I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  He was supposed to be like a bloody Gestapo officer who knew everything about his players, and there were some crazy stories about the punishments he dished out, including one about a goalkeeper who happened to answer his mobile during a tactics session. He had to spend a whole day on the club’s switchboard, even though he couldn’t speak a word of Dutch. It was like, “Hello, hello, don’t understand” all day long, and then there was one about three guys in the youth squad who’d been out partying. They had to lie on the pitch while the others walked on top of them in their studded boots. There were quite a few of those stories, not that they worried me.

  There’s always a load of talk about the coaches, and in fact I’ve always liked blokes with discipline. I get on well with blokes who keep their distance from their players and don’t get too close. That’s how I’d grown up. Nobody went like, “Poor little Zlatan, of course you’ll get to play.” I didn’t have a dad who came to training sessions and sucked up to everyone and insisted that people should be nice to me, no way. I’ve had to look out for myself, and I’d much rather get a bollocking and be on bad terms with a coach and get to play because I’m good, rather than get on with him and be allowed to play because he likes me.

  I don’t want to be mollycoddled. That just messes me up. I want to play football, nothing else. But sure, I was still nervous as I packed my bags and headed off. Ajax and Amsterdam were something completely new. I didn’t know a thing about the city, and I remember the flight and landing and the woman from the club who came to meet me.

  Her name was Priscilla Janssen. She was a gofer at Ajax, and I really made an effort to be nice, and I greeted the guy she had with her. He was around my age and seemed shy, but he spoke really good English.

  He said he was from Brazil. He’d played for Cruzerio, a famous team – I knew that because Ronaldo had played there. Just like me, he was new at Ajax, and he had a long name I didn’t really catch. But apparently I could call him Maxwell, and we exchanged phone numbers and then Priscilla drove me in her Saab convertible out to the little terraced house the club had arranged for me in Diemen, a small town far away from the city. There I sat with a posh brand-name bed and a 60-inch TV and nothing else, playing on my PlayStation and wondering what was going to happen.

  8

  IT WAS NO BIG DEAL to be on my own. If there was one thing I’d learnt growing up, it was to look after myself, and I was still feeling like the coolest bloke in Europe.

  I’d turned pro and been sold for crazy amounts of money. But my terraced house was bare inside. It felt very remote, and I didn’t even have any furniture or anything else that made it feel like a home, and to be honest, the fridge started to get bare pretty soon, too. Not that I was gripped by panic and relived my childhood or anything. It was okay. I’d had an empty fridge in my flat in Lorensborg as well. I could cope with anything. But then again, in Malmö I’d never had to go hungry – not least of all because I would stuff myself at Kulan, the restaurant at Malmö FF, and I’d often sneak out a little something extra hidden in my tracksuit, a yoghurt or something to keep me going in the evenings, but also because I’d had Mum over in Cronmans Väg and my mates.

  In Malmö I usually didn’t need to cook or worry about empty fridges. But now in Diemen I was back at square one. It was ridiculous. I was supposed to be a professional guy. But I didn’t even have a packet of cornflakes at home, and I hardly had any cash, and I sat there in my terraced house on my fancy bed and rang round to pretty much everyone I knew: my mates, Dad, Mum, my sister and my little brother. I even rang Mia, even though we’d broken up. Like, can you come here? I was lonely, restless and hungry, and finally I got hold of Hasse Borg.

  I thought he could cut a deal with Ajax, like, he’d lend me a little money and make sure Ajax reimbursed him later. I knew Mido had done something similar with his previous club. But it didn’t work. “I can’t do that,” Hasse Borg said. “You’ll have to look after yourself.” That made me go spare.

  He’d sold me. Couldn’t he help me in a situation like this?

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “And where’s my ten per cent?”

  I got no answer and got angry – all right, I admit I had only myself to blame. I hadn’t realised it takes a month before you get your wages, and then I’d had a problem with my car. It was my Merc convertible. It had Swedish number plates. I couldn’t drive it in the Netherlands. I’d only just got it, and the whole idea had been to cruise round Amsterdam in it, but now I’d had to sell it and order another Mercedes – an SL 55 – and that hadn’t exactly helped my finances.

