Zinédine Zidane and his game would, we always suspected, find a way to get back together.

It took nine months, but on Monday the former French star played on European soil for the first time since his retirement. The smile was back on his face, the skills cannot have left his feet so soon, and given just cause to get himself fit for action, he cut a decidedly happier picture than his sad departure in disgrace at the end of the World Cup in July in Berlin.

Zidane is 34. He said he retired because every day a new pain racked his body, a new pressure clouded his desire.

He became almost a sporting recluse. He pulled on his soccer shoes three times in public since leaving with that infamous head butt against the chest of his Italian tormentor, Marco Materazzi.

After that, Zizou performed once in Algeria, his father's homeland, once in Bangladesh and once in Thailand.

He declined to turn out last week for the 50th anniversary celebration match between Manchester United and a European Union side. Politics are not his thing; humanity is.

On Monday, Zidane led one team, his former Real Madrid colleague Ronaldo led the opposition, and they raised an estimated $500,000 by attracting 25,000 to the Stade Velodrome, the stadium in Marseille, where Zidane grew from a street player to one of the finest soccer players of all time.

Their game was dubbed "The Match Against Poverty." It was staged by the United Nations Development Program, and was the fourth such game, following games in Basel in 2003, Madrid in 2004 and Düsseldorf in 2005.

The proceeds will help build fields, and hope, for kids in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It scarcely matters that the scoreline Monday gave Zidane's team a 6-2 victory, or that neither he nor Ronaldo struck a goal.

It also seemed immaterial to the people of Marseille that the two great stars and the United Nations had picked a near-impossible time to put on such a show. Every player who is at the height of his powers is wanted on national team duty this week when, on all continents, there are scores of important matches.

So when even Zidane or Ronaldo call their friends and ask them to come to Marseille for a good cause, few are free to oblige. Players are seldom their own masters. The process starts in adolescence, and continues relentlessly until retirement beckons.

An example of this is happening in North and South Korea at the moment. Silently, almost secretly, a group of North Korean youth squad players arrived on Jeju Island, the southernmost of the South Korean peninsula, on Tuesday.

The purpose is to give them a training retreat on an island so besotted with soccer that I once had a pick-up game with Buddhist monks in the grounds of their temple there.

They were not gentle competitors. They kicked the ball and most things around it. The spirit of the game became, to say the least, competitive. And there was nothing about Zidane or Ronaldo that they did not know.

So I imagine those monks right now offering their services to the North Koreans. And it might be too late to forewarn the boys' coaches about what is in store.

The short-term purpose of the training camp set up on the island is to help prepare the North Korean squad for the FIFA World Under-17 tournament, which will be held in August in South Korea.

Longer term, this is a step toward unification of North and South Korea. Divided by separate ideologies, still technically segregated more than 50 years after the fighting in the Korean war ended in 1953, there have been attempts to bring the peoples together through sport for almost two decades.

When the Seoul Olympics were held in 1988, the North was shut off, a closed and militarily enforced half of the same family. When the World Cup of soccer came to the South in 2002, only the activity of pirated television showed those in the North what they were missing.

All of this seems a long stretch from Zidane and Ronaldo. But is it?

Their origins were not privileged. Zidane is the son of immigrants, his father was a janitor in a poor quarter of Marseille. Ronaldo was raised by a mother who sold pizzas to feed her brood after his father, an alcoholic, abandoned them when Ronaldo was 13.

What divides families isn't only politics, but also, as their game Monday was meant to point out, poverty.

The two Koreas have discussed marching under the Olympic banner together. Since the 2002 World Cup, they have played each other in Seoul. But the youths from the North now enjoying a taste of Jeju Island hospitality will be under strict guard.

Should they return to play the tournament in August, theirs will be one of 24 teams attracting 750,000 spectators paying from $2 to $7 a ticket. It is another world to them, and not even their parents will remember the Communist march that split the nation.

The Under-17s, however, cannot be entirely free. As they arrived on Jeju, a boxer, Hong Chang Soo, announced his retirement — and renounced his North Korean citizenship.

Hong became WBC super flyweight champion of the world by beating Cho In Ju of South Korea seven years ago. He defended his title, then won and lost and regained it, always as a North Korean.

Last month, although residing in Japan, he applied for South Korean citizenship.

"Living as a North Korean was not convenient," he said at the weekend. "I want now to learn the Korean language. I think it is shameful that a Korean cannot speak Korean."

The language of sports, at least, is universal.