To start our World Cup icons series, BBC Sport tells how Zinedine Zidane led a multi-cultural France team to 1998 glory.
Back then they called him Yaz, the 10-year-old boy from the concrete high rises of northern Marseille who watched France fizzle and burn at the 1982 World Cup, and whose humble desires were for a leather football and a bicycle rather than Ballons d’Or and immortality.
We know him as Zinedine Zidane, Zizou, the man who finally delivered Les Bleus’ World Cup dream in the summer of 1998 to a euphoric nation unified by their football team’s success.
It was not always like that…
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