I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  I believe that was one of my greatest moments. I really do. I got him back. Not that I didn’t have him before. If there had been a crisis, he’d come rushing up like the Incredible Hulk. But this was something totally new, and afterwards I ran over and chatted to him a bit, just casually, as if it was totally natural that my dad was there.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Well played, Zlatan.”

  It was weird. Dad had got some sort of bug, I thought. I became his drug. He started following everything I did. He came to watch every training session. His flat became like a shrine to my career, and he cut out every article, every little piece, and he’s kept on with it. You can ask him today about any one of my matches. He’ll have it recorded, and he’ll have every single word that’s been written about it, and all the tops and boots I’ve worn and my trophies and Guldbollen awards for the best Swedish footballer of the year. You name it, it’s all there, and not all jumbled together either, like it used to be with his stuff. Everything is in its place. He can find anything in a second. He’s got it all under control.

  From that day at Pitch No. 1 onward, he began to live for me and my football, and I believe it improved his health. He hasn’t had it easy. He was alone. Sanela had broken off all contact with him because of his drinking and his temper and his harsh words about Mum, and it had been very hard on him. Sanela was his beloved daughter, and she always will be. But now she was no longer there for him. She had cut off contact, and it was another of those harsh things in my family. Dad needed something new – which he now got. We started to chat every day, and all that became a new impetus for me as well. It was like, wow, football can do amazing things, and I gave it even more. What was a relegation into the second division, when my Dad had just become my biggest fan?

  I didn’t know what I should do. Should I start playing in the Superettan – the ‘Super One’, the ridiculous name given to the Swedish second division – or aim higher? There had been talk that AIK, one of the big Stockholm clubs, were after me. But was it true? I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know a damn thing about how hot a property I was. I wasn’t even a regular member of the Malmö squad. I was eighteen years old, and should have signed a first team contract. But I put it off. Everything felt up in the air, especially since Roland Andersson and Thomas Sjöberg had got the sack. They were the ones who had believed in me when everybody else was complaining. Would I even get to play if I stayed? I didn’t know, and I was unsure. Both Dad and I were unsure, and how good was I, really?

  I had no idea. I’d given a few autographs to kids. But of course that didn’t mean anything, and my self-confidence was up and down. The first rush of elation at having been called up into the first team was starting to fade away. But then I met a guy from Trinidad and Tobago. It was the pre-season. He was cool. He had a trial with us, and afterwards he came over to me.

  “Hey, fella,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If you’re not a pro within three years, it’s your own fault!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me!”

  Too right I did!

  But it took a while to sink in. Could it be true? If anyone else had said it, I would hardly have believed them. But this bloke, he seemed to know. He’d been around, and it hit me like a body blow. Was I really serious professional material? I started to think so. For the first time, I really did, and I buckled down even more.

  Hasse Borg, the old defender for the Swedish national side, was sporting director for Malmö FF then. Hasse noticed me right from the start. I guess he understood my talent, and he put word out among the journalists. Like, look here, you should check out this lad, and the following February Rune Smith, a reporter from Kvällsposten, one of the tabloid papers in Malmö, came to a training session. Rune was cool. He would almost become a friend, and after he watched me train we chatted a bit, him and me – nothing unusual, not at all.

  I talked about the club and the Superettan League and about my dreams of becoming a pro in Italy, like Ronaldo, and Rune took notes and smiled, and I don’t really know what I expected to happen. I had no experience with journalists in those days. But it turned into a huge thing. Rune wrote something like, “Practise this name, you’ll be seeing it in the headlines: ZLATAN. It sounds exciting. And he is exciting. A different kind of player, a bundle of dynamite in the offensive line-up.” Then he mentioned that bit about the diamond in the rough again, and I said a few things that sounded cocky and un-Swedish in the article, I dunno.

  There must have been something about that report. Now even more kids started coming up after the training sessions, and in fact, some teenaged girls as well, and even some adults. That was the launch of the whole hysteria, all that ‘Zlatan, Zlatan!’ that would become my life, and which seemed so unreal at first – like, what’s going on? Are they talking about me?

  I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t the most awesome thing in the world. I mean, what do you think? I had been trying to get attention my whole life, and now, suddenly, people were turning up, awestruck, asking for my autograph. Of course that was cool. It was a major buzz. I was pumped up. I was full of adrenaline. I was flying. You know, I’ve heard people go, oh, I’ve got it so tough, there are people screaming outside my window. They want my autograph, poor me. That’s bullshit.

  Those things get you going, believe me – especially if you’ve had a life like mine, growing up as a snot-nosed kid on a council estate. It’s like a massive spotlight has been switched on. But of course, there were certain things I didn’t understand yet, the jealousy thing, that psychological stuff about how a lot of people want to knock you down when you’re up, especially if you come from the wrong side of the tracks and don’t behave like a nice Swedish boy. I got some stick as well, like: “You’ve just been lucky!” and “Who do you think you are?”

