Zinedine Zidane picks up a vintage football and starts to juggle. Wearing a suit, shirt and tie, and a smart pair of shoes, the Frenchman isn’t exactly dressed for keepy-uppies.
Like he needs to be.
Just behind him is another ball — the very one his left boot made the sweetest of connections with at Hampden Park in May 2002, to score one of the most iconic goals in Champions League history.
😍 An iconic Champions League goal, #OTD in 2002!
⚽️ Zinédine Zidane 👏@realmadriden | #UCL pic.twitter.com/RVJSk5PLaM
— UEFA Champions League (@ChampionsLeague) May 15, 2021
Among all the other memorabilia — and it really is kid-in-a-sweet-shop territory for anyone who loves football— there’s a pair of Zidane’s boots from that era. Real Madrid provided those Adidas Predators, along with a European Cup that, presumably, was knocking around out the back somewhere at the Bernabeu and they thought they could do without it for a bit after winning their 15th last month.
In fact, there are trophies everywhere, all of them authentic, and that includes a Ballon d’Or which, judging from Zidane’s gesture when he picks it up, you wouldn’t want to drop on your foot.
It’s a book, however, that stops the 52-year-old in his tracks as his eyes flick around the set where he’s about to be photographed. Because the book, Sur Les Chemins De Pierres, was written by his father, Smail.
Zidane picks it up and smiles. “I have had Enzo Francescoli (the former Marseille and Uruguay player) as an idol. But my absolute idol is my dad, in the sense that thanks to God I am here,” he says. “I have done what I have done thanks to my parents. So to have my father’s book here is very nice for me as a son and for him. I guess when he sees the picture I think he’s going to be happy.”
Zidane’s dad isn’t really the target audience for that photo, but the target audience will appreciate the inclusion of his book in the frame, and that’s the point.
“There’s a lot of little easter eggs like that in all the various different bits of paraphernalia,” David Jackson, vice president of brand for EA Sports FC, says with a smile. “Our fans will go through every single piece in order to understand how we’ve composed the shot.
“We were aiming for: if you could dream the most iconic image you could create for global football in 2024, what would it look like? And we feel we got pretty close.”
That image includes Zidane, Jude Bellingham, David Beckham, Gianluigi Buffon and the owner of the aforementioned Ballon d’Or, Aitana Bonmati — the cover stars for the Ultimate Edition of the latest EA SPORTS FC 25 game.
“We’re going to have to cheat a little bit, because we couldn’t get everyone on set at the same time. So, as much as we would like the five of them to be there together, we’re going to have to shoot them individually,” Jackson says.
In April, The Athletic spent 48 hours as a fly on the wall at Nonstop Studios in Spain’s capital Madrid to see how all of that works.
We got to hear how Buffon’s sons have a newfound level of respect for their father because of gaming (winning the 2006 World Cup didn’t really cut it), had a chat with an unexpected guest who dropped in after Atletico Madrid training to meet Beckham (and to tell us FC 25 has underestimated his defensive ability), and listened to Zidane explaining why he “loves” Bellingham… but also why the two of them should never be compared.
“The more challenging thing beyond getting Jude Bellingham and David Beckham in one place at one time is insuring all the trophies, and the logistics of getting them here. UPS tracking numbers have never been more important,” Jackson says, smiling. “Come and have a look.”
As we move around the set, Buffon breezes through the door. High profile but low maintenance, Buffon has only one request pre-arrival: “A really good espresso.” Full of smiles for anyone and everyone on set, the Italian makes a beeline for one trophy in particular before the photographer gets to work.
Forget the scudetto — yes, that’s here too, and Buffon lifted it more times with Juventus than he probably cares to remember — it’s the UEFA Cup, or the Europa League trophy as it’s called now, that he strokes and describes as his baby.
“Parma!” Buffon says, his eyes lighting up. “It’s strange, because in my career I won just one European competition, with Parma. I lost three Champions League finals with Juventus.”
That Parma triumph was in May 1999, when goalkeeper Buffon was 21 years old. In the real world, he retired from professional football last summer at the age of 45. In the gaming world, he’s about to get a new lease of life.
