Fabien Barthez Returns to France National Team with Zidane
Fabien Barthez is back with France – and back alongside Zinedine Zidane.
The French Football Federation (FFF) confirmed on Thursday that the 1998 World Cup-winning goalkeeper will join Zidane’s new backroom staff and take charge of the national team’s goalkeepers. Barthez, now 55, reunites with his former teammate as Les Bleus turn the page on the Didier Deschamps era.
It is a move heavy with symbolism. Barthez and Zidane were at the heart of France’s triumph on home soil in 1998, the spine of a team that reshaped the country’s footballing identity. Now they return in suits, not shirts, tasked with steering a new generation.
Barthez’s remit is clear: oversee and shape France’s goalkeeping department. The former Toulouse, Monaco, Marseille and Manchester United keeper has worn the tracksuit before. He previously served as a consultant with the national team under Raymond Domenech and Laurent Blanc, but he was completely absent during Deschamps’ 14-year reign. Between 2020 and 2021, he also had a brief spell on the coaching staff at Toulouse, adding club-level experience to his résumé.
Zidane’s Staff Takes Shape
Barthez is not the only familiar face joining Zidane. The FFF also announced a series of appointments that give the new head coach a distinctly Real Madrid flavour.
Assistant coaches David Bettoni and Hamidou Msaidie, both long-time allies of Zidane, come in after working closely with him during his two spells in charge at Real Madrid. They know his methods, his rhythm, his demands. That continuity should help Zidane impose his ideas quickly in a national-team environment where time on the training pitch is limited.
Another key addition is Gregory Dupont, named “Strategy and Performance Advisor.” Dupont, too, has shared a dugout with Zidane at Madrid, where his expertise in physical preparation and performance planning became a reference point at the elite level. His role with France will be to fine-tune the margins that so often decide tournament football.
A New Era Begins in September
Zidane, 54, was appointed on July 28 to succeed his former teammate Deschamps after France’s exit in the World Cup semi-finals. The change marks the end of one of the longest and most successful tenures in French football history and the start of a project built around a coach with a formidable club record and deep emotional ties to the national side.
The countdown is already ticking. Zidane will lead his first France training camp in September, the first real glimpse of how his ideas translate from club to country, from Madrid white to France blue.
His debut in the dugout will come away to Turkey on September 25 in the Nations League. A new coach, a reshaped staff, old heroes back in the fold.
The questions now belong to the pitch.
