionist who has
dismissed the gas chambers as a “detail” of World War II) has
consolidated a disturbingly large contingency since the ‟98 triumph
(“A Question of Color, A Matter of Faith,” The Economist). In the
months after the ‟98 triumph, Mr. Le Pen also homed in on Zidane‟s
ethnic significance, diagnosing the superstar as a symptom of
France‟s multicultural cancer while Chirac praised him as the cure.
Zidane quietly soaked this in, neither rejoicing in his celebrity nor
retaliating against his critics, regarding both overzealous factions with
the vague distaste of a literalist disgusted by so many sweeping
metaphors (Vincour 34).

FOR ZIDANE, THERE ARE NO metaphors in La Castellane,

Marseilles‟s slummiest suburb and his hometown. When asked in a
television interview if he had dreamed as a child of playing for
France, he responded, “I didn‟t have dreams, I had desires.” Asked
to explain, he added, “A real leather ball, a bicycle” (Vincour 35).
Zidane gives off the impression that poetry, dreams, and metaphor
are the province of the elite; that on the mean streets of La Castellane
one must think quickly and literally. “If it wasn‟t happening at the
top of the hill, it was happening at the bottom,” said Zidane.
“Rough” (Vincour 34).
French suburbs represent the opposite of American Levittown
sprawl. Like the projects, these high-rise public housing units, built
from the 1950s to the 70s in an attempt to provide affordable
housing for immigrant workers, encircle the more affluent inner-city
neighborhoods in an eerily feudal way (“A Question of Color, A
Matter of Faith,” The Economist). One such immigrant serf was
Zinedine‟s father, Smail Zidane, who immigrated to France from the
Kabyl region of Algeria in 1953, one year before the outbreak of the
French-Algerian war (Humphries). Having first settled in Paris‟s left-
wing industrial belt, living in a matchbox flat now at the foot of the
Stade de France, Smail Zidane and his wife moved to Marseille in
1963, where he took up work as a warehouse night watchman. His
family‟s blue-collar, immigrant status imprinted the young Zinedine
with an alert class consciousness, a complex that surfaced when he
and his brothers would watch the French national team on TV.
“You know, they‟re over there, and we can only be here,” recalls
Zidane. “You‟ve got to be twice as strong as the other guy. When
you start off, the two of us, you‟ve got something less than the
French guy” (Vincour 35).
As an Algerian immigrant, he has been driven by soccer as a
means for social mobility, the way inner-city black kids play
basketball to escape the ghetto. He‟s also been yoked eleven other
ways. As a player, as the 2002 disaster proved, he has been the
French national team‟s sine qua non for the past decade. And as a
marketable entity, he has been harnessed by Chirac and other soccer-
oblivious politicians as a symbol of French multiculturalism. A
perverse sense of obligation has been thrust upon his shoulders, and
one can almost hear the old French socialists whispering thus into
their puppet‟s ear: “Take up the beur man‟s burden!”
Though Zidane identifies himself as “first a Kabyle from La
Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman,”
a Frenchman he remains (Hussey). And like every Frenchman, he
bears the burden of Modern European History. Ever since those
three German invasions—1870, 1914, and 1940—France has
suffered from an inferiority complex in international competition that
de Gaulle and Adenauer‟s reconciliation of the two nations did little
to alleviate. These atavistic insecurities resurfaced in the 1982 and ‟86
World Cup semi-finals, in which the French faced, outplayed, and
(fittingly) lost to the Germans (Geoff Hare, Football in France, 124).
As France‟s central midfielder, Zidane has always been measured
against the number ten of that team, Michel Platini, the maestro of
Italian extraction who remains, as a midfielder, France‟s all-time
leading scorer. Throughout the 80s, Platini‟s France played what has
since been branded as champagne soccer, meaning that style often
took precedence over effectiveness, and that bubbly celebrations
often started prematurely (Hare 124). After a string of French central
midfielders failed to revitalize this brand of champagne soccer,
Zidane, flanked by enforcing deputies like Patrick Viera and Claude
Makelele, instilled the stylish French attack with bite and authority.
Curiously, it took a commercial to demonstrate the extent to
which he had transfigured the style of the French team. The
advertising hit of the summer was Nike‟s Joga Bonito campaign, a
series of commercials in which a bearded, black-suited Eric Cantona5
introduced us to the beautiful game—samba rhythm, street smarts,
circus tricks, wild improvisation, art for the sake of art (and perhaps
for the sake of selling shirts). In this year‟s France-Brazil quarterfinal,
Zidane exposed Joga Bonito for what it was: commercialized
champagne soccer. Whereas Nike‟s precocious talents like Cristiano
Ronaldo and Zlatan Ibrahimovic spent their World Cups showcasing
never-ending step-overs and unwarranted back-heels, Zidane

