There can be no more dignified and proud exit from football than to make the World Cup your point of retirement. One moment a mesmeric artist universally regarded as the most complete and gifted footballer of his generation, the next a man whose skills can be savoured only in memory and archive footage. A sense of this abrupt shift will be among many thoughts running through the mind of Zinedine Zidane today. At 34 his days on the pitch are over.

Zidane has long been surrounded by superlatives. He won them when he took France to World Cup and European victories in 1998 and 2000, and he earned them again this year for his inspirational part in captaining the team regarded only as outsiders when the tournament began.

He has also been lauded for his integrity. Unlike David Beckham, his team-mate at Real Madrid, Zidane has never enjoyed the glamour that accompanies football stardom, and he is refreshing proof that in spite of the money and hype that surrounds great sportsmen, you don’t have to engage with media celebrity. You can, as he has, ignore it, say little, lead a private life with your wife and small sons, and confine your dazzling to your job.

Not that this stops you becoming an icon, and when you are born to Algerian immigrant parents on the toughest council estate in Marseilles, your success will inevitably make you a working-class hero who proves for the umpteenth time that, for the gifted and driven, sport is a passport out of the ghetto. More specifically, Zidane offers a positive self-image to young North Africans in France, and that lends him a political dimension.

Yet however hard activists have tried to involve him in the debate about race that continues to preoccupy France, Zidane has refused to engage with those who seek to use him as political capital, stating only that is is proud of his family and his roots. He describes himself as a non-practising Muslim.

There is a theory that his background is the source of an inner rage, and he has acknowledged that his “desire never to stop fighting is something I learnt in the place where I grew up”. His father, a warehouseman, taught him “that an immigrant must work twice as hard as everybody else, that he must never give up”.

But the motif of his mature playing years has been his control and self-discipline, suggesting that his public persona has been as carefully worked as the moves that have kept the ball apparently welded to his foot.