  So there I sat in Diemen, skint and hungry, and got an earful from my dad about how I was an idiot who’d bought a car like that when I didn’t have any money, and of course that was true. But it didn’t help. I still didn’t have any cornflakes at home, and I still hated empty fridges.

  That’s when I happened to think of the Brazilian guy from the airport. There were a few of us new players that season. There was me, there was Mido, and then there was him, Maxwell. I’d hung out a bit with both of them, not only because we were all new. I felt most comfortable among the black guys and the South Americans. It was more fun, I thought: more relaxed and not so much jealousy. The Dutch guys wanted nothing more than to get out of there and end up in Italy or England, so they were constantly eyeing each other up – like, who’s got the best prospects – whereas the Africans and the Brazilians were mostly glad to be there. It was like, wow, we get to play for Ajax? I felt more at home with them, and I liked their sense of humour and their attitude. Maxwell was certainly nothing like the other Brazilians I’d meet later. He was no party animal, not a guy who needed to go nuts on a regular basis – not at all, he was really sensitive, close to his family and was constantly phoning home. But he was a nice guy through and through, and if I have anything bad to say about him, it’s that he’s too nice.

  “Maxwell, I’m in a crisis here,” I said over the phone. “I haven’t even got any cornflakes at home. Can I come and stay at your place?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Come right over.”

  Maxwell lived in Ouderkerk, a small town with a population of only seven or eight thousand, and I moved in with him and slept on a mattress on the floor for three weeks until I got my first pay packet, and it wasn’t a bad time. We cooked together and chatted about our training sessions, the other players and our old lives in Brazil and Sweden. Maxwell spoke good English. He’d tell me about his family and his two brothers who he was very close to – I remember that in particular, because one of those brothers died in a car crash not long after. That was terribly sad. I really liked Maxwell.

  I got myself sorted out a bit while I was at his place, and things started to loosen up a little. I got back that feeling that this was something really brilliant, and I got off to a good start in the pre-season. I landed goals against the amateur teams we played, and I did a load of tricks, just like I thought I would. Ajax was known for playing fun, technical football, and the newspapers wrote stuff like, well well well, looks like he’s worth those eighty-five million kronor, and, sure, I noticed that Co Adriaanse, the manager, was tough on me. But I thought that was just his style. I’d heard so much about him.

  After every match he’d give us marks out of ten, and one time when I’d scored a bunch of goals he said, “You made five goals, but you made two bad passes as well. That’s a five.” I was like, okay, I get it, the standards here are tough. But I kept at it, and in fact, I didn’t think anything could stop me now. For one thing, I remember meeting a guy who had no idea who I was.

  “So, are you any good?” he asked.

  “I’m not even gonna touch that one!”

  “Do the opposing side’s fans boo and jeer at you?”

  “Hell yeah, they do.”

  “Okay. You’re pretty wicked then,” he replied, and I’ve never forgotten that. Anybody
who’s any good is on the receiving end of boos and trash talk. That’s how it works.

  The end of July saw the launch of the Amsterdam Tournament. The Amsterdam Tournament is a classic top-level pre-season tournament in the Netherlands, and that year, Milan, Valencia and Liverpool would be taking part, which of course was fantastic.

  This was my chance to introduce myself to Europe, and I immediately noticed, good grief, this was nothing like the Allsvenskan League. In Malmö I used to have all the time in the world with the ball. Now they were on me straight away. Everything just went so much faster.

  We were up against Milan in the first match. Milan was going through a rough patch at the time, but the club had dominated European football in the ’90s, and I tried hard not to care about the fact that they had defenders like Maldini. I really put some effort into it and got a few free kicks and some applause, and I made some nice moves. But it was tough and we lost 1–0.

