and joined local clubs US Saint-Henri, then
SO Septemes-les-Vallons whose youth team
coach persuaded the club director to sign an
11-year-old Castellane kid. Smail drove his
youngest of five children to training in the
family’s battered Renault 12.
“Every time he played, I had to produce
a piece of identification that proved his age,”
Zidane Snr later recalled. “His opponents
thought he played under a false licence.”
Sent by Septemes to a three-day training
camp in Aix-en-Provence run by the French
FA, a 14-year-old Zidane was spotted by
Cannes scout Jean Varraud in the summer of- “He spoke with the ball,” said Varraud.
“Believe me, I’ve never seen anything quite
like it. Yazid had the warrior quality of his
impoverished community. He was hungry.”
A six-week trial led to a place at the club’s
Mimont academy. Zidane spent much of it
cleaning – a punishment for punching an
opponent who’d mocked his ghetto origins,
the first act of uncontrolled rage which
sought dominance over the artist.
Varraud worked hard with Zidane to curb
his mentee’s raw temper, after further
attacks on spectators who insulted the
youngster’s race. Eventually, a spell living
with Cannes director Jean-Claude Elineau’s
family helped calm Zidane down.
“My greatest memory is Cannes, my
apprenticeship, the six or seven years I spent
there,” he recalled. “I watched the pros play,
I trained every day and I said, ‘Kid, if you
work, if you’re serious, you can do something
here’. I didn’t go to the cinema, or the beach
to show off to girls. I knew what I wanted.”
It was at Cannes where Zidane made
a friend for life. He hit it off with David
Bettoni immediately; they raced each other
home to Lyon and Marseille respectively in
their battered Ford Fiesta (Bettoni) and
Renault Clio (Zidane) the day they first met.
Zizou may be painfully shy, but he’s also
fiercely loyal to his intimate circle. When he
joined Juve a few years later in 1996, Zidane
and the Old Lady arranged for Bettoni to join
third-tier sides Avezzano and Alessandria so
their star man had a familiar face around
along with his young family (“I can’t tell you
about all the to-ing and fro-ing!” he later
said). Bettoni was also Zidane’s assistant
manager when he took over at Real Madrid.
They still speak most days.
Zidane was merely 16 when he made his
Cannes debut in May 1989, in a Ligue 1
fixture against Nantes. The 1990-91 season
proved his breakthrough year, as he made
31 appearances and scored his first goal –
also against Nantes – in February 1991.
At a party after the game, president Alain
Pedretti came good on a promise to give
Zidane a car after netting for the first time.
The outrageous talent Varraud had first seen- “he’d go past one, two, three, five, six
players; it was sublime” – was now wowing
Ligue 1, not least when Cannes finished
fourth to qualify for the UEFA Cup. It remains
their best performance since finishing second
in Ligue 1’s inaugural 1932-33 season.
A 20-year-old Zidane joined Bordeaux in
the summer of 1992. There, manager
Rolland Courbis recognised the brooding
intensity of the introvert in his fellow
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