Parma celebrate winning the 1998-99 UEFA Cup (Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)
“(EA FC) Players are always looking for amazing goalkeepers — it’s an undervalued but very important part of the game, especially if you get to the more competitive levels,” Jackson explains. “Buffon is one of the only players to have played in every single version of the games we’ve created, all the way from FIFA 2000 through to FC 24. Then he retired. So we’re going to bring him in as an Icon in 2025 and maintain that legacy. He will probably be one of the most sought-after goalkeepers in Ultimate Team.”
A part of you wonders how much Buffon understands about all of this, mindful he’s at a similar stage of his life to the middle-aged journalist who is interviewing him for this article and who needed to be briefed at length on EA FC by his teenage son before taking on this assignment.
But therein lies the answer: Buffon has three sons of his own. “They love football and also video games — they play every day on EA Sports,” he says. “Sometimes they ask me if I will be in the legends’ choice. Now they are proud of me!”
Buffon smiles as he tells a story about how one of his sons recently told him he had Garrincha, the brilliant Brazil winger from the 1950s and 1960s, playing in his Ultimate Team. “This game allows you to live again, another career!” Buffon says, laughing.
There’s an interesting point here — and whether it’s for better or worse now is a matter of opinion.
As a 1980s teenager, my knowledge of former players came from either watching old footage, in particular VHS videos of 101 Great Goals (Liam Brady scoring against Tottenham in 1978 in the opener: “Look at that!”) and The World’s Greatest Goals (which, for any football anoraks out there, had Diego Maradona and Bobby Charlton on the cover), or my dad telling stories about Duncan Edwards, Jimmy Greaves and George Best. But my son knows about Gheorghe Hagi, Roberto Baggio, Pavel Nedved and Lothar Matthaus because of gaming and Ultimate Team.
“That transfer of knowledge,” Jackson, who is an Everton fan, says. “I only know about Alan Ball because my dad spoke about him, or Dixie Dean because my granddad did. But my eight-year-old son Harry only knows who Pele is because he’s the best player in the (EA FC) game when he plays against me. I have to be, say, Swindon Town and he has to be the UNICEF Soccer Aid World XI and he’s got Pele up front with Zidane and (Eric) Cantona.”
And what about how those Icons are chosen — who gets to decide whether a former player is famous enough, or was good enough, to be considered, in Jackson’s words, “timeless”?
“A lot of it is driven by the community asking for players,” he says. “There’s then the availability of them as well — whether they want to be involved or not. And then there’s a commercial conversation that needs to happen. For example, there’s some challenges around Diego Maradona right now.
“Maradona was in the game and then came out because, after he died, there was a challenge around who owned his estate and therefore the IP (intellectual property) rights. There were multiple different parties connecting and fighting a little bit about who actually owned it. So, unfortunately, we had to remove him from the game. It will be resolved soon, and then he could come back in.
“The interesting thing that will happen very soon is there is a golden generation of players who are coming up to retirement. So if you think about the (Cristiano) Ronaldos and the Messis of this world, the ability for us to bring them in and maintain their legacy and their story through our game is going to be really important, we hope, to them.”
Sound the klaxon. Beckham and Bellingham are in the building.
Actually, it’s the Bellinghams, plural. Jude is here with his younger brother Jobe, who plays for Sunderland in the English second tier, and their parents Mark and Denise.
“If you want to know the athletes better, ask the mum — she knows everything,” Julien Lanfrey, athlete marketing global director for EA Sports, says. “This is not just for Bellingham, it’s for many athletes I have met over my career — usually you have better insight coming from the mother.
“She (Denise Bellingham) told us, ‘When my boys were playing (FIFA) when they were kids, they were always hiding their hands with a plastic bag during the penalties, because they don’t trust each other and they didn’t want the other to know which side they will strike the ball’.”
By the time the Bellinghams arrive, Beckham has already been on set for some individual pictures.
He looks what he is in front of the camera — a cool, smooth and stylish man who has been photographed a million times before and is somehow able to carry off a beige polo shirt and cream trousers combination that would make anyone else his age (49) look like they’re going to play lawn bowls.
There is a warm embrace and big smiles when Bellingham (Jude) joins Beckham for the shoot, and it’s not difficult to imagine where the conversation starts with the two of them, bearing in mind the late winner a certain Englishman scored against Barcelona in El Clasico three days earlier.