  In the second match we played Liverpool. Liverpool had won the cup treble that year, and they had possibly the strongest defensive partnership in the Premier League with Sami Hyypiä, a Finn, and Stéphane Henchoz from Switzerland. Henchoz hadn’t just been on top of his game that year. He had done something that was the talk of the football world. In the FA Cup final, he’d blocked a shot on the goal line with his hand, and that nasty bit of work that the referee never saw had helped Liverpool to win.

  Both he and Hyypiä were on me like leeches. A little way into the match, I fought my way to the ball down by the corner flag and went into the penalty area, and there stood Henchoz. He was blocking me on the goal side, and of course I had several choices. I was in a tight spot, but I could make a cross or play it back or try to go in towards the goal.

  I tried doing a feint with one foot, a cool thing Ronaldo and Romário did a lot, which was one of the moves I’d watched on the computer when I was a junior and had practised for hours and hours until I could do them in my sleep and didn’t even need to think in order to pull them out of the bag. It just came naturally. This one was called the Snake, because if you do it well it’s like a snake slithering alongside your feet. But it’s not all that easy to do. You need to have your outer side behind the ball and quickly nudge it to the right and then suddenly angle it with the tip of your boot to the left, and get past, like, boom, boom, quick as a flash, having total control with the ball glued to your foot, like an ice hockey player cradling the puck.

  I’d used that move many times at Malmö and in the Superettan League, but never against a world-class defender like Henchoz. It was just, like, I’d already felt it against Milan, the whole atmosphere got me going. It was more fun to dribble towards a guy like him, and now things got even more intense. Swish, swish, it went, and Stéphane Henchoz flew towards the right. He didn’t keep up at all and I whizzed past, and the entire Milan squad sitting along the sideline stood up and screamed. The entire Amsterdam Arena screamed.

  This was definitely showtime, and afterwards when I was surrounded by journalists, I came out with that line, and I promise you, I never plan what I’m going to say. It just happens, and it happened a lot in those days before I got more cautious around the media. “First I went left,” I said, “and he did too. Then I went right, and he did too. Then I headed left, and he went out to buy a hot dog,” and that got repeated all over the place, it became a famous quote. Somebody even made a commercial with it, and people were saying that Milan were interested in me. I was called the new van Basten and all sorts of stuff, and I felt like, wow, I’m awesome. I’m the Brazilian from Rosengård, and truly, that should have been the start of a brilliant season.

  Still, there were tough times ahead, and in hindsight the warning signs had been there from the start – partly down to me, I didn’t have my shit together. I went home too often and started losing weight and looking spindly, but it was also the coach, Co Adriaanse. He criticised me publicly, not so seriously at first. It got worse later on, after he got the sack. Then he said I was wrong in the head. Now, early on, it was just the usual stuff, that I played too much for myself, and I started to realise that even something like my moves against Henchoz wasn’t necessarily appreciated at Ajax unless it led up to something concrete.

  Instead it could be seen as an attempt to stand out and show off to the spectators rather than playing for the team. At Ajax they played with three men up front instead of two, like I was used to. I was in the centre. Not flitting out towards the edges and doing loads of individual stuff. I was supposed to be more of a target player, one who got up in there and took passes and, above all, scored goals. To be honest, I started to wonder if that stuff about Dutch football being fun and technical was true any more. It was as if they’d decided to become more like the rest of Europe, but it wasn’t easy to interpret the signals.

  There was a lot that was new, and I didn’t understand the language or the culture, and the coach didn’t talk to me. He didn’t talk to anybody. He was completely stony-faced. It felt wrong just to, like, look him in the eye, and I lost my flow. I stopped scoring goals, and then my excellent pre-season didn’t really benefit me any more – more the opposite, in fact. All the headlines and comparisons with van Basten were just turned against me, and I started to be seen as a disappointment, a bad purchase. I was replaced in the front line by Nikos Machlas, a Greek who I’d hung out with quite a lot, and in those situations when I get dropped and lose my form, my head starts buzzing, like: what am I doing wrong? How am I going to break out of this?

