Zinedine Zidane judged his departure from Real Madrid perfectly. His return could be even better

Hello and welcome to another installment of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. Showing the yellow card of conspiracy to the the foul throw of news.

Usually, football has the good manners to happen on Saturday and Sunday. Usually, Mondays are mercifully quiet, as everybody recovers from their weekend exertions. Usually, Tactically Naive gets to write about football’s news without any bothersome football news actually happening.

But Real Madrid don’t do usually. In Meringue World, Monday is a perfectly appropriate time to announce one of the most amusing, interesting, and surprising managerial appointments of the season. Yes, Santiago Solari is, at last, free from his troubles and worries and cares. Zinedine Zidane is back.

So, what on earth is going on? Why is Zidane, having timed his departure perfectly, making what might, on the face of it, be the most ill-advised return since Abraham Lincoln decided that he simply had to go and see Hamilton a seventh time?

Let’s review the evidence. Zidane left Madrid because, in his own words:

I know it is a bit of a strange moment but I think it is the right moment. This is a team that should keep on winning and it needs a change for that. After three years, it needs another discourse, another working methodology, and that’s why I took this decision.

This was widely interpreted as:

This whole squad is weird, unbalanced, and about to collapse down on itself with a long, loud farting noise, and when that happens I want to be sat by a swimming pool drinking port through a straw.

And to be fair, if that’s what he was thinking, then he was bang on. Straw-port and sunshine is a great way to spend an afternoon, and Madrid have been bobbins. They are 12 points behind Barcelona, and last Tuesday they were bounced out of the Champions League by Ajax. That kind of thing might have been acceptable in the 70s, but in these days of superclub hegemony, such cheekiness simply cannot stand.

So having avoided the early stages of Madrid’s flatulent deflation, why is Zidane back now, with the smell still lingering and Gareth Bale still pottering about to no great effect? It’s not like he’ll get to enjoy working with Vinicius Jr., this season’s silver lining: the young Brazilian is out until next season.

But there is a logic here. We can assume that Zidane has been given assurances that the necessary rebuilding will begin in the summer. Meanwhile, he gets to spend a few months inside the Caretaker Zone of Grace, that blissful period when every win is thanks to your inspirational presence and every loss is the fault of those fools who went before you. He also gets to work through that port hangover.

And perhaps there’s a deeper plan in action here as well. Let’s suppose you were the manager of Real Madrid. You’d been in post for two and a half seasons, and you wanted very much to continue in post for another three or four. Who wouldn’t? You love the club, and you keep winning things. It’s ideal.

But! This is Real Madrid under Florentino Perez, and you know what this means for managers. The last to make it into a fourth season was Vicente Del Bosque, back in 2003, and he got his final handshake at the end of that campaign. This empire doesn’t do dynasties. At least, not for anybody other than the emperor.

So how do you work round that? Easy. You identify the moment the team is about to fall apart, and you resign. Shock! Horror!

And then you wait, as events take their course and some other poor sucker takes the blame. Because you know that at a team like Madrid, you will only be allowed to do the rebuilding if somebody else gets the blame for the collapse.

This is what Zidane is doing. He’s running onto his own through ball.

And hey, he’s making Jose Mourinho look kind of silly in the process. No return for you, Jose. No failing upwards again. Truly, Zizou is an artist.

When we consider the rise and rise of Manchester City, there are two truths that football fans hold to be self-evident. The first is that they are doing something very funny with all their money; funnier, that is, than spending it on Robinho. The second is that nobody — not the Premier League, not UEFA, not FIFA, not Captain Planet — has the will or the wit to stop them.

This is because New City seem, in their way, to be a perfect illustration of how things work in this historical moment. The deeply unvirtuous circle whereby money and success begets freedom from the rules, which in turn begets more money and more success, and on and round and up. Forever. All the hubris; none of the nemesis. That’s just how the world works.

Which means it’s easy to be cynical when the Premier League and UEFA announce that they’re going to investigate City again. (No word from the Planeteers as yet.) Still, the leaks from Der Spiegel keep coming, and the latest allegations of inappropriate payments to Jordan Sancho’s family are a different and new kind of suspect, and perhaps it’s time to start wondering if something might happen this time …

But then, what? The enforcement of Financial Fair Play has always existed in a strange, delicate place. Last time City got in trouble over FFP, they were given a fine. Most of that fine was suspended. You can’t imagine they had trouble scraping the rest together.

And yet anything much stronger risks City pushing back, deploying every lawyer in the known universe, and perhaps blowing the whole system sky high. Why can’t we just buy everything? Who says? You say?

UEFA, as cringingly risk-averse as any other football governing body, can’t really risk the answer to those questions being: You’re wrong.

In fact, we probably have to give City some credit here. It’s a remarkable feat of provocation to have produced so many emails, detailing such a variety of supposed transgressions, in a relatively short space of time, that UEFA might have to get off the couch and do something. Now it’s being suggested that they’ve even lied directly to UEFA itself. Could be an interesting few months.

And now, this week’s human interest story, the footballing equivalent of a juggling squirrel. Please say hello to Diego Chará:

Losing 3-1? Having a bad day? On a yellow card but don’t really want to hurt anybody?

Time to reach for the most schoolchild-ish of all physical inconveniences. And a lovely dive from the forward, too. Really sells the agony of the ear-flick. Those things sting.

Anyway, by TN’s reckoning, this is the best “look, I’ve found a new way to get sent off!” since Youssuf Mulumbu picked up the ball and kicked it into Gary O’Neil’s arse. Congratulations to everybody, to football in general, and to you, lovely reader, in particular. Have a good day.