(Thomas Coex/AFP via Getty Images)
The fact Beckham and Bellingham were both around at the same time makes life easier for the photographer Joshua Kissi, who has put together a playlist for each player that features their favourite music to make them feel as relaxed as possible when he’s clicking away (no, Spice Girls didn’t feature).
“Making sure that everyone feels the best version of themselves on the cover is the goal,” explains Kissi.
It turns out that it’s not just Kissi who wants to photograph Beckham.
Antoine Griezmann, the Atletico Madrid forward and now 135-cap France international, decided to swing by the studio when he heard Beckham was in town. The two had a chat for 10 minutes and Beckham later posted a picture of him and Griezmann to Instagram, saying how good it was to meet the Frenchman, who replied describing the former England captain as his idol.
We managed to grab a word with Griezmann too, mindful that he’s well known for being into computer games as well as being decent at football. This is a man who sold Alexandre Lacazette to Huddersfield Town for £23.5million ($30.5m) on Football Manager (much to Lacazette’s public disappointment) and flirted with pairing up Chris Mepham and Matthijs de Ligt at centre-back.
Griezmann has got a reputation for being pretty good at EA FC too, but says parenting has got in the way in recent years, which means that Ousmane Dembele and — this one took us by surprise — N’Golo Kante are ahead of him in the France squad now. “I think I can be the third one, without a doubt,” Griezmann adds.
There’s something more intriguing to ask him. Earlier in the day, a couple of the EA staff explained how worked up players get about their ratings in the game, so we decided to show Griezmann his numbers to get his thoughts.
Griezmann runs his eyes over the figures. “Yeah, we need to change it,” he says. “Here in defence, we could improve a bit more because as a player I love defending. Physique… good. Dribbling… you can lower it because I’m not dribbling so much (lately). Passing, 93-94, shooting, 90, and speed… I think it’s good.”
Griezmann, left, says Kante, right, is better than him at the video game now (Patricia De Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images)
His responses are delivered slightly tongue-in-cheek but there is, believe it or not, a serious aspect to this: EA gets peppered with WhatsApp messages from unhappy players.
“We do get a lot — because, obviously, people think certain things about themselves,” Jackson says. “Kyle Walker is always saying, ’99 pace, 99 pace!’ He’s probably not wrong if you watch him track Vini (Vinicius Junior) or (Kylian) Mbappe.
“But there’s two things that are really important. The first thing is that we’re very objective, so we’re not open to influence on any of the ratings. We have a team of over 1,000 volunteers who watch multiple matches around the world every year, they take that data in, we append that data to Opta data that we get, and when we blend it, it becomes a proprietary dataset for us. So we’re not open to influence or bribes, and we maintain the integrity and the authenticity of that ratings system.
“But even more importantly, it is a video game, so we need to be able to create room in that for fantasy. So, was Pele as fast as Mbappe? We’ll never know. But you have to imagine and project back and project forward how they played, and the influence they had on the game, and then you give them an appropriate rating as a result. So there is a lot of science that goes into it, which is really important to us. But there’s a huge amount of art as well.
“What we love about it is the debate. You want (Luka) Modric saying, ‘Is my first touch really lower than (Andrea) Pirlo’s?’ And you want Pirlo coming back and going, ‘Yeah. Sorry, pal.’
“We had Pirlo one year and he was talking about how the only person with a better first touch is (Pavel) Nedved, and if you look at our ratings…”
Bonmati’s presence on the cover of this Ultimate Edition feels like another sign of how football — and gaming — is changing.
The 26-year-old was unable to get to the photoshoot in Madrid in April because she had a prior engagement that week which couldn’t be moved — she was busy in London, scoring the first of Barcelona’s two goals in their Champions League semi-final second-leg victory against Chelsea. But we caught up with the Spain international for a conversation later on about gaming and how it’s helping to grow the profile of women’s football.
Bonmati played FIFA (as it was called then) on her PlayStation 2 when she was growing up, and her response to a question about whether she felt annoyed that there was no women’s football in gaming at that time, or if she just accepted it, says everything.
“At that age, I didn’t even ask myself,” Bonmati says. “I have always said that I have had no female role models because the visibility and structure that women’s football had back then was zero. So, for me, it was practically non-existent and that’s why I didn’t even ask myself about it. I played with boys then, at school and at my hometown club.”
