{"id":169299,"date":"2025-09-20T07:56:37","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T07:56:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/169299\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T07:56:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T07:56:37","slug":"luca-zidane-son-of-zinedine-makes-himself-available-for-algeria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/169299\/","title":{"rendered":"Luca Zidane, son of Zinedine, makes himself available for Algeria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luca Zidane, the 27-year-old goalkeeper and son of French football great Zinedine Zidane, has switched his sporting nationality from France to Algeria, the Algerian Football Federation said on Friday.<\/p>\n

“FIFA officially granted… goalkeeper Luca Zinedine Zidane<\/a> authorisation to represent the Algerian national team,” FAF said in a statement.<\/p>\n

FIFA’s “change of association platform” showed the decision was dated on Friday.<\/p>\n

Luca Zidane represented France<\/a> at youth levels and currently plays for Granada<\/a> in Spain’s second division.<\/p>\n

Since he never made the step up to the French national team, he remained eligible to play for Algeria<\/a>, the country of his paternal grandparents.<\/p>\n

The North Africans have qualified for the 2025 African Cup of Nations, set to begin on December 21 in Morocco. They are also leading their World Cup qualifying Group G with 19 points, needing either a win against Somalia or a draw with Uganda next month to qualify for the 2026 World Cup.<\/p>\n

Zidane also played for Real Madrid<\/a>‘s reserve team after working his way up from its youth academy, which he joined in 2004.<\/p>\n

He debuted with the main team in their last league game in the 2017-2018 season and was the third-choice goalkeeper when Real won their 13th Champions League title in 2018.<\/p>\n

Although Zinedine Zidane was born in Marseille, his family was originally from a small village in Bejaia, some 250 kilometres east of Algiers.<\/p>\n

Want to follow Zidane? Watch the video below to find out how, or read more here!<\/a><\/p>\n

Follow your favourites<\/p>\n

Flashscore<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luca Zidane, the 27-year-old goalkeeper and son of French football great Zinedine Zidane, has switched his sporting nationality…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-169299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}