Hermel: “Zidane's destiny has been almost supernatural”

Gain the trust of Zinedine Zidane it's not easy and Frédéric Hermel (Arras, 3-2-1970) can boast of having achieved it from journalism. His almost two decades following the day to day in Madrid of the great French idol as a correspondent for L'Èquipe and RMC and collaborator of AS have allowed him to build a relationship with the genius that flourishes in 'Zidane' (Espasa), the definitive biography of the Madrid coach that goes on sale today in Spain.

Who better to tell the story of Zidane than someone who has spent half his life 'stuck' to Zizou …

I have known him for 19 years. Zidane changed my life. I was a general information journalist and from one day to the next my life became focused not on soccer, not on Real Madrid… I was focused only on Zidane. For years I lived stuck to it, a great pressure. He was obsessed with Zidane. I dreamed of him at least once a week …

We are talking about a superstar very jealous of her privacy. How did you defend that defense?

With time. Being French, a journalist, in Madrid and for so many years. Then there is trust. I will never say that I am a friend of Zidane, nor will he say it about me. But we have created a small distance that allows you to be a coach in front of a journalist and to be a journalist before a coach. I do not consider myself part of his close nucleus, but I am the journalist closest to him. Our relationship is loving, very loving. I love him very much and I think he loves me too.

The book is based on years of conversations off the record, where an icon is best undressed. Zinedine is …

It is very, very normal. I would say that even almost banal. He has two children at the French Lyceum and goes to the parents' meetings … He goes shopping with them. He has never been a star with his family and I did not succeed with me either. We are Zizou and Fred.

Is Véronique Zidane so important in the life of the genius?

His wife is his beacon, his guide. He says “without Veronique there is no Zizou”. If he hasn't gone crazy over everything that has happened to him, it's because of her. In Spain the dimension that Zidane has in France is not understood. On July 12, 1998, his portrait was projected with laser beams on the Arc de Triomphe, the symbol of the homeland. They shouted 'Zidane, President!' How can I not go crazy? That World Cup final scored two goals for Brazil at the Stade de France. It is that 44 years earlier, very close to that stadium, Zidane's father, an immigrant and poor, worked on a construction site and slept in a building under construction during the coldest winter in the history of the country … It is an almost supernatural destination .

Zidane has no flower, it has a star.

He is almost a novel character. If he did not want to be a coach and has ended up winning three Champions in a row with Madrid! Zidane has a very strong spiritual life. “I know I'm not a normal person, there is a star up there that protects me,” he once told me. But beware, the star works hard to protect that star.

Is the myth of being an aligner finally overcome?

If there is a coach who works and does not advertise it, that is Zizou. There are others like Mourinho and Guardiola who stage their work. They tell it as if it were a movie in which they are also the protagonists. Zidane does not do it because it is not his character, because he knows that the footballer is more important than the coach and because he does not want to give the rival weapons. He doesn't want to explain how he works because of that. He prefers that his methods be secret. And let no one forget that he won the title of coach on the long track. It took him three years in France when he could have done the one-year course in Spain. He did so because he wanted to learn. People don't see it, but Zizou is a very studious guy. Very Italian, he plans everything a lot. And he loves his players. What he liked most in the return to football is not having five changes, it is being able to have everyone on the bench. It hurts to leave them out of a call. One day he confessed to me that it hurt him to leave Kovacic and Nacho out when they came to train for a week of fable … The most paradoxical thing is that he was never a substitute as a soccer player.

Will the culmination of your career be directing France?

That will come. It will be. For a very simple reason, if you want you have 25 years as a coach. It's just that he's been training for four years, he's almost a rookie. He has a record that the rest can hardly dream of and it is evident that he will be the coach of France. My theory and I develop it in the book is that Zidane is going to be bigger as a coach than as a footballer. I'm convinced.

Let us return to the book and its gestation. Did the protagonist bless the project?

I tell him exactly how it was. It's November 2018 and I'll stick with it. We had an aperitif and I tell him that the time had come for me to write his biography. He wasn't asking for authorization, he was informing him, and Zidane was fine. I spoke to people around him who had never given an interview, I went to Naples for two days to see Ancelotti to tell me about him … Above all, he had my memories, of many years, so I also investigated in my memory. He never asked me for anything and in the final part he helped me with details that I needed to know. In fact, he read the book when it was already written. I gave it to him in hand in Valdebebas, he read it and he liked it a lot. He congratulated me for the style, he said it was very well written, that moved me a lot.

Do you see yourself in thirty years, the two old men, sharing battles with Zizou?

It would be the nice icing on a great story (laughs). Two Frenchmen in Madrid with a club and telling us things. I'm the accountant for Zidane's destiny. One day I told him. “Do you know why I am the right person to write this book? Because I am close enough to you, but at the same time far enough away to have a perspective ”. He sees it that way too. It is what has been built with so many years of mutual trust.