It paints a bleak picture when Bonmati puts it like that but, at the same time, it also makes you realise how much things have improved for the next generation of female players, both on and off the pitch.
In the case of gaming, young football fans can not only play as Bonmati now but actually pick her in the same team as Bellingham or Beckham, and anyone with a teenage boy who loves Ultimate Team will know what that means — their son’s knowledge and awareness of the top female players, even if they don’t watch women’s football, has changed overnight.
“When we added female athletes to Ultimate Team this year, our ability to be able to educate, and elevate the women’s game, through our platform is unrivalled,” Jackson says. “There’s nobody else who can get to 150 million hard-to-reach Gen Z young soccer fans and tell them about how amazing Mia Hamm was, and obviously still is, but was in her prime. We’re going to add a number of other female icons this year too.
“But the ability to be able to blend male and female athletes in Ultimate Team… we have the ability to equalise that playing field better than anyone else does.”
(Alex Caparros – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
What about the concept of women playing alongside men in gaming — how does Bonmati feel about that? “Being able to play with mixed teams is a great tool to normalise that sport does not understand gender, and it’s a very effective way for the players to be better known and gain more awareness within society,” she says.
“I always insist on the fact that we (women) should be role models not only for girls, but also for boys. At these crucial ages, it’s important they grow up understanding that a woman can have a relevant position in society.”
Now that Zidane’s work in front of the camera is done, it’s time to talk about another Real Madrid No 5.
Did Zidane know Bellingham was going to choose that shirt number when he joined from Borussia Dortmund last summer?
“I didn’t know,” Zidane says. “It was a surprise. But it was a good surprise. In the end, what he is doing, the player he is… I think also that the Madridistas didn’t think about a year like this for him. In the first year (at a new club), there is always a time of adaptation and he didn’t (have that). He always knew what he was doing. He was perfect.”
Zidane had met Bellingham two years ago, at the Champions League final in Paris, when they watched Real Madrid beat Liverpool together after an Adidas executive arranged a private box at the Stade de France for the two of them and their families. “I remember perfectly,” Zidane says, smiling. “Seeing Madrid win another Champions League. He (Bellingham) said he wanted to be there and do the same. In the end, there he is.”
(Michael Regan – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
During that evening in 2022, Zidane got an insight into Bellingham’s personality and maturity and liked what he saw. Even so, he must have been surprised to see the Englishman make such an impact on the pitch for Madrid — 23 goals and 13 assists across all competitions — in his debut season.
Zidane shakes his head. “Not for me,” he says. “He is the right player for Madrid and I think Madrid will be very happy with a player like that. We saw something this year, but I think in the future we are going to see a very strong Jude Bellingham who is going to be Real Madrid history. I love him and I love his personality in the sense that he’s hungry, he always wants to do more — very competitive — and I’m glad he’s at Madrid.”
At the photoshoot, Bellingham’s father Mark mentioned to the EA Sports staff how he often wore a Zidane replica shirt on family holidays, prompting a young Jude to ask one day about the name on his back. Jude, so the story goes, was encouraged by his father to look up videos of Zidane “to understand what football is”, followed that advice and kept practising the skills he watched the Frenchman perform.
That narrative feeds into another: there’s often a desire in football to compare a player from one generation to another from an earlier or later one, and in the case of Bellingham and Zidane it’s natural that’s happened because of their shirt number at Madrid and their shared position. Beyond that, though, any parallels feel forced.
Zidane nods. “There is no comparison to be made with anyone,” he says. “Each one is what he is. I think he is going to be a different player. Apart from the No 5 that we both wear, technically he may be similar but we don’t have to compare. He (Bellingham) was asked about Zidane and he said, ‘No, I’m Bellingham’. He is right. Everyone makes their own history, and I think his history at Real Madrid is going to be very beautiful.”
With that, it’s time for Zidane to go. The props from the shoot are already being packed up (quite a job!), the EA staff have got flights to catch, Kissi must have enough photos of Bellingham, Beckham, Buffon and Zidane in the can to last a lifetime, and it would obviously be wrong for any journalist briefly left to their own devices to pick up each one of those trophies in turn when nobody is looking…
(Photos: Joshua Kissi for EA)
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