JUNE 2 — On Thursday, around lunchtime, Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane sat in the press conference room at the Bernabeu Stadium and told the gathered global media he had decided to resign.
The Frenchman spoke with modesty and honesty, calmly and coherently explaining that he didn't think he would be able to continue to lead the team successfully, even though they had won their third consecutive Champions League trophy just a few days earlier.
Zidane was, perhaps, being harsh on himself because his two and a half years in charge of the team had yielded an impressive haul of nine trophies, but his decision to leave was also a fair acknowledgement of the fact that Real had competed poorly in La Liga this season, finishing in third place a whopping 17 points behind champions Barcelona.
At roughly the same time that Zidane was thoughtfully and intelligently tendering his resignation, just a couple of miles away in Madrid's parliament, the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was defiantly refusing to quit after being subjected to a vote of no confidence by the opposition party.
Rajoy's Popular Party has been found guilty of serious and widespread corruption, with several leading officials accepting personal payments for the granting of political favours in a deep-lying scandal which Rajoy has consistently attempted to cover up.
Yet there he was, sitting there with a total lack of contrition or humility, stubbornly insisting that he had no reason to resign and claiming the vote of no confidence was unjustified, projecting the air of a man who was determined to hang on until the bitter end with no sense of personal dignity.
What a contrast.
On the one hand, we had Zidane, courageously carrying out an act of self-criticism and having the self-awareness to conclude that it was the right time for him to leave.
And on the other hand, we had Rajoy sticking his head in the sand and angrily insisting he had done nothing wrong despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Not for the first time, the events of Thursday afternoon in Madrid showed us that the world of politics has a lot learn from the world of sport.
We like to focus a lot of our analysis of the conduct of professional athletes upon the negatives. We complain about the diving, we emphasise the acts of bad sportsmanship, we condemn the vociferous arguments with referees about contested decisions.
But we don’t really give due credit to the far more common instances of admirable behaviour provided by sport and its purveyors.
In the aftermath of Saturday's Champions League Final, for example, there was a big outcry against Madrid captain Sergio Ramos following his rough challenge on Mohamed Salah which has left the Liverpool star in danger of being unable to play for Egypt in the World Cup Finals.
It wasn’t really mentioned, though, how many Madrid players went to Salah to show their concern after it became clear that he was seriously injured, or the way in which victorious Madrid player Mateo Kovacic went to console Liverpool defender and fellow Croatian international Dejan Lovren at the final whistle.
These aspects of sport, I feel, should be taken more seriously.
Through sport, we can see human capability stretched to its limits. We see people striving to be the best they can be, giving every possible ounce of effort in pursuit of success. They make sacrifices, overcome obstacles along the way, but often still have to end up dealing with the disappointment of defeat.
Through sport, we see people constantly trying to better themselves and having to react to new situations, being forced to embrace the inevitability of change and adapting to new scenarios ― often while facing the added pressure of knowing that their every action is coming under intense public scrutiny.
Through sport, we see people learning to apply their hard-earned individual talents in the context of a collective endeavour, accepting responsibility for leading others but also having the humility to know where those personal responsibilities end and allowing others to come to the fore.
We see all these things in sport and take them for granted, instead choosing to focus our energies upon the few occasions when sportspeople do the wrong thing, rather than ― as they usually do ― trying to do the right thing.
That’s a shame because as shown by Zinedine Zidane’s gracious and selfless departure from Real Madrid ― when he could have taken Mariano Rajoy’s approach and clung on to power for as long as possible ― there are many moral tales to be told in sport if we look in the right places.
With his honesty and humility, Zidane didn’t only show us the best way to make a gracious departure from a football management position; he also showed us how to be a better human being.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
