I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  It was mental. Okay, I’d been in a fight with that dad’s son. I’d taken a load of nasty tackles, and I went off on one. I’d headbutted him, if I’m honest. But I was filled with regret afterwards. I cycled over to the hospital and begged for forgiveness. It was a stupid thing to do, really, but a petition! Give me a break. The manager, Åke Kallenberg, just stared at the paper and went, “What kind of ridiculous crap is this?!”

  He tore it into pieces. He was a good bloke, Åke. Well, up to a point! He put me on the bench for almost a whole year in the junior squad, and like everybody else he thought I dribbled too much and yelled at my teammates too much and had a bad attitude and the wrong mindset and all the rest. I learned one important thing in those years. If a guy like me was going to get respect, he had to be five times better than Leffe Persson and whatever their names were. He had to train ten times harder. Otherwise he didn’t have a chance. Not on this earth! Especially not if he’s a bike thief.

  Of course I should have shaped up after that business. I definitely wanted to. I wasn’t completely hopeless. But it was a long way to the training pitch – over four miles – and I often had to walk the whole way. But sometimes the temptation was too great, especially if I saw a cool bike. One time I caught sight of a yellow bike with a load of massive carriers on it and I thought, why not? I hopped on and rode off – nice smooth ride. But after a while I started to wonder. There was something peculiar about those carriers, and it suddenly dawned on me: it was a postman’s bike. I was pedalling around with the neighbourhood’s post, so I hopped off and left the bike a little distance away. Didn’t want to nick people’s post as well.

  Another time the most recent bike I had nicked got pinched, and I was left standing there outside the stadium. It was a long way home and I was hungry and impatient, and so I pinched another bike from outside the locker room. I popped the lock as usual, and I remember liking it. It was a nice bike, and I was careful to park it a little way away so the former owner wouldn’t happen across it. But three days later, the team was summoned into a meeting. I already had an issue with stuff like that. Meetings usually meant hassle and getting a talking to, and I started coming up with some clever explanations. Things like, “It wasn’t me. It was my brother, innit.” I was right to do that, because the meeting concerned the assistant coach’s bicycle.

  “Has anybody seen it?”

  Nobody had seen it. Me neither! I mean, in that sort of situation, you don’t say anything. That’s how it works. You play dumb: “Oh, that’s a shame, poor you, I had a bike stolen once, too.”

  But even so, I got worried. What had I done? And what bad luck! The assistant coach’s bike! You’re supposed to respect the trainers. That’s what I reckoned. Or more accurately, I mean you’re supposed to listen to them and learn their stuff, zone game, tactics, all that stuff. But at the same time, don’t listen. Like, carry on with dribbling the ball and the tricks. Listen, don’t listen! That was my attitude. But nicking their bikes? I didn’t really think that was part of the picture. I got nervous and went up to the assistant coach.

  “Erm, here’s the thing,” I said. “I borrowed your bike for a little while. It was, like, an emergency. A one-time thing! You’ll get it back tomorrow.”

  I gave him my best sheepish grin, and I think it sort of worked. My smile helped me a lot in those years, and I could come up with a joke when I was in a tight spot. But it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t just the black sheep. If any tracksuits went missing, everybody blamed me. With good reason, as it happened. I was flat broke as well. While the others had always had the latest football boots from Adidas and Puma in kangaroo leather, I’d bought my first ones at the discount supermarket for 59.90 kronor – they were stocked alongside the tomatoes and vegetables, and that’s how it carried on. I never had anything to parade around in like that.

  When the team went abroad, a lot of the others had two grand with them for spending money. I had, like, 20 kronor, and that was even when Dad didn’t pay the rent one month in order to send me off. He would rather get evicted than make me stay at home. That was well nice of him. But I still couldn’t keep up with the others.

  “Come with us, Zlatan, we’ll get a pizza, a burger, we’ll go and buy this and that,” the lads would say.

  “Nah, later. I’m not hungry! I’ll just chill out instead.”