5
Another of Zidane’s predecessors in the French central midfield department,
Cantona never achieved Zidane’s success in the national team, and is held, along
with David Ginola, by many as a scapegoat for France’s failure to qualify for the
1994 World Cup finals.
displayed skill subordinate to purpose: art for the sake of goals.
Every time he did a spin move or juggled the ball over an opponent‟s
head he had a purpose. He quietly galvanized the French team from
the merely stylish to the beautifully effective. Consequently, France-
Brazil wound up looking like the „96 Bulls versus a makeshift
Globetrotters.

AS ANY ENGLISH TEACHER WILL tell you, American literature

inherently resists the idea of an epic hero. Were Beowulf American,
his quest to slay Grendal would be hindered by all sorts of checks
and balances. American pop culture equally resists the epic hero,
only with celebrities we first inflate them to outrageous extremes
before easily shooting down our giant, bloated targets. Tom Cruise,
Madonna, and Berry Bonds all make great fodder for satire, but only
because we spent the previous two decades salivating over them.
The French also inflate their celebrities. After France won the
1998 World Cup, blue lasers spelled out Zidane‟s name on the Arc de
Triomphe. Chirac decorated him with a Legion of Honor medal.
Rumors circulated that he would run for president (Vincour). But
something prevents the French from shooting their celebrities down.
Is it a vestige of the Napoleonic and the monarchical that fuels an
idolatry uninhibited by egalitarian concerns? Or is it pure elitism?
Either way, the French delight in watching helium-filled caricatures
of their celebrities float by. Look, they say, pointing at the sky. Sartre!
Charlemagne! Zidane! Throughout all the aggrandizing of Zidane, no
one stopped to think about the unlivable role he‟d been slotted
(Gopnik). That was left to two young filmmakers and their
auspicious documentary.

ZIDANE:A 21st CENTURY PORTRAIT debuted at the Toronto

film festival this past spring. Directors Philippe Parreno and Douglas
Gordon trained 17 cameras on Zidane, and only Zidane, for an entire
Primera League match against Villareal. Over the 90 odd minutes the
audience becomes Zidane‟s voyeur, glimpsing him both regally
clothed and somberly exposed. We see Zidane the imperious, as he
glides past defenders; Zidane the gamesman, as he jostles, fouls, and
provokes his opponents; Zidane the heroic, as he sets up Real‟s
second goal; and finally Zidane the human (and the red-carded), as
his involvement in a late brawl gets him sent off (Philip French, The
Guardian).
By getting red-carded Zidane did Perreno and Gordon an
unwitting favor. He transformed an interesting, if unoriginal
documentary (similar films were made about George Best and
Garrincha in the „60s) into high cinema—a film with pathos, a touch
of noir, and an ending ambiguous enough for any art house. But by
getting sent off again, in the World Cup final, Zidane turned the
directors into soothsayers and the film into prophesy. The
appearance of Zidane: A 21st Century Documentary two months before
the headbutt now looks as uncanny as if All the President’s Men had
premiered two months before Watergate.
The headbutt both saddened and excited the directors, though it
hardly surprised them. “Philippe rang me immediately to say he
knew it would happen,” says Gordon, “that something was going on
in those eyes we‟d spent over a year watching in an edit suite. Zidane
shapes his own destiny” (Jason Solomons, The Observer).

