Zinedine Zidane took the France job in July and named his first squad on Friday. His wife of 32 years was in the stands in Morocco in December and January, watching their second son keep goal for Algeria.
Véronique Zidane watched Algeria lose an Africa Cup of Nations quarter-final in Marrakesh on 10 January, her second son in goal and her husband beside her. AFP photographers found the couple there, as they had in Rabat on 28 December and again on 6 January. Six months later Zinedine Zidane was appointed head coach of France, and on Friday, 18 September, he named his first squad.
She is 56, born in Rodez, married to him for 32 years, and has lived in Madrid since his transfer to Real Madrid in 2001. Frédéric Hermel, the French journalist who has covered Zidane in Spain since that summer, tried to introduce himself to her through a car window in the club’s training ground car park in July 2001. She thanked him and put the window back up. He wrote later that he came to understand her mistrust of reporters, and that little about it has changed.
Company filings, Hermel’s biography and a handful of interviews give the outline of her life.
- Born Véronique Fernandez in Rodez, Aveyron, on 20 March 1970. Two notarised company statutes give the date.
- Daughter of Spanish migrants from El Chive, a hamlet in the municipality of Lubrín, in the hills of Almería.
- Trained in classical dance at the Rosella Hightower school in Cannes.
- Married Zinedine Zidane at Bordeaux town hall on 28 May 1994, under a separation of property contract signed a month earlier.
- Mother of four sons, all footballers or former footballers, and grandmother to three girls.
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Rabat, Marrakesh and a son playing for Algeria
Luca Zidane switched his international allegiance in the autumn of 2025 to Algeria, the country his father’s parents came from, which ruled him out of playing for France. His mother was in the stand for the group match against Burkina Faso in Rabat, for the round of 16 against DR Congo in the same city, and for the quarter-final Algeria lost to Nigeria in Marrakesh.
Luca went on to play at the World Cup in June, when Argentina beat Algeria 3-0 in Kansas City. He left Granada in August and signed for Leganés.
How Véronique Zidane and Zinedine met in Cannes
She started a biology degree, left it inside a year and took a place at the Rosella Hightower school, the classical dance academy the American ballerina set up in Cannes in the early 1960s, then still in the centre of town. Zidane was at the AS Cannes academy. Both of them lived in the same hostel for young workers.
Zidane’s own account, given to L’Équipe for his 50th birthday, is fixed to a date by snow. He remembers scoring his first professional goal against Nantes on 10 February 1991 because four days earlier it had snowed in Cannes, he had lost his watch in it, and he had met his wife. Hermel’s book puts their first meeting two years before that, in the hostel cafeteria in 1989, when she was 18 and he was 17. In the L’Équipe interview Zidane said they had been together for more than 31 years, that she had been there through every complicated moment, and called her “the other woman of my life, with my mother”.
She gave up the dancing when she followed him to Bordeaux in 1992. Hermel, who calls her the Andalusian from Rodez, writes that she had the ability to make a career of it.
Turin, Madrid and a house in her home village
Juventus signed him in 1996 and the family spent five years in Italy. Hermel writes that she tired of the grey in Turin and wanted the sun of her parents’ country, and that the move to Real Madrid in July 2001 was the best present her husband could have given her.
While they were still living in Turin, the couple set up a property company in France. Its stated purpose was to buy a house at Onet-le-Château, the commune next to Rodez where she grew up. They called it SCI ZIFERN, Zidane and Fernandez run together. Of the 506,130 euros of capital, the company’s filing at the Rodez register records 253,065 euros from her and five euros from him. Enzo, then five, and Luca, then two, held the rest of the shares. Both parents were named managers, and she still holds the post.
Two more companies have followed at the same address in the commune. FAFER6 was set up in 2019 with all four sons as partners and both parents running it. Z5 INVEST12 was signed in front of a notary in January 2026, with Zidane and Enzo as managers and a quarter of the shares in her name. In the 2019 and 2026 deeds her occupation is given as sans profession.
Four sons, and the surname they played under
Her maiden name became the family’s cover in Spain. Hermel writes that the boys were enrolled at the French lycée in Madrid and at Real Madrid’s academy as Fernandez, on the grounds that the name is as ordinary there as Zidane is heavy, and that the sons of famous footballers get a hard time in Spanish schools. Enzo went along with it. Luca, according to Hermel, never did, and would tell people that his name was Zidane.
The four have settled it differently.
- Enzo, born in Bordeaux in 1995, played his whole career as Enzo Fernandez and retired in September 2024 at 29. He is now a manager of the newest of the family’s companies in Aveyron, alongside his father.
- Luca, born in Aix-en-Provence in 1998, plays under the name Zidane, keeping goal for Leganés in Spain and for Algeria.
- Théo, born in Aix-en-Provence in 2002, plays in midfield for Córdoba in the Spanish second division and signed a new contract in July.
- Elyaz, born in Vitrolles in 2005, joined Red Star in the French second division in July. In the 1-0 win over Nantes on 8 August he provided the pass for the goal, wearing a shirt that reads Elyaz, 15.
Almería, and the village her parents left for work
Her parents came from El Chive because there was no work there, and the family has gone back every summer since. In February 2020 she turned up at a Segunda match at Almería, where Enzo was playing for the home side against Luca’s Racing Santander.
She gave a few minutes to La Voz de Almería that night, one of her rare appearances on the record. She said she had come with her heart split in two, called the province the land of her parents and grandparents, and said the family comes back to El Chive every year without fail. Zidane was not with her. Real Madrid were training the next morning.
The padel plan on the fields outside Rodez
The family now wants to build nine padel courts, a restaurant and a small pitch on farmland at Onet-le-Château, at a cost of 2.5 million euros. Asked by France 3 Occitanie in June why Zidane had picked his commune, the mayor, Jean-Philippe Kéroslian, put it down to the family’s attachment to the place through his wife. The site is a short walk from Costes Rouges, the estate where she grew up, one of three districts in the commune classified as priority neighbourhoods.
An opposition councillor told the broadcaster that a company belonging to the Zidane family holds a 99-year lease on the land for 1,800 euros a year. A group that campaigns to protect farmland in the Rouergue has taken the building permit to the administrative court in Toulouse and has asked for the local planning document to be annulled. No ruling has been published.
The times she does turn up
When Zidane was presented as a Real Madrid player in July 2001, his wife and children stayed off the stage. When he was presented as the club’s head coach on 4 January 2016, they walked on with him, and Hermel remembers her in a bright red dress among the dark suits.
For their thirtieth wedding anniversary in May 2024 the couple renewed their vows at a party for close family, according to ¡HOLA!, days after Enzo’s twin daughters were born. On 12 and 13 September this year she was in the paddock with her husband at the Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid, five days before he sat down to name his first France squad.
