Zidane’s return boosts Real Madrid

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This article was published 16/03/2019 (2710 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Zinedine Zidane is back — back in charge of Real Madrid, back in the job he left in May, less than a week after guiding Los Blancos to a third successive Champions League triumph.

At the time, so soon after such an extraordinary success, the Frenchman’s resignation came as a shock. But it was also understandable, and all the more so in the context of Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure to Juventus in July.

“I left because I needed it,” he said upon his reappointment at Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, according to newspaper Marca. “The squad needed a change after winning everything.”

What he surely meant, and what is plainly and painfully evident after his 284 days away from the club, is that it was the squad itself that needed changing, and not its manager.

Satisfied with its accomplishments, more lulled into a pleasant, post-lunch nap than energized for an afternoon’s work, the players, as a group, had nothing further to prove, even if they had won only a single Spanish title during Zidane’s first tenure. Real Madrid, after all, is a club that measures itself in European competition, and it had won three European Cups on the bounce and four in five seasons.

The squad could hardly have been faulted its contentedness, but Zidane knew he could win nothing further with players sufficiently fulfilled. Club president Florentino Perez and upper management found themselves in a tough spot, as well. How could they overhaul a squad that had just delivered the only European triumvirate of the Champions League era?

And so, like he did so often as a player, whether winning Scudetti with Juventus, the World Cup with France or La Liga and the Champions League as a player with Madrid, Zidane bided his time and waited for the opportune moment before asserting himself into the fray, exhibiting exceptional control and generating the perfect strike for his team.

It was a masterstroke — vintage Zidane genius.

“For us,” Perez gushed on Tuesday, “the best coach in the world is back at Real Madrid.”

Those 284 days, it turns out, were a nightmarish gestation with a horrifying result, at least in Madrid’s terms.

Their decision to replace Zidane with then-Spain boss Julen Lopetegui was fraught with trouble from the start. The announcement, which was leaked to the senior Madrid players, widened the rift with La Roja’s Barcelona contingent mere days before the World Cup. Lopetegui, who was hardly a competent character in the comedy of errors, managed only 14 matches for Los Meringues, winning six of them, before being sacked in October.

Santiago Solari was next up, and while he ensured Madrid was solidly in La Liga’s Champions League places before his exit, he also oversaw a Copa del Rey loss to Barcelona and this past week’s epic defeat at home to Ajax in the club’s signature tournament — a series of results that prompted partisan Marca to proclaim “the worst seven days in the history of the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu.”

And so, Perez got back on the phone (he had first rung Zidane, still living in the Spanish capital, following Lopetegui’s firing) and was this time met with the answer he wanted.

“When the president called,” the 46-year-old said, “I couldn’t say no.”

But, what was he told over the course of that conversation? What was he promised that lured him back to the position he had quit of his own volition — every manager’s dream — just nine months before?

On Thursday, when Real Madrid disclosed the 50-million-euro acquisition of Porto defender Eder Militao, it revealed the obvious: Zidane will be given a sizable transfer budget, perhaps the largest in the club’s history, to rebuild the squad. The squad, as he himself said, needs a change. And now, he will be the one to change it.

“Things are going to change. They need to,” he reiterated at his reintroductory press conference. He’s not wasting any time.

There will be numerous big-money signings that follow Militao to Zidane’s Madrid 2.0. Eden Hazard, who enters the final year of his contract with Chelsea next season, is at or near the top of the new Galactico list. PSG’s Kylian Mbappé, himself a French World Cup hero, has already stated a desire to work with Zidane and could also make the switch, even if his signature would cost in excess of 200 million euros. Lazio midfielder Sergej Milinkovic-Savic and Lyon’s Nabil Fekir will likely be pursued, as well.

Of course, there will also be a cull. Karim Benzema, despite being a previous Zidane favourite, is 31 years old and has scored only 13 goals in 27 La Liga matches this term. Toni Kroos, a one-time pass-master for Madrid, Bayern Munich and Germany, has already won four Champions Leagues, four domestic titles and the World Cup. He is the very picture of contentedness, and it has shown this season. Then there is Gareth Bale, despised by a majority of Madrid fans and having failed to adequately replace Ronaldo these past several months.

His sale would also help finance even more arrivals.

Other veteran players, such as Sergio Ramos, Marcelo and Casemiro, will be given the chance to show they can be reinvigorated. At the same time, experiments with the likes of Dani Ceballos, Mariano, Jesus Vallejo and Marcos Llorente are almost certainly over, and Mateo Kovacic and James Rodriguez — both out on loan — could also be offloaded.

Zinedine Zidane is back, charged with bringing Real Madrid back to where it was less than a year ago. It’s not a risk, he says, insisting he has nothing to prove and that he owes the club nothing. And he doesn’t.

What he has done is visualized — and perhaps even in the moment when he initially stepped down — what would eventually happen at Madrid, and he waited until the moment when he could control the process. In his return to the Bernabeu, he has once again shown himself as much a mastermind on one side of the touchline as he was for so long, and so iconically, on the other.

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