Zidane and His First Squad List: Jacquet, Five New Faces and the Gamble Called 'Continuity'

Morning fog at Clairefontaine in September always carries its own scent, wet grass mixed with warm printer's ink, the smell of squad lists fresh off the photocopier. On September 18, when the A4 sheet was pinned to the noticeboard in the training centre corridor, twenty-three names were counted. Among them, one made the corridor go quiet: Jeremy Jacquet, a centre-back in his debut season at Anfield, called up to the France senior squad for the first time.

Zinedine Zidane stood before that board. He did not smile, and he did not frown. He simply stood. Seven years of writing about football have taught me that silent moments in front of a squad list often say more than an entire press conference. And this list, Zidane's first as France head coach, was a statement written in choices, not words.

The pitch is a page, and every season is a long stanza. The A4 sheet pinned to the Clairefontaine noticeboard that morning was the opening stanza of a new epic.

Context: an empire entering a different verse

France arrived in this September not as a side searching for identity. They are 2026 world champions, 2026 runners-up, and in the most recent major tournament they stopped only at the semi-final. That foundation would make any federation in the world bow. Yet it is precisely that foundation which is the burden Zidane must carry upon succeeding Didier Deschamps.

Deschamps left behind a national team that has gone deep consistently across several tournaments but has not lifted a trophy since 2026. The French press calls those moments slips at the threshold. The federation calls them the problem of a winner. And Zidane, born in 2026, aged 54 when he took the chair, was handed a contract running to the 2030 World Cup. Such a long deal is not merely trust. It is a boundary drawn in time to tell the public: give us time.

In Kazan, Germany were not defeated, they wandered into a ruined poem. I still remember the night of June 27, 2026, sitting in a pub in King's Cross, watching German fans stand frozen like statues after Kim Young-gwon's goal in the 90+3rd minute. Football tells its story through collapses, and France are being entrusted not to become the next chapter of that story.

Zidane arrived with a resume of three consecutive Champions League titles at Real Madrid. That resume does not promise a tactical revolution. It promises a dressing room that knows how to listen, that knows who the leader is and knows when to stay silent. In elite football, that talent is rarer than any formation. And the September 18 list is the first evidence of how Zidane intends to use it.

Core: what the structure of a squad list says

The first thing that strikes you is not the familiar names but the five faces appearing at senior international level for the first time. They cluster around the spine: goalkeeper Restes, defenders Jacquet and Diouf, midfielder Da Cunha, and forward Lepaul.

This is no random blooding. When a coach brings five debutants into a squad entering a competitive Nations League window, he does not do it out of desperation. He does it because he has surplus options. Five first-time names are not a sign of a talent crisis, but the evidence of a pipeline still flowing.

But their positions are what matters. Goalkeeper, defence, midfield, attack: the debutant group is spread across every line, yet none of them is placed in a match-controlling role. This is the classic low-risk integration model: new bodies blooded at the edge of a stable leadership axis, never at the centre of the operating structure.

That leadership axis has one name: Kylian Mbappe. At his peak, with 66 international goals, he continues to wear the armband. In a squad with five newcomers, confirming the captain from the outset is a stabilising move. It erases any power vacuum, any question about who speaks in the dressing room. It also gathers the entire psychological identity of the cycle into one person.

Mbappe is captain, all-time top scorer, and tactical focal point: three roles in one body. Such a single-point dependency can be a strength, and it can be a gap. When every emotional channel leads to one man, one injury, one dip, one bad night can ripple through the whole system.

The structure also raises an unanswered tactical question. With a coach from the possession school, many expect Zidane to build around a solid midfield trio, in the 4-3-3 or 4-3-1-2 diamond he once used in Madrid. But Tchouameni, the most natural defensive anchor, is absent from this window, being eased back from injury. Marcus Thuram is also missing, with no clear explanation.

As a result Zidane enters his first match unable to field the spine of his designs. In the most structurally important zone of a team, the zone that converts defence into attack, he must assemble pieces that have never been tested together.

