Can Zinedine Zidane prove the rare playing great who is just as good as a manager?

It’s too early yet to tell if the old trope will hold true, if great players really do always fail to make great managers.

The late Johan Cruyff was a transcendent player and then built the modern Barcelona as a manager. But beyond him, the truly era-defining players never came close to replicating their on-field success from the sideline. He was the exception, as they say, that proved the rule.

[ El Clasico: Ramos rescues Real | Clasico Live | Match stats ]

And here we arrive at the case of Zinedine Zidane, the world’s greatest playmaker from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s. Winner of the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000 with France and then the 2002 Champions League with Real Madrid. He took over as manager in the Spanish capital on Jan. 4 of this year, in spite of his total lack of senior team experience as a head coach, and summarily won the club’s 11th European crown.

Certainly, he took over a Real team plenty capable of winning the thing and held it together over the course of five months. In the quarterfinals of the Champions League, the Blancos overcame a 2-0 first-leg loss to Wolfsburg with a 3-0 win in the return leg and squeezed past Manchester City 1-0 in the semifinals. The final against Atletico Madrid was won on penalties. But Real Madrid also won 17 of its 20 remaining league games – including the one in Barcelona – and lost just one. Barca won the league by just one point.

Which is to say that while Zidane had certainly made a very talented team a bit better than his predecessor Rafa Benitez, who always seemed like an odd, stopgap choice for the job, there was no telling just yet how good of a manager he really was going into this 2016-17 season.

Here’s a different statistic: After Saturday’s 1-1 tie in El Clasico, Real has not lost under Zidane in 33 competitive games going back to April 6, which was that Wolfsburg loss that was corrected in the second leg. And Real has lost just twice since Zidane took over exactly 11 months ago, with a 1-0 Feb. 27 defeat to Atletico Madrid being the only other blemish on his record. His winning percentage is an absurd 82 percent.

Yet Zizou, as he was nicknamed as a player, has not displayed any particularly notable tactical acumen. He was never the type to shout as a player and doesn’t appear to be as a manager, either. He may be a good motivator, but his charisma has always been the quiet kind. And that sort of locker room discourse never makes it outside its doors anyway. There’s no one obvious thing that makes him stand out as a manager. But there is also no arguing with the results he’s gotten.

Ahead of El Clasico, Zidane predicted that they would play for a result “with our butts clenched.” He instructed his team to unsettle Barcelona’s inimitable attacking rhythm. When Real went behind early in the second half, he didn’t panic. In fact, when Barca started to overrun his side upon the Catalans’ insertion of Andres Iniesta in the 60th minute, Zidane entered the defensive Casemiro into the fray in the 66th, as if all he was trying to achieve was to limit the damage.

But the Brazilian holding midfielder steadied the midfield and stemmed the flow of attacks. Real made a late charge, forged a few chances and finally got an injury-time equalizer through Sergio Ramos. And so Zidane and his side got the tie that preserved its six-point gap at the top of the table. When all the points are counted in May, this result, which stopped Barcelona from cutting its arch rival’s lead in half, may well be the difference for the title.

Zidane made a subtle move and the outcome listed in his favor.

On the field, in his heyday with Juventus, Real and France, Zidane wasn’t a showy player. He didn’t do amazing things just because he could. He did them when they were necessary. Mostly, he concerned himself with starting, or finishing attacks. Setting up teammates and dictating the tempo. He hardly talked. Even in his final act, The Headbutt of the 2006 World Cup final, he barely even seemed to open his mouth.

If Zidane is as understated and elegant as a manager as he was as a player, there may well prove to be a certain kind of greatness in that as well. Real is a hornet’s nest. The locker room is like a dysfunctional congress. Despotic club president Florentino Perez looms over everything, eager to impress and force his opinions about lineups and tactics on his managers. Surviving alone is a feat for any Real Madrid manager.

Zidane hung around at the Bernabeu after he retired a decade ago. After a few years, he became an “adviser” to Perez, and after that to then-manager Jose Mourinho. Two years ago, he was put in charge of the B-team. Yet other than his obvious footballing intellect and the respect he would command from the demanding players on account of his own career, there was nothing to suggest that he would succeed as a manager.

But Zidane was able to stand up to Perez and keep him away from his lineup sheet. And he has enough clout within the club and its fans, and sufficient credibility with the media, to avoid incessant questioning of his every decision.

As Real manager, Zidane seems less like the pilot of a plane doing loops and stunts than the steady air traffic controller. He keeps things running smoothly and the competing interests from colliding. At a club with one of the best collections of talent in the world, that can be enough. No complicated tactical schemes are necessary when you allow great players to thrive. Complex motivational tools need not be wielded when the players are happy and in their prime.

Stability can be exciting at a club that spends years on end in relatively choppy waters, even when it was winning. Carlo Ancelotti and Vicente Del Bosque were fired by Perez a year after winning the Champions League. Jupp Heynckes won the Champions League and was fired immediately after the same season, albeit by Perez’s predecessor Lorenzo Sanz. That’s life in the blazingly hot seat at Real.

Zidane has kept cool, managing the many treacherous circumstances as deftly as the players in his charge.

It may not be flashy, but then Zidane the player never was either. Therein lay his greatness back then. And maybe it still does now.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.