Zinedine Zidane confirmed on Sunday that coaching France is on his to-do list, though he stopped short of saying he expects to replace Didier Deschamps right away.
Speaking at an event organised by Italian
sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, the 53-year-old former France midfield genius said: “I’m sure I’ll get back into coaching. I’m not saying it’s going to happen now, what I want one day is to coach the national team.”
Deschamps — the 2018 World Cup-winning coach — is due to step down after next summer’s tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and Zidane has been widely mooted as the favourite to succeed him.
Zidane did not confirm any timetable, instead stressing the importance of passion and purpose in coaching.
A glittering — if relatively concise — managerial CV
Zidane’s managerial résumé is short but extraordinarily successful. His only senior head-coaching jobs have been two spells at Real Madrid (2016–2018 and 2019–2021), where he established himself as one of modern football’s most effective coaches.
He famously led Madrid to three consecutive UEFA Champions League titles (2016–18) and added domestic honours across his two tenures: all credentials that would carry weight in any conversation about a France job.
Still, he has been out of club management since leaving Madrid in 2021, and national team roles bring different pressures and rhythms.
Coaching outlook: energy, desire and passing things on
Asked about what matters most in management, Zidane sounded like a teacher: “The most important thing is to have a passion for football and to want to pass on something to your players, what you have in you, deep within you,” he said.
He added a pragmatic metric for success: “A coach has an important role in the success of his team. In my opinion his energy and desire are 80 percent of whether things go well.”
If Zidane does take the France job, he would inherit a squad stacked with talent but carrying huge expectations.
For now, though, Zidane is keeping things deliberately open: he wants to return to coaching one day, he said, but not necessarily immediately.
(with AFP inputs)
