Twelve months after head-butting Marco Materazzi and being sent off in a World Cup Final that France went on to lose, Zinedine Zidane has never been more popular.

In a twist that must have left his pal David Beckham incredulous – think France 98, Argentina, Diego Simeone, a petulant flick of a boot, red card and hate campaign – Zidane’s violent reaction to Materazzi’s insults received the backing and sympathy of a huge majority of the French public, from then President Jacques Chirac down. The exclusive television interview in which Zidane first talked of the incident drew a record audience for Canal Plus TV and Coup de Boule (“Head-butt”), a novelty song celebrating France’s No. 10, had the whole nation singing along as it raced to the top of the charts.

Advertisers, too, have stuck with Zidane. Some even used the head-butt to inspire their campaigns, reminding us of how Eric Cantona managed to turn his kung-fu attack on a fan to his advantage. Even when scandal rags spread rumours of an extra-marital affair with a French pop singer, the mud didn’t stick. It’s as if Zidane’s untouchable.

In the past 12 months, Zidane has made an emotional return to Algeria, the birthplace of his parents, multiplied his charity work – playing football with kids in Thailand, meeting a Nobel Peace Prize winner in Bangladesh, staging
a UNICEF game in Marseille – and begun his life as an occasional, superstar TV consultant. He also took on his first role in a major French movie, due out in January, while pondering whether he might just have retired too soon. For as opinion polls regularly show, Zidane remains France’s favourite son.

This is the story of his year…

It started with a butt…
The images will haunt him forever. The memories will never fade. Even if he could somehow blank it all out, there will always be someone, somewhere, who will remind him of the moment he head-butted an opponent in the World Cup Final. Although he helped France to a 1998 World Cup triumph and the European Championship in 2000, won leagues and cups with Juventus and Real Madrid and scored one of the most fantastic goals ever to win a Champions League final, Zinedine Zidane will be remembered more than anything for the last thing he did in his remarkable playing career. He can’t get away from it. The questions keep coming. Whatever he does, wherever he goes, people always want to talk to him about that moment.

It’s July 9, 2006. The World Cup Final. France and Italy are playing extra-time. There are about 10 minutes remaining. The clock in Berlin’s Olympiastadion reads 22.16 when the referee raises a whistle to his lips and blows. For a few seconds, there is confusion – in the stadium, on the field, and in millions of homes around the planet – for not everyone has seen what has happened. But in the minutes, hours and days that follow, the whole world will become familiar with the most dramatic incident ever to mark world sport’s biggest day.

Ninety seconds after that fateful toot on his whistle, Argentine referee Horacio Elizondo brandishes a red card in front of Zinedine Zidane’s face. The clock shows 22.19 when the French captain leaves the pitch, walking past the World Cup trophy without a sideways glance. The career of one of football’s most magnificent players has ended in controversy and disgrace.

The tournament has been robbed of the fairytale ending that seemed to have been specially scripted: Zidane, having come out of international retirement to help France qualify for the finals, had been superb against Spain, at his brilliant best in defeating Brazil, and at the age of 34 was set to inspire his country to World Cup glory for a second time. In his last ever match. It was shaping as a dream end.

In the Final, Zidane put his side ahead with an early penalty, an impudent chipped effort so audacious it still draws a gasp when you see it today. Marco Materazzi levelled for the Italians, the game went to extra-time and Zidane came closest to settling the contest with a flying header that brought a wonderful save from Gianluigi Buffon. So close to a happy ending for the Frenchman. But as we all now know, it was not to be. Oh Ambassador, you're really spoiling us
Since that tumultuous night, Zidane the footballer is no more. The first year of his “retirement” though, has been anything but relaxing. Already tied to several major companies for advertising work while he was playing, Zidane now commits 120 days per year to a group of employers which include Canal Plus, Danone, Adidas, Generali, GrandOptica and Orange. We’ve seen Zidane all over the place, though rarely without an economic motive.

In November, he was in Bangladesh, opening a factory for Danone and chatting with Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Zidane, who seemed genuinely surprised at his megastar status in one of the world’s poorest nations, was easily persuaded to join in a match between local kids, even though he was dressed in shirt and jeans.

In Thailand in February, he played in a gala game organised by Adidas in benefit of children affected by AIDS and, with his wife, was spotted ringside at a Thai boxing event. The same month, Veronique also accompanied her husband to New York during the Big Apple’s Fashion Week.

A not-too-comfortable-looking guest of honour alongside the catwalk at the Y-3 show, Zidane was not exactly cutting edge in his jeans, leather jacket and trainers. His presence, though, assured a certain amount of media coverage for the line produced for Adidas by Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto.