  I tried to be evasive and still remain cool. It wasn’t much fun. It wasn’t a big deal. But it was something new, and I was entering into a period where I wasn’t confident. Not that I wanted to be like the others. Well, maybe a bit! I wanted to learn their things, like etiquette and stuff like that. But most of the time I did my own thing. That was my weapon, you could say. I saw the blokes from the council estates in the suburbs like mine who would try to pretend to be posh. It never worked, no matter how hard they tried, and I thought, I’ll do the opposite, I’ll do my own thing that much more. Instead of saying, “I’ve only got 20 kronor,” I’d say, “I haven’t got any cash, not a penny.” That was cooler. More ‘out there’. I was a tough kid from Rosengård. I was different. That became my identity, and I enjoyed it more and more and didn’t care that I didn’t have a clue about the Swedish guys’ idols.

  Sometimes we were the ball boys for the first team’s matches. One time Malmö FF was playing against IFK Göteborg, a really big match in other words, and my teammates went nuts and wanted to get autographs from the stars, particularly one called Thomas Ravelli, who clearly was the greatest hero after some penalty kicks in the World Cup. I’d never heard of the bloke – not that I admitted it. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. Sure, I’d seen the World Cup as well. But, I mean, I was from Rosengård. I didn’t give a damn about the Swedes. I’d been following the Brazilians, like Romário and Bebeto and that lot, and the only thing about that Ravelli that interested me was his shorts. I wondered where I could nick a pair like that for myself.

  We were supposed to sell BingoLotto game cards to earn money for the club. I had no idea what BingoLotto was. Had never heard of guys like Loket, the bloke who presented the lottery programme on TV. But I went round knocking on doors in our neighbourhood, like: “Hi there, my name’s Zlatan. Sorry to bother you. Would you like to buy a lottery ticket?”

  I was useless at that, to be honest. I sold approximately one ticket, and even fewer of the Advent calendars we were landed with. That is to say, basically zero, and in the end Dad had to buy the whole lot. That wasn’t fair. We couldn’t afford it, and we didn’t really need more rubbish at home. It didn’t exactly make me overjoyed to be able to open every door in every calendar in November already. It was ridiculous, and I don’t understand how people can send kids out like that, basically to beg.

  We played football, and we were an awesome year group, the ones at Malmö born in ’80 and ’81. There was Tony Flygare, Gudmunder Mete, Matias Concha, Jimmy Tamandi, Markus Rosenberg. There was me. There were all kinds of sharp guys, and I kept on improving, but the grumbling continued. It was mostly the parents. They just wouldn’t give in. “Here he goes,” they’d say. “Now he’s dribbling again!” “He’s not right for the team!” It made me go spare. Who the hell were they to stand there and judge me? People have said things like I was considering quitting football around that time. That’s not true. But I was really serious about going to a different club for a while. I didn’t have a father nearby to defend me or buy me expensive clothes. I had to look after myself, and those Swedish dads with their snobby sons were everywhere, explaining why I was wrong. Of course I felt rotten! And I was restless. I wanted action, more action. I needed something new.

  Johnny Gyllensjö, the youth team coach, got wind of this and took it up with the club. “Come on,” he said. “Not everybody can turn up with their hair all slicked down. We’re about to lose a major talent!” They drew up a youth contract for me, which Dad signed. I got 1,500 kronor a month, and that was a buzz, of course, and I made more and more of an effort. I was
n’t completely impossible, like I said. It wasn’t all, don’t listen to them! It was also, listen.

  I practised hard at taking the ball down with as few touches as possible. But I still didn’t really shine, I have to say. It was still all about Tony, and I soaked up knowledge in order to get at least as good as him. My whole generation at Malmö was into Brazilian stuff and tricks. We spurred each other on there. It was a bit like Mum’s estate again, and when we got access to computers we’d download all kinds of feints, stuff that Ronaldo and Romário were doing, and then we’d practise until the trick took hold. There was lots of rewinding and fast-forwarding. How do they actually do that? How do they do that little thing?

