Zidane Takes the France Job He Spent Five Years Refusing Everything Else For

The French football federation named Zinedine Zidane head coach of the men's national team on Tuesday, on a four year contract. He is 54, he has not held a job since he left Real Madrid in 2021, and he spent the intervening period turning down clubs that could pay him considerably more than this post does.

He succeeds Didier Deschamps, who stepped down after the 2026 World Cup at the end of fourteen years in charge. Deschamps took the team through 185 matches for 120 wins, won the 2018 World Cup and the 2020-2021 Nations League, and reached the Euro 2016 and 2022 World Cup finals. It is the most successful run any France manager has had, and it is also long enough that the federation has not run this appointment process in a very long time.

The immediate context is a tournament that went wrong at the end. France arrived in North America among the favourites and lost in the semi-finals to Spain, who went on to win it. That is not a squad crisis. It is the more awkward problem of a group good enough to be expected to win that did not, which is the situation in which a change of voice is usually preferred to a change of players.

What Zidane brings is not a tactical school. It is that the dressing room does not need his career explained to it, and that the federation has hired the one candidate whose standing does not depend on the next qualifying campaign. Whether that survives a bad October is the only real question, and it is the same question every France coach starts with.