The Italy coach, Marcello Lippi, looks on as the French players celebrate Zidane’s goal in the final. In Berlin it seemed fitting that his final game as a footballer should come with Lippi on the touchline, on a night when Zidane’s expressive, balletic brilliance was matched against a team of definitive Italian defensive resilience. The fitness, the tactical discipline and the influence of Marcello Lippi pushed him right out into the far reaches of his own talent. He’d spent six seasons in Ligue 1, brilliant but brittle, by the time Juventus took a gamble on this silhouette of a football genius. Zidane turned 24 while playing (unremarkably) for France at Euro 96. It was always part of Zidane’s appeal that he remained to some degree an outsider superstar even in his pomp years.

A moment of violence in the glare of lights and noise. Watching the whole two hours and 40 minutes of the 2006 final back on Fifa’s media channel, with the added certainty of knowing not just how this ends, but how it feels 14 years later, it is still hard to see any clarity. And yet it remains an oddly opaque incident. We remember it as the decisive turn in a World Cup final as a discordant endnote to a great career and its aftermath as a wider narrative of loyalties, brands, attitudes, even personal politics. Zidane’s red card is one of the much-storied moments of modern football.

Where the fuck is my endnote floater