  We were all used to touching the ball. But the Brazilians would, like, nudge it with their foot, and we’d practise over and over again until the thing took hold, and finally we’d try it out in matches. There were a lot of us who did that. But I took it a step further. I went deeper into it. I was more precise in the details. I became completely obsessed, to be honest.

  Those tricks had always been my way of getting noticed, and I carried on dribbling, no matter how much the dads and coaches grumbled. No, I didn’t adapt. Or more accurately, I did and I didn’t. I wanted to be different. I wanted to do the coaches’ stuff too, and it kept getting better. But sometimes it wasn’t that easy. Sometimes it hurt, and I’m sure the situation with Mum and Dad affected me. There was a lot of shit that needed to come out.

  At school they hired special teachers just for my sake. I got really angry. Sure, I was rowdy. Maybe the worst one. But a special teacher! Give me a break! I got an A in art, and Bs in English, chemistry and physics. I wasn’t exactly a druggie. I’d hardly even taken a puff on a cigarette. I was just restless and did a load of stupid stuff. But people were talking about putting me in a special school. They wanted to set me apart, and I felt like I was from Mars. It was like a time bomb started ticking inside me. Do I need to mention that I was good at PE? I might have been a bit unfocused in the classroom and had a hard time sitting still with a book. But I could concentrate too, if we’re talking about moving a ball or an egg around.

  One day we were playing floorball. That special teacher came and stared. Every little thing I did, she was there, like a barnacle. I was really fuming. I lined up a world-class shot and hit her square in the head. She was completely stunned, and just stared at me. Afterwards they rang Dad and wanted to talk about psychiatric help and a special school and that kind of shit, and you know that was not the right stuff to talk to my dad about. Nobody says bad things about his kids, especially teachers who are persecuting them. He went spare and charged into the school with his whole cowboy attitude: “Who the hell are you? Coming and talking about psychiatric help? You’re the ones who ought to be in the nuthouse, the whole lot of you. But there’s nothing wrong with my son, he’s a fine lad, you can all go to hell!”

  He was a crazy Yugo and completely in his element. Not long after that, the teacher quit. No wonder, really, and things did get a bit better. I got my self-confidence back. But even so, the whole idea! A special teacher, just for me! It makes me furious. Sure, maybe I wasn’t an angel. But you can’t single out kids like that! You just can’t!

  If anybody ever treated Maxi or Vincent like they were different, I would flip out. I promise you. I’d be worse than Dad. That special treatment is still with me. I didn’t feel good about it. Okay, in the long run maybe it made me stronger. I dunno. I became even more of a fighter. But in the short term it really ruined me. One day, I was supposed to go on a date with a girl, and I wasn’t particularly confident around girls in those days. The kid with the special teacher following him around, how cool does that sound? Just asking for her phone number made me break into a sweat! There was a fit girl standing in front of me, and I barely managed to stammer out:

  “D’you want to meet up sometime after school?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “How about Gustav, on such-and-such day?”

  Gustav is Gustav Adolf Square, which is between the Triangeln shopping centre and Stortorget Square in central Malmö, and she seemed to like the idea. But when I got there, she wasn’t there. I got really nervous. It wasn’t exactly my home turf, and I felt awkward. Why wasn’t she there? Didn’t she like me any more? A minute passed, two, three, ten minutes, and finally I couldn’t stick it out any longer. It was the ultimate humiliation.

  I’ve been stood up, I thought to myself. Who would want to go on a date with me? And so I left. Who cares about her? I’m going to be a football star, anyway. But that was the stupidest thing. The girl’s bus had just been a bit late. The driver had been on a fag break or something, and she got there just after I’d left and was just as upset as I was.

  4

  I STARTED secondary school at Borgarskolan, doing the social sciences curriculum with a special focus on football, and I was hoping for great things. Everything would be different now! Now I’d be really cool. But the whole thing was a shock. Okay, I’d had some preparation.

  There were some lads from the posh suburb of Limhamn in the team. But now there were girls as well, and other sorts of guys, stand-offish types in trendy clothes who stood around in the corners, smoking. I rolled up in my trainers and jogging suits covered in Adidas or Nike logos. That was the coolest thing, I thought, and I went round like that all the time. What I didn’t realise was it all just screamed Rosengård! It was like a billboard. As if that special teacher was still clinging on to me.

