The Picture of Dorian Gray attracted such controversy in the early 1890s that Oscar Wilde wrote a preface to defend his only novel’s reputation. That prologue has come to be as famous as the work it precedes as a manifesto for art for art’s sake, praising something utterly useless as long as its beauty can be admired intently.
Take a look at Zinedine Zidane’s list of club honours and your first reaction is probably disappointment. In the modern era of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, three league titles, one Champions League, one Ballon d’Or and a goal every five-and-a-bit games is meagre. Sure, France’s 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000 victories are impossible without Zidane, but at club level, the bare figures are far from earth-shattering. Yet Zidane exists in the bracket of all-time greats with Johan Cruyff, George Best and Alfredo Di Stefano.
Why? Art. Such was Zizou’s ludicrous talent and leonine grace that, in his late ’90s and early noughties prime, the man with the monk’s haircut produced as close to art for art’s sake as any footballer in history. You can’t count the balletic roulettes which extricated him from tight situations, the unnecessary flicks on the halfway line or a crowd’s moments of hushed awe as stats because they’re not direct contributors to the brutalist function of winning matches. But you could feel them.
Twenty years ago, however, Zidane came as close as anyone before or since to showing how doing something just because you can may also provoke something spectacularly useful. On May 15, 2002, Zizou watched a ball plummet from the Scottish night’s sky, swivelled on his right foot and thrust his weaker left to shoulder-height. The volleyed goal of such startling, impossible beauty that followed deserved its own museum. It also won Real Madrid the Champions League and beatified a modern football god.
“Without your art, you are nothing”
Goals like Zidane’s against Leverkusen just shouldn’t happen. These showpiece events are usually littered with an unremitting drudge of mediocrity between two teams desperate not to make a costly mistake. Individuality and creative thinking are actively discouraged at the expense of team shape, limiting space and eventually finding a way to win. Playmakers in Champions League finals exist as an afterthought, like a work experience kid tossed a throwaway crumb to keep them busy: get the ball, see if you can do something with it, but mainly remember your responsibilities to your co-workers.
Forty-two years before the howitzer that ensured Zidane’s deification, on the same Hampden Park pitch in Glasgow, his Madrid forebears proved there was another way in a European Cup final if you were touched by a higher power. When Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas scored every Real Madrid goal – the latter four, to the former’s three – in a 7-3 destruction of Eintracht Frankfurt in the 1960 final, ingenuity triumphed over pragmatism for Los Blancos.
