I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  I’d done a few tricks and a backheel down by the corner flag, but otherwise it was more Ijeh and Majstorović’s match than mine, and there was no magic in the air when, two minutes later, I got the ball around the midfield. But things soon changed, because suddenly I drew a bloke, it just happened, and then another one, and I was like, wow, this is easy, I’m in control, and I carried on.

  It was like a dance, and even though I wasn’t conscious of it, I dribbled past every one of the defenders from that newspaper article and toed the ball into the goal with my left foot, and honestly, that feeling was not just joy. It was revenge. This is for you lot, I thought, this is for your chants and your hate, and I assumed my war with the spectators would continue after the final whistle went.

  I mean, we had humiliated Djurgården – the final score was 4–0. But do you know what happened? I was surrounded by Djurgården fans, and nobody wanted to fight or hate any more.

  They wanted my autograph. They were crazy about me, and honestly, when I look back on that time, there’s a lot of stuff just like that, about how I managed to turn everything round with a goal or a fancy move. You know, there was no movie I loved more than Gladiator in those days and there’s a scene in it that everybody knows, right, where the emperor comes down into the arena and tells the gladiator to take his mask off, and the gladiator does it and says: “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius … And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.”

  That was how I felt, or wanted to feel. I wanted to stand up to the whole world and show everybody who’d doubted me who I really was, and I couldn’t imagine anyone who’d be able to stop me.

  7

  IT WAS HIGH CHAPARRAL, as I like to say. It was a three-ring circus, and I said all kinds of stupid stuff, like how the Swedish national squad would have won the Euro 2000 championship if they’d had me! It might have been cocky and cool then, I dunno, but it didn’t seem so funny when I really was called up.

  That was in April as well. I’d just scored that goal against Djurgården, and the papers were totally crazy. They had me in the headlines constantly, and I guess people who read them wouldn’t exactly think I was the most humble guy in the world, and that made me a little worried. Would the big guys, like Patrik Andersson and Stefan Schwarz, think I was a cocky little shit?

  It was one thing to be a star at Malmö FF. But come on, the national squad was something else! There were guys there who’d won the World Cup bronze, and believe it or not, I was well aware of the attitude in Sweden that it’s not a good idea to stick out and stuff, especially when you’re the new kid on the block. God knows I’d come in for a lot of stick in the youth team, and I wanted to be liked.

  I wanted to be part of the gang, but it didn’t get off to a brilliant start. We headed off to a training camp in Switzerland, and all the journalists were just buzzing around me the whole time. It was almost embarrassing. Come on, I wanted to say, Henke Larsson is standing over there, go over and talk to him instead, and yet I couldn’t let it go. At a press conference in Geneva I was asked whether I thought I was similar to any other great player in the world.

  “No,” I replied. “There’s only one Zlatan,” and how humble was that on a scale from one to ten? I realised straight away I had to make amends. I tried to keep a low profile after that, and to be honest, I didn’t need to make much of an effort. I felt shy around all the big names, and apart from Marcus Allbäck, who I shared a room with, I didn’t talk to many of them. I stood around on the sidelines. “He’s a loner. He goes his own way!” the papers wrote, and sure, that sounded exciting. Like, Zlatan the intriguing artiste.

  But in fact I was just awkward, and I didn’t want to get anyone else worked up, especially not Henrik Larsson, who I know as ‘Henke’ – he was like a god to me! He was playing for Celtic then, and it was that year – 2001 – he was awarded the Golden Boot as the top goal scorer in all the European leagues. Henke was awesome, and when I heard he and I would be in the starting line-up against Switzerland, it felt great.

  That was another one of those surreal things, and several newspapers ran long stories about me before the match. They wanted to run a proper feature about me now ahead of my international debut, and there was some director of studies from Sorgenfri in those articles – you remember, the school where they gave me a remedial teacher, and she said I was the most unruly pupil she’d had in thirty-three years of teaching or something like that: I was the hooligan at Sorgenfri School. A one-man show. It was a bunch of blah blah blah, but there was other stuff as well, loads of expectations that I would be a massive success in the national side. People really wanted to see me as both a hooligan and a star, and I was feeling the pressure.