  At Borgarskolan kids had Ralph Lauren sweaters, Timberland boots and shirts with collars! Imagine! I’d hardly ever seen a bloke wearing a button-front shirt with a collar before, and I realised immediately that I needed to take drastic action. There were loads of fit girls in the school. It wouldn’t do to go and chat them up while looking like a guy from a council estate. I talked it over with my dad, and we had an argument. We got a study grant from the government in those days. It was 795 kronor a month, and it was obvious to my dad that he would take care of that, because he was responsible for the cost of my upkeep, as he put it. I put it a different way: “I can’t be the biggest prat in the school!”

  Somehow, he swallowed it. I got the study grant and a bank account and a bank card with a picture of a tree on it. My grant came through on the twentieth of each month, and a lot of my mates would stand there by the cash machine at 11:59 p.m. the night before, just waiting, completely mental. Is it almost midnight? Ten, nine eight … I was a little cooler, but the next morning I had certainly taken out quite a bit and gone and bought a pair of Davis jeans.

  They were the cheapest. They cost 299 kronor, and then I picked out some polo shirts, three for 99. I tried out a few styles. Nothing worked. My appearance still screamed Rosengård. I didn’t fit in. That’s how I felt. I’d been small all my life. But that summer I’d grown a massive amount, five inches in just a few months, and I guess I must have looked really lanky. I needed to sort myself out, plain and simple, and for the first time in my life I started hanging out in the city centre, at Burger King, in the shopping malls, in the Lilla Torg square.

  I carried on with some worse things too, not just for the buzz. I needed some wicked stuff. Otherwise I’d have no chance in the schoolyard. So I pinched one guy’s music player, a wicked Minidisc. We had lockers outside the classroom. They had combination locks, and I found out one of the kids’ secret combination from a mate. When he wasn’t around, I went over and went like, right five, left three, and then rode off with that Minidisc player, digging his tunes and feeling well cool. But of course it wasn’t enough.

  I still didn’t have a lot to bring to the table. I was still the bloke from the council estate. My mate was smarter. He got himself a girlfriend from a posh family and talked his way in with her brother, and started borrowing his clothes. That’s a good trick, for sure, even if it only worked up to a point. Those of us from the council estates never really fit in. We were different.
But still, this mate of mine started turning up with wicked brands, and he had a cool girl and was as cocky as anything. As for me, I felt worse than nothing. I carried on with my football.

  But that wasn’t going so well either. I had made it into the junior team and was playing with guys who were a year older, and that was an achievement in itself. We were a brilliant gang, one of the better teams in the country in our age group. But I was on the bench. That was Åke Kallenberg’s decision. Of course, a coach can put whoever he wants on the bench. But I don’t think it was just about football. When I was substituted in, I scored goals pretty often. I wasn’t bad. But I was wrong in other ways, they thought.

  People were saying that I didn’t contribute enough to the team. “Your dribbling doesn’t drive the play forward!” I heard that kind of thing hundreds of times, and I sensed the vibes – like, that Zlatan! Isn’t he too unbalanced? There weren’t any more petitions, but it wasn’t far off that, and it’s true, I did have a go at my teammates. I shouted and talked too much on the pitch. I could get into arguments with spectators. Nothing too serious. But I had my temper and my playing style. I was a different type of player, and I would fly into a rage. I didn’t really belong at Malmö FF. That’s the view many people took. I remember the Swedish junior championship. We made it into the final, and of course that was a huge deal.

  But Åke Kallenberg didn’t put me in the team. I wasn’t even going to sit on the bench. “Zlatan is injured,” he told everyone, and I leapt up. What do you mean, injured? What was he talking about? I said to him:

  “What are you talking about? How can you say something like that?”

  “You’re injured,” he repeated, and I couldn’t believe it. Why was he coming out with that kind of crap when we were going to be in the final?

  “You’re just saying that because you don’t want to deal with me.”