In the first of a new series running throughout November looking back at the most controversial moments in World Cup history, The Athletic’s James Horncastle tells the story of the moment of madness that blighted the 2006 final.
Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt on Marco Materazzi stunned the world – and had far reaching consequences, particularly for the Italian…
Marco Materazzi planned to take his children to Disneyland Paris after the 2006 World Cup. He had been away from the family home in Milan for six weeks and wanted to make it up to them. They would go on the rides, pose for pictures with Mickey Mouse. After playing centre-back for Italy, Materazzi wanted to play dad again. But he couldn’t and was advised to cancel the holiday. Materazzi did so with a heavy heart, wondering how he was going to break the news to the children.
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“It was the first time I couldn’t keep a promise as a father,” he lamented. Unfortunately it was still too soon after the World Cup final in Berlin. Still, a small world after all and going to France immediately would have been considered too much of a provocation.
An act playing up to the perception of Materazzi as an inveterate provocateur when his exclusive intention had been to express the love and affection of a doting dad. It made him rueful. Wasn’t he the victim of that Zinedine Zidane headbutt rather than the villain? “Apparently it’s my destiny,” Materazzi reflected in his biography, The Life of a Warrior. “I can never fully enjoy the things I achieve because there’s always something that ruins the party. On this occasion it was the endless controversy that followed the final and that headbutt.”
My first assignment in journalism involved covering Materazzi. He was in London on a drizzly November day. Inter Milan could have been in town for a Champions League game against Arsenal or Chelsea. But Materazzi wasn’t protecting Julio Cesar’s goal from Robin van Persie or Didier Drogba. He was defending his character at the High Court. After the World Cup final, the Daily Mail falsely accused Materazzi of provoking Zidane into headbutting him. The paper wrongly alleged Materazzi used “vile racist abuse” and “a slur on his mother”.
They apologised, as did The Sun and the Daily Star in a series of libel cases brought by Materazzi. It was a different kind of treble from the one he would celebrate with Inter in 2010. One win after another encouraged The Times to name his legal counsel Lawyer of the Week. I was half-expecting a post-match interview in which Materazzi passed him the award and muttered some words of congratulation. But this wasn’t a game to him.
When we sat down for a brief one-on-one at the offices of the law firm representing him, Materazzi wasn’t in a particularly gleeful mood.
Two years had passed since the final at the Olympic Stadion and he was still dealing with the fall-out. There was a weariness to Materazzi that day. It went beyond Inter’s mothering press officer stopping the interview because his shirt collar was outside the lapels of his blazer.
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Hitherto I had laboured under the misapprehension that Materazzi took it all in his stride, revelling in the notoriety it brought him. I’d seen the billboards in Milan and Rome as well as the Nike advert in which an NFL linebacker, a riot police unit with a battering ram, a monster truck and a wrecking ball all bounced off Materazzi’s iron chest. But in the background, he had received death threats after the Mail’s wholly untrue claims and as fearless and unflappable as Materazzi appears, he’s human and a family man, and they had taken a toll greater than missing a trip to Euro Disney.
The headbutt itself and the actual words exchanged were not a source of regret. Not talking immediately after the match was, in retrospect. “The fact is my silence and his immediately after the game allowed everybody to think, say and write far-fetched things about what we may have said to each other.” On the one hand, it distracted from the game itself. On the other, the 2006 final was on its way to being defined by Materazzi and Zidane anyway.
Italy feared no one after knocking Germany out in extra time at Signal Iduna Park, a ground where the hosts had never lost. But they would have preferred Brazil over France.
Watching the games at the team hotel in Duisburg, Materazzi’s centre-back partner Fabio Cannavaro recalls sinking into his chair after every Zidane masterclass. France knocked Italy out on penalties in the 1998 quarter-finals and a golden goal from David Trezeguet decided the Euro 2000 final in extra time. Marcello Lippi had worked with Zidane at Juventus and knew what he was capable of. “I hope I’m not offending anyone when I say this but he was the best player I ever coached.”
A Ballon d’Or winner in 1998, the expectation was France Football’s panel would vote for Zidane to win the award again upon leading his country to a second World Cup in Germany. Everything about him was effortlessly smooth; the glistening bald head, the sleek symmetry of his initials, the gunpowder hidden in feathery goose-down touches. Possessing a fierce grace, Zidane resembled a ballet dancer with a black belt and gave the Brazilians a lesson in football capoeira in the quarter-final. He appeared in complete control at all times.
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So it came as little surprise when, seven minutes into the final, Zidane stood over the penalty spot and decided on attempting the boldest skill against the best goalkeeper in the world. He wanted to pull off a Panenka against Gianluigi Buffon in the biggest game in football. The audacity of the choice was in turn a statement of Zidane’s omnipotence. It showed his hand. This was how he wanted to go out in his last game ever. Zidane the supreme.
On another level. Being him it could be no ordinary Panenka either; the execution had to be perfect and it was, kissing the bottom of the bar, spinning in, then out, deceiving Sky Italia’s commentator Fabio Caressa. “No goal,” he shouted, without the benefit of goalline technology. Alas, the replay showed the ball bouncing a foot inside, aesthetically as good as it gets.