The opening schedule intensifies the picture. France begin with a trip to Turkey in Izmit on September 25, then another away trip to Belgium, before hosting Italy and Belgium again. Four fixtures, two flights, two top opponents. This is no gentle warm-up window.

Contrarian angle: when 'continuity' is a veil

Zidane says there is no break with the past, that this is a continuation of his ideas. That phrase sounds smooth, and may even be sincere. But set it beside the squad list and I see another layer.

When you succeed a figure who has just delivered a decade of stability, publicly declaring a break is media suicide. You place yourself against collective memory. So calling it continuity is both truth and strategy. It is how to minimise political risk in the first window, while quietly regenerating the squad in peripheral positions.

The five debutants are evidence of that quiet renewal. None of them carries the structure. But they are subtly changing the composition of the whole system, from goalkeeper to forward, one layer at a time. This is a revolution wearing the clothes of continuity. Such revolutions usually only become visible eighteen months later, when people look back and realise the spine changed without anyone noticing.

There is another layer, less discussed but legally important. Debutants like Jacquet, Diouf and Restes are called into a competitive Nations League window, not a friendly. Under FIFA rules, appearing in a competitive senior international is a turning point for eligibility. It is an act of tying the future, a way of telling other federations: this one is ours.

A 23-man list has limits, and those limits carry a price. Not every dual-national talent is called at once. Some rising names must wait, and while waiting they remain in the sights of other nations. It is a long-game calculation played in silence, rarely appearing on front pages.

So where is Zidane's biggest risk? Not in the five new faces. They are placed in a safe buffer zone. The risk lies in the very spine he claims to be continuing. A midfield not tested enough, an attack dependent on one man, and a schedule opening with two away trips. Add those together and you get a structural weak point that no communications line can hide.

When the Bundesliga fell silent, we could hear the ball breathe. I learned that during the pandemic, when I had to mute commentary to hear boots on wet grass. And what I learned is this: football always tells the truth, only the listener is often lazy. The signs of a cycle's weakness always appear early, in the smallest details, before results turn them into big stories.

Another contrarian point must be stated plainly. France are in what I call the winner's burden. When a team consistently goes deep, the public no longer measures by escaping the group. They measure by trophies. And when the bar has been raised to the trophy line, any slow start reads as failure, regardless of the nature of a new cycle. Zidane signed to 2030, but the public did not sign a patience contract with him. They signed a results contract.

Progressive takeaway: the heartbeat of a new stanza

There is a private list I keep, recording moments when fans fell silent. I call it the list of painful matches. Kazan night has a name on it. Wembley night after Bukayo Saka's penalty is there too. Those moments taught me that the stands tell the truth more than any statistic.

The September 18 list is not yet such a moment. It is only a semicolon, a pause between two sentences. But it is precisely such semicolons that decide the rhythm of the whole poem later.

Every transfer is a farewell unannounced. Every squad list is the same. When Zidane pinned the sheet to the Clairefontaine board, he welcomed five new men and silently said goodbye to a generation no longer named on the list. Football runs on that gentle cruelty.

Glory falls too; only the poems about it stand. And the most valuable question now is not whether Zidane will win. It is whether a cycle built on a continuity statement, on peripheral debutants and on a captain carrying three roles, has enough flexibility to absorb the inevitable shocks of international football.

The Turkey match in Izmit will be the first answer. Not the last. Not the verdict. Only the first answer, a short heartbeat in a long symphony. And as always, people will only remember that heartbeat if it stops unexpectedly.

Conclusion: waiting for a cycle that does not need noise

Zidane does not need to speak loudly. He only needs to place the right people in the right spots, hold the spine steady, and let time do the rest. The five debutants may all be forgotten in three years, or one of them may become a pillar of a decade. That is the probabilistic nature of a new cycle.

What to wait for is not the scoreline. What to wait for is how France react when they fall behind, how the untested midfield pieces knit together, how Mbappe carries responsibility when the armband weighs heavier than ever. Those moments will reveal more than any statement.

Great transitions do not begin with cheers. They begin with boots on wet grass on a foggy morning, at a training centre surrounded by pine trees, when no one yet knows they are witnessing the opening stanza of something.