  That’s the kind of person I am.

  I’m really not one to go round all satisfied, like, wow, I’m Zlatan! Not at all: it’s like there’s a film constantly playing in my head and I ask myself over and over, should I have done this or that differently? I watch other people: what can I learn from them? What am I missing? I go over my mistakes all the time – along with the good stuff. What can I improve? I always, always take something with me from matches and training sessions, and of course that’s tough sometimes. I’m never really satisfied, not even when I have reason to be, but it helps me improve. It’s just that at Ajax I got bogged down in those thoughts, and I didn’t have anybody to talk to, not really.

  I talked to the walls at home. I thought people were idiots, and of course I’d phone home and have a moan. There was a cloud hanging over me. Still, I really shouldn’t put the blame on anybody else. Everything just felt sluggish, and I wasn’t doing well at all. It was like life in the Netherlands just didn’t agree with me, and I went up to Beenhakker and asked him, “What’s the coach saying about me? Is he happy, or what’s going on?” And Beenhakker, he’s a different sort of bloke to Co Adriaanse, he doesn’t just want to have obedient footsoldiers.

  “It’s all right. It’s going fine. We’re being patient with you,” he replied.

  But I was homesick, and I didn’t feel appreciated, not by the coach, not by the press, and certainly not by the fans. Those Ajax supporters are not to be treated lightly. They’re used to winning – they’re like, what the hell, you only won 3–0?

  When we only managed a draw against Roda they threw rocks, sections of pipe and glass bottles at us, and I had to stay in the arena and seek shelter. There was a constant stream of shit, and instead of all that ‘Zlatan, Zlatan’ I’d heard early on, even at Ajax, I was now getting boos and jeers, and not from the opposing fans. That would have been completely normal, but no, this was from our own fans, and it was tough. It was like: what the hell is this?

  But still, you just have to lump it in this sport, and in a way I could understand them. I was the club’s most expensive acquisition. I really shouldn’t be a reserve. I was supposed to be the new van Basten and score one goal after another, and I made every effort I could. I made too much of an effort, to be honest.

  A football season is long, and you can’t put everything on show in a single match. But that’s what I tried to do. As soon as I arrived I wanted to do my whole repertoire all at
once, and that’s why I got stuck, I think. I wanted too much, and that’s why it wasn’t enough, and I guess I hadn’t learnt to handle the pressure yet, in spite of everything. Those eighty-five million kronor were starting to weigh me down like a damn rucksack, and I spent a lot of time sitting around in my terraced house in Diemen.

  I have no idea what the press thought of me in those days. I’m sure many of them imagined me and Mido were out on the town, partying. In fact, I stayed home and played video games, day and night, and if we had a Monday off, I’d fly home on Sunday evening and come back on the six a.m. flight Tuesday morning and head straight to the training session. There were no night clubs, none of that stuff, but even so, I wasn’t being professional.

  I was totally irresponsible, to be honest – I didn’t sleep or eat properly and got up to all sorts of stupid stuff in Malmö. I went round with airbombs and stuff – illegal fireworks that we’d chuck into people’s gardens. We did all kinds of crazy stuff to get our adrenaline going. There’d be smoke and clumps of grass and crap flying all over the place. There was loads of racing round in cars, because that’s how I function. If nothing’s going on with football, I’ve got to get my kicks somewhere else. I need action, I need speed, and I wasn’t looking after myself.

  I continued shedding weight, and as a centre forward at Ajax I was supposed to be sturdy and able to drive myself forwards. But I was down to 75 kilograms or even less. I got really thin, and I was probably worn out. I hadn’t had a holiday. I’d done two pre-seasons in the space of six months, and as for food, well, what do you think? I ate junk. I could still only, like, make toast and boil pasta, and that whole flood of favourable newspaper coverage had dried up. There was no ‘Another triumph for Zlatan’. It was ‘Zlatan booed off’, ‘He’s out of balance’. He’s this, that and the other, and people were talking about my elbows.