In the summer of 1998, my wife and I watched the World Cup final from a park in Geneva. We had walked across the bridge to the Parc de la Grange by Lac L\u00e9man, where large screens had been set up for France against Brazil. We drifted in among the Brazilian fans, hair dyed in team colors, drums going, everyone certain Brazil would win. Then Zinedine Zidane, about whom I knew just a bit, rose out of the crowd for one header, and then another, and by the end, France had won three to nothing. We spent the rest of the night celebrating with the French supporters.<\/p>\n
What stayed with me was not the score. It was this player, Zidane, and the reverence the French public already held for him. His skill, leadership<\/a>, and self-assured style had combined into something I can best characterize as relational charisma<\/a>. Not just a personal charm, but something with heft wrapped inside it.<\/p>\n The 2006 Final<\/p>\n Eight years later, I was watching the final of the 2006 World Cup from Chapel Hill, with three young kids in the room, only to see him leave the game in apparent disgrace. Zidane had carried an unfancied France to the 2006 final in what everyone had cast as the last act of a legendary career<\/a>. He had announced his retirement<\/a>. A win would have finished the story as a fairy tale. Instead, in the 110th minute, after an exchange of words with Italy’s Marco Materazzi, he turned and drove his head into the Italian’s chest. Those few seconds remained seared in the collective memory<\/a> of millions. The referee sent him off. He walked past the trophy on his way down the tunnel, and France later lost on penalties.<\/p>\n Zidane apologized to the children who had watched, but not for the reaction itself. To regret it, he said, would be to concede that Materazzi’s very personal slur was justified.<\/p>\n I expected the moment to sink his standing, at least for a while. It did the opposite. Within days, a poll in Le Parisien found that 61 percent of the French public had already forgiven him. President Jacques Chirac told him publicly that the country admired and loved him. I believe he lost almost none of his sponsors. The crowds chanting his name at the team bus turned Zidane’s exit into a collective moment of national consolation.<\/p>\n I noticed the same pull in myself, and it surprised me. Sports had always been an occasion to draw some lesson out loud with three boys playing various sports themselves. When I learned what Materazzi had said, I was, if anything, at peace with what Zidane had done. His honor seemed to weigh more than the trophy.<\/p>\n When I spent some time around the grittier parts of Marseille and Lyon, the cultural context for the insult stood out even more starkly. The lesson was that certain affronts cut so deep, at family, at dignity, at the parts of a person that sit beneath any achievement, that they demand a response in the moment and some marker for it afterward. The response should not be physical. And perhaps it need not even be outward and public. But finding a way to deal psychologically with a perceived insult in such a way that it does not scar the psyche seems like a timeless lesson, back then, and in the days of social media<\/a>.<\/p>\n Relational Slack<\/p>\n The public’s forgiveness<\/a> of Zidane had a different root, and as someone who studies trust and reputation, I recognized it. Strong trust, once built and set, is remarkably resilient<\/a> to a transgression, deliberate or not. Zidane had spent eight years, from that Geneva night onward, depositing goodwill into a national account. By 2006, that stock was so large that the country read the headbutt the way you read a lapse in someone you love: as a hero’s tragic mistake, not a villain’s malice.<\/p>\n I have come to think of this, and measured it in research, as relational slack. Relational slack is more than trust. Trust is the baseline that lets ordinary exchanges run smoothly. Slack is the surplus above that baseline, the relational capital a person or an organization holds over and above what any single exchange requires. It is built the slow way, through repeated and consistent proof of trustworthiness, until the trust is not only high but also strongly held. Like a financial cushion, it works as a buffer. It carries you through failures and reputational shocks, and it funds the risks you could not otherwise take. That is what Zidane had.<\/p>\n