  But there was no great success. I was substituted out at half-time, and I wasn’t called up for the big World Cup qualifiers that year against Slovakia and Moldova. Lagerbäck and Söderberg relied on Larsson and Allbäck in front instead, and that should have given me a little more anonymity. I was hardly even a regular member of the squad.

  But nothing worked out the way it should for me. I remember the first time I played with the national side in Stockholm. We were up against Azerbaijan at Råsunda Stadium, and I was still something like a fish out of water. Stockholm was a different world for me. It was like New York. I was lost and awkward, and there were loads of hot chicks in the city. I was just gawping at everything.

  I was starting as a reserve, and there was a capacity or near-capacity crowd at Råsunda. There were 33,000 people there, and all the big guys seemed confident and used to the whole thing, and I sank down onto the bench and felt like a little boy.

  But fifteen minutes into the match, something happened. The crowd started shouting. They were bellowing my name, and I can’t describe it, I got so pumped up. I got goosebumps. All the big names were out there on the pitch. There was Henke Larsson, there was Olof Mellberg, there was Stefan Schwarz and Patrik Andersson. But they weren’t shouting their names. They were shouting my name, and I wasn’t even playing. It was almost too much, and I didn’t get it. What had I done, exactly?

  A few matches in the Allsvenskan League, that’s all! And yet I was more popular than guys who’d played in big championship games and won the World Cup bronze. It was completely nuts, and everybody in the team was looking at me. But whether they were happy or gutted, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that they didn’t get it either. This was something completely new. This hadn’t happened before, and after a while the crowd went back to yelling the usual chant, ‘Come on Sweden, come on!’ and I bent over to do up my laces, just for something to do or because I was nervous. It was like an electric shock.

  The spectators thought I was warming up, and they boomed, ‘Zlatan, Zlatan’ again, completely mental now, and of course I took my hands away from my boots. I mean, I was sitting on the bench and to take over the show like that would have completely overstepped the mark, so I tried to make myself invisible.

  But secretly I was loving it. I felt a massive rush. The adrenaline was pumping, and when Lars Lagerbäck really did tell me to warm up, I rushed onto the pitch, absolutely delighted, no lie. I was soaring around, there was ‘Zlatan, Zlatan’ coming from the stands, and we were ahead 2–0. I lobbed the ball with my heel, a beautiful little move from the council estate, and I got the ball back and fired it at the goal, and all of Råsunda and the evening exploded, and even Stockholm felt like my town.

  The only thing was, it was like I brought Rosengård along with me. One time that year I was in Stockholm with the national squad. We went out to Undici, Tomas Brolin’s nightclub, and we were just sitting there. Then one of my mates from the estate started talking:

  “Zlatan, Zlatan, can I have your hotel key?”

  “What are you on about?”

  “Just give it to me!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He got it, and I thought nothing more of it. But when I got in that night, my m
ate was there and he had shut the wardrobe and was acting all secretive and jumpy.

  “What have you got in there?” I asked.

  “Nothing special. And don’t touch it,” he replied.

  “What?”

  “We can make some cash from them, Zlatan!”

  You know what it was? It was completely mental. It was a whole load of Canada Goose down coats he’d nicked from Undici. So I didn’t always keep the most respectable company, to be honest, and things at Malmö FF started to have their ups and downs. It was a funny thing to stay with a club when I’d already been sold to another one, and I wasn’t the most well-balanced bloke. Sometimes I would go off on one.

  I’d explode. Of course, I’d always done that, but now there was this whole situation surrounding me, and that ‘bad boy’ stuff was starting to bite. When we were playing away against Häcken, I’d got a warning in the previous match for shouting at the referee, and there was a certain amount of uneasiness in the air. Was that madman Zlatan going to do something again?

