FourFourTwo's best team ever: Our ultimate XI of the last 30 years

CM: Zinedine Zidane

Mon Dieu, has any player produced more truly iconic moments over the past 30 years than Zinedine Zidane?

Speak the Frenchman’s name and a reel of era-defining shorts begin to clatter through the projector. The headers that downed Brazil to seal Les Bleu’s home-soil domination in 1998. The left-footed volley that demolished Bayer Leverkusen in 2002. The golden-slippered toying of Brazil in 2006… The headbutt that followed just two games later.

While few proclaim Zidane the greatest player of all time, there is a case to be made that he’s the best in purely technical terms. Elegance, composure, control, vision, balance, touch. In his finest performances at Bordeaux, Juventus and Real Madrid, no player could match him. In a France shirt, nobody even came close.

Some may point to Zidane’s medal haul as evidence that he wasn’t as good as is often suggested. Three league titles and one Champions League are a paltry haul for a player of his quality, even with his World Cup, European Championship and the 1998 Ballon d’Or thrown in. But medals, goals, mere numbers, don’t do Zidane justice. How do you measure the gasp of a crowd witnessing one of his trademark Roulette turns? How do you calculate the audacity of flicking the ball over R9’s head in a World Cup quarter-final? You’d have better luck reducing a stroke of Claude Monet’s paintbrush to fractions.

Perhaps Los Blancos legend Alfredo Di Stefano said it best when he suggested that Zidane played football “as if he had silk gloves on each foot”.

One silk glove raised high into the cold night air in Glasgow’s Hampden Park as a ball falls from the heavens. There isn’t another player over the past 30 years that could have hit it like that…

Ed McCambridge