Zidane and the Sanhaji Void: The Blow That Never Appears on the Tactical Board

In the staff list for Zinedine Zidane's first training camp as France head coach, one name had been struck through. Mohamed Sanhaji — the man responsible for security and logistics for the French national team since 2026. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one training camps. Twenty-one times standing at the gates of Clairefontaine checking every access badge, counting every bus, arranging every hotel room.

His name now sits inside a French criminal investigation file. The charges: corruption, influence peddling, embezzlement of public funds, fraud. He is under strict judicial supervision, barred from setting foot in Clairefontaine, barred from contacting any member of staff or any player. I have sat in enough of these rooms to know one thing: when a logistics man of twenty years is pulled out of the system, nobody walks onto the pitch in his place. There is only a void. And a void is always more expensive than people assume.

A training camp built around a court case

Zidane took charge of the France national team and spent his opening weeks piecing together both his technical and his administrative staff. On that list, Sanhaji was one of the closest names. Zidane personally asked for him to stay. The FFF agreed — until the judicial authorities stepped in and forced them to do the opposite.

One thing must be stated plainly: this case is not about tactics. No formation has been disrupted, no pressing structure has collapsed. Across the entire file there is not a single xG figure, not one PPDA metric, not one possession percentage. This is a governance matter, and it does not belong to the tactical category. But at elite level, those two worlds have never truly been separate.

At the heart of the case is a donation from Kylian Mbappé to the officials responsible for France's national team security. Irregularities tied to that money form the core of the investigation. Sanhaji's lawyer has appealed and publicly criticised the judicial measures imposed on his client — a move French observers read as an attempt to buy time and save face.

The real power of a logistics man

Here I want to say something European media usually skates past. The role of security and logistics chief for a national team is not a routine administrative title. That person controls the flow of information.

He knows who enters the dressing room. He knows which player left the hotel at what hour, with whom, and when he returned. He is the first to hear about an injury, the first to see a player's face after a defeat, the only man present in every corridor. Over twenty-one years, Sanhaji accumulated an asset no payslip can measure: personal relationships with three generations of French players.

Based on my experience following matches at national-team level, I once witnessed a similar case at another federation. One logistics official was replaced, and within two weeks three senior players started calling their own agents to ask what was going on. Not because they cared about politics. But because the one person they trusted to ask had disappeared. Moscow that night was not as cold as the eyes that avoided mine.

For Zidane, the problem runs a level deeper. He had just staked his personal credibility on keeping Sanhaji. He did not lose to an opponent on the pitch; he lost to an administrative decision beyond his control. A head coach's power is measured by what he can protect, and Zidane failed to protect his very first personnel decision.

On the FFF side, their stance deserves close reading. They kept Sanhaji until the final possible moment, when the law no longer permitted it. That signals a two-decade close relationship — and it also signals a governance gap. An organisation with a rigorous compliance process removes a person under investigation from direct contact with players immediately, without waiting for a court order.

The "Zidane shock" story is naming the wrong protagonist

Headlines are orbiting Zidane. First blow. Broken start. Shocking collapse. I read them and see the wrong protagonist being named.

Zidane is not the victim of this story. He is the man who chose to place the bet. When a new head coach knows full well that his subordinate is under criminal investigation for embezzling public funds and still asks for him to stay, that is a decision, not an accident. Loyalty is an admirable quality in a dressing room. But inside an organisation spending public money, personal loyalty and institutional responsibility are two different roads, and whoever chooses wrong pays.

The blind spot in the official story is this: the press is using the Sanhaji affair to judge Zidane's ability to command, while the affair actually judges the FFF's ability to govern — and the coach's own risk judgement.

People say women know nothing about the number 10. But I have seen the number 10 cry. Mbappé, France's number 10, has been dragged in purely because of a donation. As of now, he faces no charge. But in the image economy of modern football, a name appearing inside an investigation file is an asset being repriced. Image-rights contracts, commercial agreements, advertising campaigns — all of them carry morality clauses, and all of them are waiting to see where this file goes.

One more detail matters: the donation was reportedly intended for security officials. That means the money flowed into precisely the department Sanhaji ran. Even if Mbappé is entirely innocent, the structure of the affair creates a grey zone — and grey zones are where investigations live longest.

The next dominoes

The appeal by Sanhaji's lawyer is the first domino. If the court relaxes the supervision measures, the next question becomes: will the FFF bring him back? And if it does, how will the organisation explain its compliance standards to the French sports ministry?

Next comes the fixture list. Zidane's first camp is engulfed by a story unrelated to football. If France start well, the affair fades. If not, it becomes a ready-made excuse — and ready-made excuses are always more dangerous than defeat.

The last domino, and perhaps the most important: whether other football federations begin auditing their own logistics recruitment processes. Transfer offices reek of cigarette smoke and patriarchy. I sat still, and they beat themselves. In those corridors, people ask only one question when signing a contract: results. Nobody asks about ethics, until a police car parks at the gate.

A signature is only the last lie to be officially recognised. But a courtroom signs nothing.