WHETHER DESTINY, MARCO Matterazzi, or Zidane himself

shaped his shameful 112th minute tryst with referee Horacio Elizondo
hardly matters. The true issue is what shaped Zidane: the press; his
Algerian identity; Chirac; Le Pen; Platini; the beur man‟s burden;
champagne soccer; and France‟s 4-3-Zidane-2 formation, which relies
on him like France on American intervention. That‟s not a shortlist
of excuses for the headbutt. After being videoed, romanticized,
vilified, yellow-carded, red-carded, condemned, acquitted, slandered,
and re-condemned, the last thing Zidane‟s needs is to be excused,
much less martyred. Rather, those items represent the identities
Zidane was expected to reconcile, the many roles written for him,
some of which suited him as well as the French Empire did Algeria.
Most importantly, those items do the one thing to Zidane that has
not yet been done, and needs to: they humanize him.

IF YOU HAVE MEASURED OUT your life in World Cups like I

have (I might be married by the 2014 finals; could be a father by
2018, and should, according to statistical averages, die sometime
between the 2058 and 2072 World Cups), you attribute grave
significance to anything as auspicious as Zidane‟s headbutt. Only
later would I realize that calling Zidane my Indian giver created a
metaphor as weak as Chirac‟s. Zidane no more ended my soccer
career than he undermined French multiculturalism.
In a World Cup you can find multiculturalism, as well as a time of
gifts. You cannot, however, find those things in one man, nor can
that man reconcile Algeria and France, nor win a World Cup by
himself, nor reinvigorate French history, nor provide a storybook
ending to a fairytale World Cup that lends symmetrical, water-tight
closure to your soccer career, and thereby your adolescence.
What you can, and should do, is take a minute to watch Zidane in
a very literal sense, the way a formalist reads poetry. Take in the
crescent step-overs, the deft yet bullish pirouettes, the pigeon-toed
shuffle that becomes magisterial in full stride, the reconciliation of a
slightly hunched, pale, arthritic figure with all his guile and verve and
panache and sangfroid and art.
If you can, watch it in the HofBrauhaus, on a big screen TV, with
a schnitzel and a liter of beer when you are twenty years old and have
been planning your World Cup trip for half your life on a huge
Germany map spread over the basement ping-pong table like
something out of Churchill‟s war room. Turn to the man next to you
and remark on Zidane‟s grace. Notice he is an Arab, maybe an Iraqi.
Talk about Zidane‟s goal to win France ‟98, how Madrid was a
mistake for him, whether he might play on in America, whether
America is worth playing on in anyway. Realize that Zidane doesn‟t
symbolize multiculturalism; he creates it on a microcosmic level.
Also realize that Zidane the multicultural metaphor withers as soon
as he‟s plucked from the field. Leave him grounded. You can‟t take
him with you.

Works Cited

“A Question of Color, A Matter of Faith.” The Economist. 16 Nov.

2002. LexisNexis
Academic-Document. Reed Elsevier Inc. Davidson College Library,
NC.
14 Nov. 2006. <http://web.lexis-
nexis.com/universe/document?>

French, Philip. “Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait.” The Observer. 1

Oct. 2006.
Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Davidson College Library,
NC.
14 Nov. 2006.
<http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_
Review/0,,1884876,00.ht…>

Gopnik, Adam. “Rules of the Game: Can We Forgive Him?” The

New Yorker. 24 July
 2006. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Davidson College
Library, NC.
14 Nov. 2006. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/delivery?>

Hare, Geoff. Football in France: A Cultural History. Oxford: Berg,

2003

Humphries, Tom. “End of a Journey Nonpareil.” The Irish Times.. 8

July 2006.
LexisNexis Academic-Document. Reed Elsevier Inc. Davidson
College Library, NC.
14 Nov. 2006. <http://web.lexis-
nexis.com/universe/document?>

Solomans, Jason. “Chronicle of a Disgrace Foretold.” The Observer.

16 July 2006.
LexisNexis Academic-Document. Reed Elsevier Inc. Davidson
College Library, NC.
14 Nov. 2006. <http://web.lexis-
nexis.com/universe/document?>

Vincour, John. “Just a Soccer Star, After All.” The New York Times
Magazine.
14 Mar. 1999: 32-35.

Wahl, Grant. “Surreal World.” Sports Illustrated. 17 July 2006.

LexisNexis
Academic-Document. Reed Elsevier Inc. Davidson College Library,
NC.
7 Dec. 2006. <http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?>