In despair at giving the penalty away, Materazzi sought to make amends. The decision appeared harsh upon review as he barely made contact with Florent Malouda. There was no VAR at the time.
Things almost got worse very quickly when Willy Sagnol whipped in a cross and Materazzi headed it behind. He feared an own goal rather than a corner kick. “I thought to myself, ‘It’s not my night’,” Materazzi said. But Italy were not behind for long. While practising attacking set pieces before the final, Materazzi’s team-mates told him Patrick Vieira was afraid of his aerial prowess. They had played against each other in the Derby d’Italia and the fear was well placed. Materazzi rose above him to head in the equaliser.
He pointed to the sky, the tall and thin figure of Materazzi, a mast the Italy players clung onto after an early storm. For a moment, he was overcome with emotion, red-faced and on the brink of tears. By indicating the heavens, Materazzi was dedicating the goal to his mother Anna who passed away when he was 15. “Mum was there,” Materazzi said. “When I leapt over Vieira and sent the ball into the back of the net, she was there. When I cried on my own in some corner of the pitch, kissed the World Cup and sang with my teammates, she was there.”
Materazzi’s grief, the enduring love he felt for his mother — Materazzi’s daughter is named after her — meant he could never offend someone else’s. “Only people who don’t know about it could write and say that I insulted Zidane’s mother in Berlin. Only people who don’t know me. I would never, and I mean never, allow myself to besmirch what I consider to be a person’s most cherished affection because I know what it means to lose that affection.”
Before the headbutt, cannelloni, Luca Toni, pepperoni, hit the crossbar. The Fiorentina striker could not let Materazzi finish as Italy’s top scorer. He thought he scored the winner too only for his goal to then be ruled out for offside because Daniele De Rossi, still desperate to make up for the red card he was shown against the US for elbowing Brian McBride, went too early for an Andrea Pirlo free kick.
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“If we’d lost I would have beaten him up,” Toni joked. The game went to extra time and as it wore on France looked the more likely to win. Another Sagnol cross found Zidane in the box. Rino Gattuso lost him again. But Buffon was on hand to turn the header over the bar. Gattuso told Materazzi to start marking Zidane. He couldn’t do it on his own.
When Zidane next ventured into Italy’s box, Materazzi made sure he got tighter. There was a coming together then another one. Materazzi apologised, telling Zidane he couldn’t just let him run unchecked and head another effort on goal.
As they left the penalty area, Materazzi claims Zidane said: “If you want my shirt, you can have it after the game.” But Materazzi already had a Zidane jersey. They had swapped shirts after another Italy-France game in the past. “I replied that I’d rather have his sister,” Materazzi revealed. He thought nothing of it. To him it was the kind of trash-talk you heard in the schoolyard or, in an Italian context, at the oratory. A throwaway line. But it hit a nerve with Zidane. The inscrutable Sphinx-like visage suddenly cracked.
Zidane’s sister, Lila, had been on the phone to him several times that day. Their mother wasn’t well and Lila was looking after her. She kept calling. The tension Zidane already felt was high. He was preparing for a final, the last game of his illustrious career. This summer Zidane went back over the incident in an interview with L’Equipe to mark his 50th birthday. “He didn’t say anything about my mother,” Zidane explained. “He’s often said that and it’s true. But he did insult my sister who was with my mother at the time. Everybody says things to each other on the pitch. Sometimes bad things. But you don’t do anything. That day, what happened happened. He triggered something talking about my sister. It was only a second. Then it was over.”
Materazzi never saw it coming. He was looking away when Zidane turned into his path and prepared for the headbutt. Impulsive as it was, the act showed all of Zidane’s respect for technique. It’s as if he spent hours studying wildlife documentaries about rutting water buffalo narrated by David Attenborough or burned the midnight oil at Clairefontaine reading up on Gods metamorphosing into rams in the Greek myths. The way he bows his head and plunges it into Materazzi’s chest is unlike any headbutt ever seen on a football pitch. A cliched tete-a-tete it is not. It remains one of one.
😎 The Panenka
😱 The headbutt⏪ Throwing it back to the final game of Zinedine Zidane’s career…
🗓 The @FIFAWorldCup kicks off in nine days#ITVFootball pic.twitter.com/r0uGU70AF5
— ITV Football (@itvfootball) November 11, 2022
Cannavaro did not see it as he stepped out of the defence. He was a couple of feet away but remembered the noise. “A loud, crashing noise. I was 10ft away. Then Gigi (Buffon) came running out of his goal and said Zidane had done a mad headbutt.”
Buffon was like Chief Brody in Jaws; the only guy on the beach to see the attack. “It was like a flash of light ripping through the sky,” he said, “a slashed canvas. Something that leaves you stunned.” The Argentine referee, Horacio Elizondo, had no idea what happened. He was oblivious as to why Materazzi lay on his back. Sixty-nine thousand fans at the Olympic Stadion all turned their attention to Elizondo. More than 715million people around the world were watching him. They wanted to know what he was going to do because they were seeing what Elizondo could not: replays on loop of a stooping, surging Zidane warhead.