Some of his promotional work is the stuff of classical advertising – witness his photo on giant billboards for the insurance group Generali – slogan: “How did I choose Generali? I used my head!”. More often though, companies opt to use Zidane as a kind of roving ambassador for their brands, milking the feel-good factor that the simple presence of this furiously-gifted player can generate. This approach makes sense to companies looking to create a buzz, an event, but it actually forces Zidane to operate in the kind of situations in which he is least at ease.

A kind of anti-Beckham, Zidane is still uncomfortable in front of the camera, despite all the years of practice. His body language when confronted by media hordes tells you he would rather be elsewhere. And even when working with those he knows well at Canal Plus, who use him as a star presence at certain sports events, Zidane can appear to struggle for his words or give flat, monosyllabic replies. It was OK, in an Alan Shearer kind of way, when he was a player, but now he’s being paid to be in the studio, more is expected from him. And the most exasperating thing for the French broadcasting giant is that once the lights are off, he’s back to his fluent, jokey self.

Christophe Dugarry, who Canal Plus also signed up last season, has been one of Zidane’s closest friends ever since they played together at Bordeaux. After the not-very-exciting press conference to announce Zidane’s arrival as a Canal Plus man, Dugarry was at pains to point out that the Zidane people see at such times is not the same as the one he hangs out with. “Do you really think I’d spend my holidays with the Zidane you see on the telly?” he guffaws.

A little bit of politics
More than 600 million people worldwide tuned in to the 2006 World Cup Final, double the audience of any other sporting event and by far the biggest TV happening of the year. Many would have been willing Zidane on, hoping for a glorious swansong for a player whose sublime skills had marked him out as the best of his generation and one of the greatest of all-time.

It took only seven minutes for Zidane to light up the final in the most unexpected of ways. Penalty for France. Zidane versus Buffon, the world’s greatest goalkeeper. Breaking all the rules of convention, Zidane decided not to take it in his usual manner. Instead of firing low and hard to the keeper’s right, he sent a gentle chip to Buffon’s left. The ball hit the underside of the bar and bounced down well behind the goal-line: 1-0 to France. Zidane had scored from what on the Continent they call a "Panenka"‚ in tribute to the Czechoslovakia player Antonin, who scored in similar fashion with the final kick of the shoot-out in the 1976 European Championship Final to hand his side victory over West Germany. Later Zidane explained that he felt the need “to do something different against Buffon”. His team-mates, meanwhile, were torn between admiration and incredulity. Willy Sagnol, one of Zidane’s few real confidants, thought “he was mad”.

Patrick Vieira, another of the inner circle, put it most concisely: “If we’d won 1-0, with Zidane scoring from the penalty the way he did, can you imagine the reaction?” he asks. “Zidane for President!” Instead, France ended up with Nicolas Sarkozy.“Zidane knows he did a stupid thing”
The head-butt and red card have been debated at length, but it’s interesting a year on to learn how the players saw it all unfold. In fact, most of them didn’t even see the incident. The ball, after all, was nowhere near Zidane when he struck. Lilian Thuram admits: “I told Gennaro Gattuso to stop being a cry-baby”, while Claude Makelele got into a spat with Buffon, accusing the Italians of “being up to their old tricks again”, as he put it. Sagnol told FourFourTwo he first saw the head-butt at 5am the following morning, in his hotel room.

One player who did witness the whole thing was Buffon. “I think I was the only one who saw it,” he says. “The linesman wasn’t looking and the referee was following the ball.” The way Buffon recalls the events brings us back to the row about the role of the fourth official. Did he really see what happened? Or did he benefit from television replays before alerting the referee? Whatever the truth, the correct decision was taken. In France, though, the procedural rights and wrongs were hotly debated and a group of fans brought a court case – subsequently kicked out – to try to get the game replayed.

More fascinating was the reaction to Zidane’s violence. It was, after all, his 14th red card and second World Cup dismissal following his stamp on a Saudi Arabia player in 1998. And yet his status as France’s most popular player since Michel Platini seemed to protect him. Plus the fact he has plenty of influential friends.

The way Didier Deschamps spoke on the post-match TV panel proved indicative of how France would go. Deschamps, a former team-mate at Juventus and captain of France’s 1998 team, said he was sad to see Zidane end his career in such a manner. But he stopped short of overtly criticising him. While in other countries the criticism was stinging, in France people were quickly looking for ways to help Zidane off the hook.

