The model, though Real Madrid would be reluctant to acknowledge it too loudly, was made fashionable by Barcelona.
Install a respected, gifted former player as a coach in club’s youth system. Put him in charge of the feeder team that, in Spanish football, competes against the senior professionals of the second and third tiers of the league structure.
Use that as a springboard for him to take over the first XI, to the enthusiasm of supporters who remember fondly his greatness as a player.
Barcelona did just that with Pep Guardiola, who took over the manager’s seat at Camp Nou in 2008 on the back of no top-flight experience as a coach, but with a distinguished past at the club.
He had a short but thorough apprenticeship in management guiding the teenagers and twentysomethings of Barcelona B, most of whom had grown up at the same academy Guardiola himself attended as a boy.
Read more: Reports in Europe point to Pep Guardiola leaving Bayern – likely for Manchester City
Manager Guardiola then won the Uefa Champions League after barely 10 months as Barcelona’s first-team manager, and the Primera Liga too.
The path laid out for Zinedine Zidane at Madrid is similar, although the association between club and former superstar was not formed quite so early in Zidane’s life.
He was 29 when he became the world’s most expensive footballer, in joining Madrid from Juventus in the summer of 2001, already a world champion with France.
In France too, there is a notion, one said to be tempting to Zidane, that he may one day be in charge of the national team.
Zidane’s candidacy as Madrid manager is being assessed from within the club with greater urgency right now, because the rickety form of recent weeks, and the diminishing confidence in Rafa Bentiez, who took over from Carlo Ancelotti only in July.
Zidane is on site, now in his second season in charge of Real Madrid Castilla, who are based at the Madrid academy and are second in Spain’s Segunda B, the regionalised third division.
That is a step up from the last campaign, when they finished sixth in the table. Zidane has his admirers as a coach, not least Ancelotti, whom he served as an assistant in the season Madrid won the 2014 Champions League.
“He has a fantastic CV as a player, and he’s now gaining maximum experience as a coach,” Ancelotti told RMC, the French broadcaster. “I see him as very very capable of taking over the reins of the first team. He has all the right qualities, the charisma, the personality, the desire.”
He would have allies, too, in the dressing room. As Ancelotti’s deputy, he worked with most of the current squad, excluding those who joined in the last two season such as Toni Kroos and James Rodriguez.
Some of the main recommendations of his abilities come from Madrid players who have worked on specific technical aspects of their game with Zidane.
Jese, the young striker promoted from the academy, has devoted many hours to listening to Zidane instruct him on how to time his volleys. No challenging the teacher’s expertise in that respect: perhaps the most celebrated goal of Zidane’s club career was the arching volley that opened the scoring in Madrid’s 2-1 victory over Bayer Leverkusen in the 2002 Champions League final. He has a strong relationship with Karim Benzema, his compatriot. Benzema’s development over the past three years as a centre-forward of clever movements and awareness of how to bring others into play is credited to concentrated sessions with Zidane; Rafael Varane, the young France central defender whom Zidane urged Madrid to sign, has also spent a good deal of time one-on-one with the 1998 Ballon D’Or winner
“When Zidane speaks, players listen,” Ancelotti once said of him. He can come across as reserved, but has made a point of studying the communication skills of other managers.
Time was that he would take a seat discreetly among reporters for the manager’s press conferences, to note how difficult questions were deflected or confronted by Ancelotti.
The weighty question he may well have to answer soon is: ‘Do you feel ready to step up?”
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