Zinedine Zidane beware - the Champions League often serves as a solitary jewel in a middling managerial record

It is time for the Real Madrid manager to prove that he is a managerial great who forges his own destiny, rather than just a figurehead in the right place at the right time

Just as the European Cup has two handles as a trophy, it also has two sides as a symbol. The hugely prestigious piece of silverware is most commonly seen as a unique crowning glory in a great manager’s club career, that truly immortal feat that lifts them onto another level in the game’s history, but an under-appreciated reality is it has just as often served as a solitary jewel in some very middling records.

You only have to look at some of the names who have won it, and look at how little they won in the rest of their career.

Lifting the trophy might have involved a lot of long nights of the soul and thereby been a holy grail for genuine greats like Sir Matt Busby, Sir Alex Ferguson, Giovanni Trapattoni, Rinus Michels and Helenio Herrera, but it also undeniably fell so much more easily to otherwise overlooked names like Luis Carniglia,Dettmar Cramer, Stefan Kovacs, Tony Barton and Roberto Di Matteo.

This is one of the inherent contradictions to such an illustrious prize.

It is also the big challenge now for Zinedine Zidane, the extra edge to his Real Madrid anguish. He must prove he is a managerial great who forges his own destiny rather than just a figurehead who was just fated to be in the right place at the right time. Even the fact he has two medals as manager isn’t such a mitigating factor, given that Carniglia, Kovacs and Cramer did too, and they don’t tend to appear in many appraisals of the game’s legends.

This is of course as much about the manifold contradictions and characteristics of managing a big club. It's about the natural cycles they go through. While so many of those greats have had to endure those long nights of the soul because they have been responsible for properly building up something new, or have sought to impose a grander philosophical idea on a team that means they come to represent something bigger than just winning, that isn’t always the case.