  I responded by getting even cockier. What else could I do? I hadn’t been brought up to apologise. In my family, we didn’t say, “Oh, forgive me, I’m so sorry you’re upset!” We give as good as we get. We fight if we need to, and we don’t rely on people in general. Everybody in my family has taken their knocks, and my dad always said, “Don’t do anything too hasty. People only want to take advantage of you.” I listened, and I thought it over. But it wasn’t easy. In those days, Hasse Borg was running round after me, all suited up, trying to get me to sign a contract for the first team.

  He was incredibly keen, and it was flattering. I felt important. But we had a new coach then – Micke Andersson – and I was still unsure how much I’d get to play. People thought Micke Andersson would want to focus on Niclas Kindvall and Mats Lilienberg up front and have me as a reserve, and I didn’t want to get into the Superettan League and sit on the bench. I talked it over with Hasse Borg, and of course there are loads of things I could say about him. But I don’t think it was just by chance that he was a successful businessman. He gets straight to the point. He’s a bloody master at persuading people, and he drew on his own experiences as a player and went to town.

  “This’ll be good, lad. We’ll invest in you, and the Superettan League will be the ideal incubator. You’ll have opportunities to develop. Just sign!”

  I felt like I agreed. I was starting to trust the guy. He kept phoning me and giving me advice, and I thought, why not? He must know. He was a pro in Germany and all that, and he really seemed to care about me. “Agents are crooks,” he said, and I believed him.

  There was a bloke after me. His name was Roger Ljung. Roger Ljung was an agent, and he wanted to sign me up. But Dad was sceptical, and I knew nothing about agents myself. What is it they do? So I bought into Hasse Borg’s line of thinking, that agents are crooks, and I signed his contract and got a flat in the Lorensberg neighbourhood in Malmö – a studio flat not far from the stadium – and a mobile phone, which meant a lot to me, because I hadn’t been allowed to use the phone at Dad’s, and a salary of 16,000
kronor a month.

  I resolved to really give it a go. But things started off badly. The first match of the season in the Superettan League, we were away at Gunnilse, who were a bunch of pushovers, and we should have had a big win. But the old enmities were still there in our team, and I stayed on the bench for a long time. Bloody hell, was this how it was going to be? There wasn’t much going on in the stands, it was windy and when I finally went in I got a nasty elbow in my back. I gave my opponent one in the back – bam, just like that – and then I had a go at the referee, who gave me a yellow card. There was a huge song and dance about it, both on the pitch and in the papers, and our team captain Hasse Mattisson claimed that I was spreading negative energy.

  “What do you mean, negative? I’m just psyched up.”

  “You don’t let things go.” And then there was a load of rubbish about how I was nothing like the star I thought I was, and that others had ball skills just as good as mine. They just didn’t show off all the time, thinking they were the next Maradona. I got frustrated. There’s a photo of me where I was standing by the bus in Gunnilse, looking angry.

  But it subsided. I started playing better, and I have to give Hasse Borg credit: the Superettan gave me playing time and opportunities to improve. I should be thankful for the relegation, in a way. It wasn’t long before things started to happen.

  It was mental, really. I wasn’t exactly another Ronaldo yet, and Swedish national newspapers don’t generally get too worked up about second division football. But now the tabloids were producing centre spreads with titles like ‘The Super-Diva in the Superettan’ and things like that, and the Malmö FF Supporters’ Club suddenly got a big influx of young female members, and all the older players in the club were wondering, like, what’s this all about? What’s going on? And it really wasn’t easy to understand, especially for me. People would sit in the stands waving banners that said, ‘Zlatan is the king’ and would scream when I dribbled the ball like I was some rock star. What was happening? What was it all about? I didn’t know. I still don’t, really.

  But I guess a lot of people were just excited about my tricks and my fancy moves, and I was hearing a lot of wows and check that outs now too, just like I had in Mum’s neighbourhood, and it got me going. I felt bigger when people recognised me around town, and girls would scream and kids would run up with their autograph books, and I did my thing even more. But sure, sometimes things went a little overboard. For the first time in my life I had some cash. I spent my first pay packet on an intensive driving course to get my licence. For a bloke from Rosengård, a car is a basic requirement, you could say.

  People in Rosengård don’t boast about having a fancy apartment or a beachfront house. People brag about having flash cars, and if you want to show you’ve made something of yourself, the way to do it is with a wicked set of wheels. Everybody drives in Rosengård, whether they’ve got a driving licence or not, and when I got my Toyota Celica on lease, me and my mates were constantly out in it. By that time, I’d calmed down a bit. The whole uproar in the media made me want to keep a low profile, or at least a bit lower, and when my mates started nicking cars and that sort of thing, I said to them, “That stuff isn’t for me any more.”

  But even so, I still needed to get a little buzz once in a while, like when I drove with a friend up along Industrigatan, the street where all the prostitutes in Malmö wait for punters. Industrigatan isn’t far from Rosengård, and I’d been round there quite a bit as a kid, up to no good. One time I even chucked an egg at one of the women, hit her right in the head – not very nice, I admit. But in those days I didn’t really think things through, and now when my mate and I came there in the Toyota, we saw a prostitute leaning over one car, just like she was talking to a client, and we said, “Let’s have some fun with the punter there,” and so I slammed on the brakes right in front of him and we rushed out and yelled, “Police. Put your hands up!”