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Mic-ed up Elizondo put his finger to his ear and asked his assistant Dario Garcia if he saw anything. Nothing. His linesman Rodolfo Otero didn’t either. The fourth official, Luis Medina Cantalejo, said: “Horacio, Horacio, I saw it. A really violent headbutt by Zidane on Materazzi.” France’s Zodiac consulting coach Raymond Domenech would later complain Cantalejo saw it on one of the monitors near the dug-out and, without knowing it, became the first VAR in history. But Elizondo disputed the claim. “When I spoke to Luis,” he told the Blizzard, “I asked how he’d seen it, to be sure. That is, going back to the game, when he tells me: ‘I saw it, I saw a headbutt’, right there and then. After the match I asked him again, whether he’d seen it on the monitor or on the field of play and he told me: ‘No, I saw it on the pitch. The monitor didn’t come into it’.”
As an officiating team, they were perhaps the most influential to referee a World Cup final since Gottfried Dienst and the “Russian” linesman Tofiq Bahramov (an Azeri who now has a stadium named in his honour) in 1966. One underlined a need for goalline technology, the other VAR. Inadmissible or not, Elizondo felt he had no choice but to send Zidane off.
“Pas ca, Zinedine. Pas ca,” Thierry Gilardi, the TF1 commentator, lamented. “Not that, Zidane. Oh no, not this. Ai ai ai. Oh no, Zinedine. It’s not possible. It’s terrible. It’s the last time.” But it wasn’t the first time. Lippi knew that better than most. He had been in Domenech’s shoes and anyone who has watched the film Zidane: A 21st-century portrait, a movie that follows his every action in a game for Real Madrid against Villarreal, knows it ends in a red card.
“In the past he headbutted a Hamburg player (Jochen Kientz) in the Champions League (in 200o) and punched one of Parma’s,” Lippi recalled. “But Zinedine is a great person and one wrong gesture doesn’t change that.”
Perhaps only the sight of Roberto Baggio rooted to the spot like a downcast scarecrow after blazing his penalty over against Brazil in 1994 provides a more saddening scene in a World Cup final than that of Zidane walking, disconsolate, past the World Cup trophy.
Materazzi would soon put a green, red and white hat on the trophy. He scored his penalty in the shoot-out at the end of extra time. Trezeguet missed his and Fabio Grosso became Marco Tardelli for a new generation. “You have to accept it,” Zidane told L’Equipe. “I’m not proud of it but it’s part of my journey. I was more fragile at that time. And it’s in those moments that sometimes you do something that isn’t right. That’s how it ended. Gilardi was right. Pas comme ca. But that’s how it is. It’s hard. But it’s my career. The story of my life just like the two goals I scored in the 1998 final.”
Less than a week after the final, there was a disciplinary hearing at FIFA house in Zurich. Materazzi was suspended for two games, the second of which was a World Cup qualifier against France in Paris. It left Materazzi incredulous. He claimed his legal team had footage of Zidane using the same insult in the past but chose not to use it as evidence. The situation was too inflamed already. Better to keep a low profile and move on.
Materazzi was prepared to shake Zidane’s hand. He told the disciplinary commission it was his opinion Zidane deserved to win the Ballon d’Or. “But the thing was by now far bigger than it should have been,” Materazzi said, “the verdict was already written. FIFA preferred to punish me.” Zidane, a retired footballer, got three days’ community service working with FIFA’s humanitarian activities. Did the punishment fit the crime? “Only one day more than me!” Materazzi said in disbelief.
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Before the next World Cup in South Africa, FIFA’s disgraced former president Sepp Blatter spotted a PR opportunity. Admittedly his plans were less grandiose than those of his successor Gianni Infantino whose ambition seems to be to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But he wanted to bring Materazzi and Zidane together.
“Perhaps they should go together to Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held in prison for 27 years,” Blatter said. “It is a pity… that the World Cup comes to an end with a red card.”
Materazzi and Zidane bumped into each other in the parking lot of a Milan hotel in November 2010 instead. Real Madrid were in town to play AC Milan in the Champions League and Zidane was by then an executive, advising Florentino Perez and Jose Mourinho. “What was said stays between us. Let’s say I did most of the talking and when at the end he held out his hand, I shook it firmly until he looked me properly in the eye,” Materazzi told Mediaset television. “It’s what I wanted. For me it was great, I don’t know about him.”
In Qatar, a bronze sculpture by the Algerian-born French artist Adel Abdessemed immortalises the headbutt. It is expected to go back on display during the World Cup at the sports museum in Doha after initially being withdrawn from a location on the seafront. An ambassador for Qatar during the World Cup bidding process, Zidane should be in town for the tournament. One day he hopes to coach France at the World Cup. He has unfinished business after 2006. He told L’Equipe: “That’s why I say that with Les Bleus, it’s not over. I don’t want it to end like that. It’s not over.”
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