Rumours spread fast. He had been called a terrorist! Materazzi had insulted his mother and sister! Phone-ins were soon flooded with people saying Zidane was right to have stood up for his honour, to have protected his family. When politicians joined in, it became surreal.

Zidane’s team-mates were also keen to absolve him at first. Indeed, it has taken several long months to finally break the omerta. Thuram, as ever, is the most fluent on the subject: “If you say he was right to react like that, then you’re saying that tomorrow morning when some guy says something to you that you don’t like, you can just get out of your car and hit him. That’s anarchy. No, Zidane knows he did a stupid thing.”

Makelele, Zidane’s water-carrier in their Real Madrid heyday, has also come out with his true feelings at last. “I forgive him,” the Chelsea midfielder begins. “But at the same time I don’t forgive him. Because with him still on the field I’m convinced we’d have won the World Cup.”

Cash cows and charity
One place Zidane was certain to avoid criticism was Algeria, a country where he is even more popular than in France. In December, he took his parents back to their homeland, in a plane provided by President Bouteflika. A proud moment for Zidane, who hadn’t been to Algeria for several years and was returning with the specific aim of following up funds he’d helped raise in response to the 2003 earthquake.

Greeted by huge, adoring crowds wherever he went, Zidane nevertheless found himself in a delicate political position. Bouteflika, not one of Amnesty International’s favourite world leaders, awarded Zidane a medal usually reserved for war heroes and posters featuring the two men side by side were slapped up under the slogan ‘Men of Solidarity’. Opposition parties and defenders of the Kabyle cause were outraged.

Zidane’s family is from Kabylie, a region where some campaign for an independent state and most boycott national elections. Therefore, Zidane had to consider his every public word and did so cleverly. He answered questions from Kabyle journalists, and when asked at the beginning of his stay how he felt to be in Algeria his reply was simple: “I’m happy to be in Algeria. And tomorrow I’m going to Kabylie.” It was the perfect win-win response.

In Algeria, Zidane did a spot of business with a telephone company that underlined his enormous earning potential. Marketing experts believe that, unlike most of his former playing partners, Zidane will continue to be in demand years after the end of his sporting career. He is one of those rare athletes whose personality is appreciated over and above performances. And his new ‘partners’ pay well. Who needs to play in Qatar or for the New York Bulls when Danone alone pays a reported $24m over the next 11 years.

This economic might means Zidane can mostly do what he wants for his wife and four boys, with whom he’s decided to stay living in Madrid. But the Zidanes are rarely seen blowing their money, preferring to avoid the limelight. When we do see Zinedine in his spare time, it’s often related to the genuine charity work he does. Involved with ELA, a medical charity, since 1999, Zidane was the main protagonist of a recent prime-time Saturday night show that featured stars performing outside their regular field. After France’s answer to Sandra Sully completed a dance routine, we saw Zidane perform a horse-riding number in the TV studio. Having never ridden, he’d spent three hours every day over a two-and-a-half week period being trained. The programme raised $2.6m for Zidane’s charity.

“I wouldn't have been able to retire...”
Zidane hasn’t limited himself to the small screen. In January, cinema-goers will be able to see him alongside the likes of Alain Delon and Gerard Depardieu in Asterix Goes to the Olympics‚ a film featuring other sports stars such as Beckham and Formula One star Michael Schumacher in similar minor roles. Zidane’s character’s name? “Numerodix” (number 10), of course.

Thankfully for lovers of Zidane’s ball skills, we’ve also seen the maestro in a couple of large-scale charity games, taking on teams captained by his old muckers, Ronaldo and Luis Figo. And he was easily the most skilful on show in February’s futsal exhibition tournament in Paris, where he and the likes of Dugarry and Laurent Blanc proved a match for the best team Paris St Germain could field.

It made you wonder if Zidane might have retired too soon. After all, he was only 34. And the sad thing is Zidane was thinking the same. Couldn’t he return to try to blot out the terrible stain on his career?

“If I hadn’t already announced my retirement, I would have played on for another year,” he confessed in an extraordinarily frank interview recently with Canal Plus. “I wouldn’t have been able to say ‘I’m retiring’ after that. But I’d made the announcement. I had wanted to. And there was no going back.”

When it came to that question again, Zidane looked haggard. And while he still refuses to reveal exactly what Materazzi said, his weary response showed he is aware the head-butt issue will never, ever go away.

“I didn’t choose for it to be this way,” he shrugged. “It happened, and I can’t pretend it wasn’t me. I’m a human being. I reacted. I apologised to everyone, and I would have liked things to end differently. What’s tough is that I have to live with it for the rest of my life.”