Quotes

I don't know where all my medals are. They are in boxes somewhere, I think. I live for the present and the future and not the past.

It is only in the second half of my career that I have been a major player. The first half of my career was very quiet and normal.

He [Thierry Henry] came into the group [France squad], he looked around a lot, he talked to people and he learned. He has a very big intelligence, in football and also as a man. That is maybe his secret. You knew pretty early he and [David] Trezeguet were major footballers.

You win the World Cup, you win the Euro, so people are more interested in football than before. Football is the most played sport in France. But I still think French football has a problem. French people don't have the football culture. The Spanish people have the football culture. The Portuguese people have the football culture and you, the English, your stadiums are full, your fans all wear the clubs' shirts, your clubs have economic power - you really have the football culture. The French... no. France has traditions, its arts, its gastronomy, but there is not such a tradition for sport. As a French player you know what you do is important to your country but you know that in other countries it would be of a higher importance, and that feels a little strange. If Brazil are knocked out of a tournament it's a drama, the end of the world. In France it's [he shrugs], 'Oh, we've been knocked out.' Our big problem is that. In France you have the good training, the good performance... but you don't have the culture. In 1998, football was big. It was, 'Hey, football's fantastic, we're winning, the economics are great, the restaurants are full.' But it didn't last.

Everyone [in the France squad] has their own personality, but look at someone like [Lilian] Thuram. He's someone with a lot of character, who has an air of calm and serenity. He's not one of those leaders who talks a lot. You don't have to talk a lot to be a good leader. I myself don't talk so much. It's about how you are as a person and the way you play. Thuram is someone who brings a real feeling of security to that group of players. Fabien [Barthez] is the same.

When you win, you stay a lot of time together. You know the player but when you go through an experience like 1998, you get to know the man. The group we had then, many who continue to be the core of the French team today [2004], have become... a family. You meet and you look into each other's eyes and you know the other person genuinely feels good about seeing you. It will be like that when we're old men. This is not something like on television that we're talking about, but something real - real friendship. When you win a World Cup together, you have a friendship for life.

[Zinédine Zidane is] very quiet. He doesn't have the forceful personality off the field of someone like, perhaps, myself or [Didier] Deschamps, but he has something which, for me, is much more important: he has personality on the ball. He expresses himself in this incredible way with a football and leads by example.

Fabien [Barthez] is quiet, really. In England you have a false impression of him. In reality he is very quiet, very cool. He is a player who likes to play in the big occasions and that's when he's at his best. For me, the definition of a big player is someone who, when you have a big game, gives a big performance. They're not afraid. I know so-called big players don't sleep, don't eat when they have a big game: it's all too frightening.

When you're playing for the first time in the national team and it's the World Cup quarter-final, and there's all the history of Italy versus France, and you see big players, players with big experience, say, 'No, no, I don't want to take a penalty because I don't feel very good today'... and at the age of 20 you say, 'Me, I'll take one, I'll shoot,' that's fantastic. What a mentality! In such moments, you see what players are made of. With [David] Trezeguet and [Thierry] Henry, we knew they'd settled into the group nicely. They'd done well for the Under-21s, they had great ability... but what does that really count? Then you get a situation like that. From that instant Henry and Trezeguet went from being good players to great players.

I think there are five teams that could win Euro 2004: France, England, Italy, Portugal - and one surprise, because in a tournament there is always a surprise. England and France both have big players but the only important thing when they meet will be the result, because the first game a team plays in a tournament is always crucial. If you win or draw, okay, but if you lose there is huge pressure on you, because you then have two matches and you have to win both of them.

[November 2010, on whether some of the French national team players smoke, like he used to when he played] Yes, some do, but not many.