  It was completely insane. I had a bottle of shampoo in my hand, like a really lame pretend handgun, and that punter, some old man, got totally scared and tore out of there. We didn’t think any more of it, it was just a thing we did. But when we drove a little further, we heard sirens, and the old man from Industrigatan was sitting in a police car, and we thought, what’s going on? What’s this all about? And it’s true, we could have just gassed it and got out of there. I was no stranger to things like that, after all. But oh, we had our seat belts on and everything and we hadn’t done anything, not really. So we stopped politely.

  “It was just a joke,” we said. “We pretended to be police. No big deal, is it? We’re sorry,” and the cops mostly laughed, like it was no big deal.

  But then a bastard turned up, one of those photographers who sit and listen to the police radio all the time and he snapped a photo, and I, idiot that I was, I put on a huge grin, because the whole media thing was new to me in those days. It was still great to be in the papers, regardless of whether I’d scored an awesome goal or been stopped by the police. So I grinned like a clown, and my mate took it even further. He had the newspaper story framed and hung it on the wall. And that old codger, you know what he did? He gave some interviews and said he was an upstanding church member and was just helping the prostitutes. Give me a break! But it’s true, that story stuck around, and people even said that certain big clubs decided not to buy me because of it. That was probably just gossip.

  But the press got even more out of control after that, and some members of the team had a go at me and talked behind my back. “He’s got a lot to learn,” “He’s very rough,” and really, I can understand them. It can’t have been easy. They probably needed to put me down a bit. There I came waltzing in from nowhere, and got more attention in one week than they’d had in their entire careers, and to cap it all, a load of blokes in sharp suits and bling watches turned up in the bleak stands in the provincial towns we played in that season – blokes that didn’t belong there at all, and everybody was staring at me.

  Looking back, I don’t know when I first grasped it, or even sat down and thought about it. But people started saying that those blokes were football scouts from European clubs, and they were there to check me out. They guy from Trinidad and Tobago had certainly warned me about this, but it still felt completely unreal. I tried to talk about it with Hasse Borg. He avoided the subject. He didn’t seem to like that topic of conversation at all.

  “Is it true, Hasse? Are there foreign clubs checking me out?”

  “Take it easy, lad.”

  “But which ones are they?”

  “It’s nothing,” said Hasse Borg. “And we aren’t going to sell you.” I thought, sure, fine, there’s no rush, in spite of everything, and so I tried to renegotiate my contract instead.

  “Play five good matches in a row and you’ll get a new deal,” said Hasse Borg, and so I did. I played an awesome five, six, seven matches, and then we sat down and discussed terms.

  I managed to get another ten thousand kronor or so on my salary, with another ten thousand to come later, and I thought that was all right. I didn’t have a clue, and I went to visit my dad and proudly showed him my contract. He wasn’t too impressed. He’d changed beyond all recognition. He was the most committed supporter now, and instead of burying himself in the war or something else, he sat at home all day and investigated things concerning football, and when he read the clause about sales to foreign clubs, he stopped short.

  “What the hell,” he said. “There’s nothing here about how much you’ll get.”

  “How much I’ll get?”

  “You should get ten per cent of the transfer fee if you’re sold. Otherwise they’re just exploiting you,” he said, and I thought I’d happily take 10 or 20 per cent. But I couldn’t figure out how we would work it. If there had been a chance of something like that, Hasse Borg would have mentioned it, wouldn’t he?

  Even so, I asked him. I didn’t want to look like a pushover, afte
r all. “Erm, Hasse,” I said. “Can’t I get a percentage if I get sold?” But of course, I didn’t expect anything else. “Sorry, lad!” he said. “That’s not how it works,” and I told my dad. I assumed he would accept it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But that’s not what happened. He went ballistic and asked me for Hasse Borg’s number. He phoned once, twice, three times, and finally got hold of him, and wouldn’t be satisfied with a ‘no’ over the phone. He demanded a meeting and it was decided, we would meet with Hasse Borg at ten o’clock the following morning in his office, and you can imagine. I was nervous. Dad was Dad, and I was worried things might get out of control, and to be honest, it wasn’t the calmest meeting either! Dad went off on one pretty fast. He started sputtering and pounding his fist on the desk.

  “Is my son a horse?”

  No, of course I wasn’t a horse, Hasse Borg said.

  “So why are you treating him like one?”

  “We’re not treating him…”

  It carried on like that, and finally Dad declared that Malmö FF would not see hide nor hair of me any longer. I would not play another second unless my contract was rewritten, and then Hasse Borg began to turn pale, which I could understand, to be honest. My dad is not to be toyed with, like I said. He’s a lion, and we got that bit about the ten per cent into the contract, and that would turn out to mean a lot. All respect to my dad for that, and that whole thing should have been a lesson, food for thought. But agents were still crooks and I still relied on Hasse Borg. He was my mentor, sort of another father figure. He invited me out to his place in the country, his half-timbered house in Blentarp, where I got to meet his dogs, his kids and wife and the animals, and asked him for advice when I bought my Mercedes convertible on hire purchase.