  Häcken were coached by Torbjörn Nilsson, the former star player, and they had Kim Källström, who I knew from the national Under-21 squad. There was some nasty play early on, and a little way into the match I took down Kim Källström from behind. I elbowed another guy and was sent off, and then the real outburst came. On the way to the locker room I kicked over a loudspeaker and a microphone, and, well, the sound technician who’d set up that stuff didn’t exactly appreciate it. He called me an idiot, and I turned round and went up to him, like, who the hell are you calling an idiot?

  But our equipment manager split us up, and there was a big to-do and newspaper headlines and about seven million pieces of advice from all quarters, like I had to change my behaviour and all that. Otherwise things could go badly at Ajax … Bullshit. Bullshit! The Expressen tabloid even interviewed a psychologist who said I ought to seek help, and of course my immediate reaction was, who the fuck is he? What does he know?

  I didn’t need any psychologist. I just needed peace and quiet. But it’s true, it was no fun to be stuck on the bench and see IFK Göteborg humiliate us 6–0. Our flow from the season opener had vanished and our trainer, Micke Andersson, came under a fair amount of criticism as well. I really didn’t have anything against him, and we didn’t have much contact either. If I had a problem, I’d go to Hasse Borg. But there was one thing that was starting to annoy me. I thought Micke had too much respect for the older players in the team. He was frightened, pure and simple, and he can’t have been too happy with me since I’d been sent off again against Örebro. There were some tensions, and we played a training match. It was summer. Micke Andersson acted as the referee, and there was some confrontation with Jonnie Fedel, the goalie, who was one of the eldest in the team, and of course Micke called it in Jonnie’s favour. I saw red and went up to Micke.

  “You’re scared of the older guys. You’re even fucking afraid of ghosts,” I bellowed. There were a load of balls lying on the pitch. I started kicking them, boom, boom, boom.

  They went flying like missiles and landed on the cars outside, setting off the car alarms, and whistles and horns started and everything just came to a standstill, and I stood there with a fierce council estate attitude, while my teammates were looking daggers at me. Micke Andersson tried to calm me down, and I screamed at him, “What are you, my mother?”

  I was furious and headed off to the locker room, where I emptied my locker and ripped down my name, and declared that I would never come back. I’d had enough! Goodbye Malmö FF, so long you idiots, and I drove off in my Toyota Celica and didn’t turn up to any more training sessions, just played on my PlayStation and hung out with my mates instead. It was sort of like I was bunking off school, and of course Hasse Borg rang me up, sounding absolutely hysterical.

  “Where are you? Where are you? You’ve got to come back!”

  And of course, I was reasonable. Four days later I turned up and was polite and charming again, and to be honest, I didn’t think my outburst was really such a big thing. That stuff happens in football, it’s part of it, there’s a lot of adrenaline in the sport. Besides, I didn’t have long left with the team, I was on my way to the Netherlands, and I didn’t actually believe there would be any penalty or ridiculous consequences. I was thinking more about how they would see me off. Only a few months before, Malmö FF had been in crisis. They had a ten million kronor hole in their finances and really couldn’t afford to purchase any top players.

  Now they were the richest club in Sweden, I’d given them a massive amount of capital, and even Bengt Madsen, the chairman of Malmö FF, had said in the papers: “There’s only a player like Zlatan born every fifty years!” So no, it wasn’t so strange to think that they were planning a big send-off, or at least a ‘thanks for the 85 million’, especially not when they’d said farewell to Niclas Kindvall in front of 30,000 spectators in the match against Helsingborg the previous week. But sure, I noticed that they were all a little scared of me. I was the only one who could scupper the deal with Ajax by doing something even crazier, and my last match in the Allsvenskan was approaching.

  It was on the 26th of June away to Halmstad, and I was gearing up for a good farewell performance. It was no big thing for me, don’t get me wrong. I was finished with Malmö. In my mind I was already in Amsterdam. But even so, a period of my life was coming to an end, and I remember looking at the list of names on the wall who would be going along to Halmstad. Then I looked again.

