‘Un homme avant tout’: Zinedine Zidane and the sociology of a head‐butt

Abstract

In the hundred and eleventh minute of the 2006 World Cup final, Zinedine Zidane was ejected from the field of play for head‐butting Marco Materazzi in the chest. What provoked this violent reaction was a challenge to his masculinity in the form of a slur on the chastity of his mother and sister. This essay tells the story of the head‐butt and, in so doing, would demonstrate that only a sociological account is capable of offering a truly sophisticated understanding of the incident. It thus draws on the work of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu and argues that Materazzi’s insults acted as a catalyst, causing divergent aspects of Zidane’s fractured habitus to clash, and the dispositions of the Franco‐Kabyle habitus to override the ‘civilized’ habitus demanded by the illusion generated by the professional football field, and erupt onto the pitch in the form of the now notorious head‐butt.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor David Inglis (University of Aberdeen) for his extensive and invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and Dr Nadia Kiwan (University of Aberdeen) who helped me locate literature on the Kabyle diaspora in France.

Notes

1. ‘ZZ Top’, Observer, April 4, 2004.

2. ‘Read My Lips: The Taunt That Made Zidane Snap’, Times Online, July 11, 2006; ‘Team‐mates Back Zidane as Insult is Revealed’, Daily Mail, July 11, 2006.

3. The harkis were Algerians who had fought for the French in the Algerian War of Independence. They were, and still are, despised by the Algerians as collaborators and cowards. Left to fend for themselves, in the final days of the war, the harkis – of whom nearly 100,000 fled to France following wide‐spread torture and massacres in Algeria – are an embarrassing reminder to the French of defeat and disavowal as non‐recognition of those who died defending French Algeria remains an issue yet to be fully resolved. Upon returning to France the harkis were housed in disused army camps and some were given employment in forestry projects, known by their children as ‘reservations’ (cf. Fysh and Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism, 30).

4. ‘Materazzi Breaks Zidane Silence’, BBC Sport Online, September 5, 2006.

5. Hughson and Inglis, ‘Merleau‐Ponty in the Field’.

6. Connell, Masculinities.

7. Ibid., 77.

8. Gilbert and Gilbert, Masculinity Goes to School.

9. Jackson, ‘Laddishness’, 45.

10. Archer, Pratt and Phillips, ‘Working‐class Men’s Constructions of Masculinity’, 436.

11. Renold, ‘“Other” Boys’, 215.

12. Epstein, ‘Boyz Own Stories’, 109.

13. Swain, ‘The Money’s Good’.

14. Ibid., 107.

15. Ibid., 103.

16. Ibid., 101.

17. Elias talks about the habitus as an individual, psychic structure that is moulded by social attitudes and experienced as second nature (cf. Elias, The Civilizing Process). Bourdieu subsequently developed the concept of the habitus in works such as, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (with Passeron), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Distinction, and The Logic of Practice.

18. Bourdieu, ‘The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason’.

19. Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture.

20. Particularly Merleau‐Ponty’s discussion of the ‘habit body’ in Phenomenology of Perception.

21. Throop and Murphy, ‘Bourdieu and Phenomenology’; see also Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 87 and Thompson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’.

22. Swain, ‘The Money’s Good’, 103.

23. For example, Young, ‘Throwing Like a Girl’.

24. See Bourdieu’s discussion of men refusing to eat fish in Distinction.

25. Swain, ‘The Money’s Good’, 95.

26. Elias, The Germans.

27. Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement.

28. Dunning, ‘Power and Authority’.

29. Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players.

30. Hughson, Inglis and Free, The Uses of Sport, 22.

31. Swain, ‘The Money’s Good’, 99. The International Football Association Board are responsible for the regulation and modification of the laws of international football and are comprised of four FIFA representatives and one from the English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh football associations

32. The demarcation and regulation of the soccer field has been echoed by the development of the modern stadium. Most European football spectators watch the games from under the surveillance of panopticonesque systems which have been made more effective by the replacement of standing‐terraces with rows of individual seats and are comprised of the gaze of stewards, police officers and cameras. The seats themselves even act as physical impediments to expressive or aggressive spectator actions and restrict rapid fan movements (cf. Giulianotti, Sport, 129–30).

33. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960; Bourdieu, Masculine Domination.

34. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, 32.

35. Ibid., 5.

36. ‘ZZ Top’, Observer, April 4, 2004.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 42. Elsewhere Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as ‘capital – in whatever form – insofar as it is represented, i.e., apprehended symbolically, in a relationship of knowledge or, more precisely, of misrecognition and recognition’ (cf. ‘The Forms of Capital’, 243).

40. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 43.

41. Ibid., 45.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 48.

44. Ibid., 48–50.

45. Ibid., 50–1.

46. Silverstein, Algeria in France.

47. Ibid., 167.

48. Duret, Anthropologie de la fraternité dan les cités, 33.

49. Silverstein, Algeria in France, 115.

50. Ibid., 120.

51. Ibid., 153.

52. ‘ZZ Top’, Observer, April 4, 2004.

53. ‘Zinedine Zidane; he Delights, he Dazzles, now Zizou wants to Run the Show’, Independent, June 13, 2004.