  My name wasn’t there. I wouldn’t even be sitting on the bench. I was going to stay at home, and of course, I realised. That was my punishment. That was Micke’s way of showing who was in charge, and okay, I accepted it, what else could I do? I didn’t even get angry when he told the press that I was “under pressure and out of balance,” and “needed some rest”, basically like he was dropping me because he was such a kind-hearted guy, and in fact, I was naïve enough to believe that the club’s management were still planning something, maybe some event with the supporters.

  Soon afterwards I was summoned to Hasse Borg’s office, and as you know, I don’t like that sort of thing. I think I’m going to get a talking-to or something. But there was so much going on then that I just went there without expecting anything, and there in the office stood Hasse and Bengt Madsen, looking generally uptight and stuck-up, and I wondered, what’s this all about, is this a funeral?

  “Zlatan, our time together is drawing to a close.”

  “You don’t mean …”

  “We’d like to say …”

  “So you’re going to see me off in here?” I said, looking around.

  We were in Hasse’s stupid, boring office, just the three of us in there.

  “So you’re not going to do it in front of the fans?”

  “Well,” said Bengt Madsen, “people say it’s bad luck to do it before a match.”

  I just looked at him. It’s bad luck?

  “You said goodbye to Niclas Kindvall in front of 30,000 people, and that still went all right.”

  “Yes, but …”

  “Whaddaya mean, but?”

  “We’d like to give you this gift.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  It was a ball, an ornament made out of crystal.

  “This is a memento.”

  “So this is how you’re thanking me for the 85 million kronor?”

  What were they thinking? That I would take it along to Amsterdam and, like, weep when I looked at it?

  “We’d like to express our gratitude.”

  “I don’t want it. You can keep it.”

  “You can’t just …”

  Yes, I could. I put the crystal thing on the table. Then I got out of there. That was my farewell from the club – no more, no less – and sure, I wasn’t happy about it. Nevertheless, I shook it off. I mean, I was on my way out of there, and really, what was Malmö FF
anyway? My real life was about to start now, and the more I thought about it, the bigger it got.

  I wouldn’t just go to Ajax. I was the club’s most expensive player, and while Ajax might not be Real Madrid or Manchester United, it was definitely a big club. Only five years earlier, Ajax had played in the Champions League final. Six years ago they’d won the whole tournament, and Ajax had had blokes like Cruyff, Rijkaard, Kluivert, Bergkamp and van Basten – especially van Basten, he’d been absolutely brilliant, and I was going to be wearing his number. It was mental, really. I was going to score goals and make a difference, and sure, that was awesome, but it was also beginning to dawn on me that it meant incredible pressure.

  Nobody spends 85 million kronor without expecting something in return, and it had been three years since Ajax had won their league. For a club like Ajax, this was a minor scandal. Ajax are the finest team in the Netherlands, and their supporters expect the team to win big. You had to deliver the goods, not go round all cocky and do things your own way from the start, definitely not start off by going, “I’m Zlatan, who the hell are you?” I would fit in and learn the culture. The only thing is, stuff continued to happen around me.

  On the way home from Göteborg, in a little place called Bottnaryd near Jönköping, I got stopped by the police. I’d been going 110 kilometres an hour in a 70 zone, not exactly flooring it when you consider what I would get up to later on. But I lost my licence for a while, and the press didn’t just print massive headlines. They made sure they dredged up the business from Industrigatan as well.

  They compiled entire lists of all my scandals and all the times I’d been sent off, and of course it all made its way to the Netherlands. Even though the club’s management was already aware of most of it, now the journalists in Amsterdam got in on it as well. No matter how much I wanted to be a good lad, I was labelled a bad boy even before I started. There was me and one other new guy, an Egyptian called Mido who’d been a success with KAA Ghent in Belgium. We both got reputations as being out of control, and to cap it all I was hearing more and more about the coach I’d met in Spain, Co Adriaanse.