I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  There was a hell of a lot of talk about my elbows.

  It started in a match against Groningen, where I elbowed a defender in the back of the neck. The referee didn’t see anything, but the defender dropped to the ground and was stretchered off, and people claimed he got a concussion. When the bloke came back in after a while he was still groggy, but worst of all, the football association took it upon themselves to study the TV footage and decided to give me a five-match suspension.

  That was definitely not what I needed. It was shit, and things didn’t exactly get off to a good start when I returned after my suspension. I elbowed another guy in the back of the neck, and of course, he was stretchered off as well. It was like I’d got a stupid new habit, and even though I avoided a suspension that time I didn’t get to play much afterwards, and it was hard, and the fans weren’t exactly delighted, and so I phoned Hasse Borg. It was idiotic, but that’s the sort of thing you do when you’re in a desperate situation.

  “Shit, Hasse, can’t you buy me back?”

  “Buy you back? Are you serious?”

  “Get me out of here. I can’t take it.”

  “Come on, Zlatan, there’s no money for that, you must realise that. You’ve got to be patient.”

  But I was tired of being patient, I wanted to play more, and I was so homesick it was unreal. I felt totally lost, and I started phoning Mia again, not that I knew whether it was her or something else I was missing. I was lonely and I wanted my old life back. But what did I get? I got another kick in the teeth.

  It started when I discovered that I was being paid less than everybody else in the team. I’d suspected as much for a while, and finally it was clear. I was the most expensive transfer, but I got paid the least. I’d been purchased to be the new van Basten. And still I earned peanuts, and I mean, what was that down to? It wasn’t hard to figure out.

  Remember what Hasse Borg said: “Agents are crooks”, and all that, and like a bolt from the blue I understood: he’d screwed me over. He’d pretended to be on my side, but in reality he was working only for Malmö FF. The more I thought about it, the more furious I got. Right from the beginning Hasse Borg had made sure nobody came between us, nobody who could represent my interests. That’s why I’d had to stand there like a fool at the St Jörgen Hotel in my tracksuit and let the guys in suits with their finance diplomas shaft me, and it felt like a punch in the guts. Let’s get this straight: money has never been the main thing for me, but to be tricked and exploited, to be seen as some stupid falafel boy you can cheat and make money out of, that made me furious, and I wasted no time. I rang Hasse Borg.

  “What the hell is this? I’ve got the worst contract in the entire club.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He was playing dumb.

  “And where’s my ten per cent?”

  “We invested it in an insurance policy in England.”

  In an insurance policy? What the hell was that? It meant nothing to me, and I said, okay, it could be anything, an insurance policy, a carrier bag full of banknotes, a bucket in the wilderness, didn’t make a difference:

  “I want my money now.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  They were tied up, they were invested in something I didn’t have a clue about, and I decided to get to the bottom of it. I got myself an agent, because this much I’d realised: agents aren’t crooks. Without an agent, you haven’t got a chance. Without help, you’ll just stand there and get screwed by the blokes in suits again. Through a friend I got hold of a guy called Anders Carlsson who worked at IMG in Stockholm.

  He was all right, wasn’t exactly going to set the world on fire. He was the sort of guy who’d never spit out his chewing gum in the street or cross over the line, but who still wants to seem a little tough, though it doesn’t really suit him. But still, Anders helped me out a lot in the beginning. He got hold of the insurance documents, and that’s when I got my next shock. It didn’t say ten per cent of the transfer fee. It said eight per cent, so I asked: “What’s this?”

  I found out they’d paid something called advance tax on my wages, and I thought: what kind of shit is that? Advance taxes on somebody’s wages? I’d never heard of it, and straight away I said: this isn’t right. This is a new trick. And what do you think happened? Anders Carlsson got on the case, and that was all it took for me to get those two per cent back. Suddenly there was no more advance tax on my wages, and then it was all over, I was finished with Hasse Borg. It was a lesson I’ll never forget. It scarred me, to tell the truth, and don’t think for a second that I’m not fully on top of everything when it comes to my money and contracts these days.

  When Mino rang me up recently he asked: “What’d you get from Bonniers for your book?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Bullshit! You know exactly how much,” and of course he was right.

  I’m in complete control. I refuse to be cheated and taken advantage of again, and I always try to be one step ahead in negotiations. What are they thinking? What do they want, and what are their secret tactics? And then I remember. Things get etched in, and sure, Helena often says I shouldn’t dwell on things so much, like, “I’m tired of hating Hasse Borg.”

  But no, I won’t forgive him. No chance. You don’t do something like that to a young guy from a council estate who doesn’t know anything about that stuff. You don’t pretend to be like a second dad to him while you’re looking for every possible loophole to screw him over. I’d been the guy in the youth squad they didn’t believe in, I was the one they least expected to get called up into the first team. But then… when I was sold for big money, their attitudes changed. They wanted to milk every drop out of me. One minute I barely existed, and the next I was there to be exploited. I won’t forget that, and I often wonder: would Hasse Borg have done the same thing if I’d been a nice lad with a lawyer for a father?

  I don’t think so, and even back then at Ajax I made my feelings known. I basically said, he’d better watch out. But I guess he didn’t really get it, and later in his book he wrote that he was my mentor, he was the bloke who’d taken care of me. The thing is, I think he got the idea later on. We bumped into each other in a lift a few years ago. This was in Hungary.

  I was there with the Swedish national side. I got into the lift, and we stopped on the fourth floor, and then out of nowhere he got in. He was in town on some junket. He was busy tying his tie and then he caught sight of me. Hasse is always going, “Alright there, how’s it going?” – that sort of thing, and he said something along those lines and put out his hand.

  I didn’t move a muscle, nothing at all. All he got was an ice-cold, black stare, and he got really nervous, that’s for sure. He just stood there, psyched out, and I didn’t say a word. I stared him down, and down in the lobby I strode out and left him behind. That was our only encounter since all that business, so no, I won’t forget. Hasse Borg is someone with two sides to him, and I was really hurting from all that at Ajax. I’d been cheated and insulted, I was being paid less than everybody else, and the club’s own fans were booing me. There was one thing after another. There were my elbows. There was crap everywhere, the lists of my mistakes, the thing with the police in Industrigatan for the 98th time, and people saying I was out of balance. People missed the old Zlatan. There was talk about me day in, day out, and my thoughts kept going round and round in my head.

  I was looking for solutions every hour, every minute, because I wasn’t going to give up, no way. I didn’t have it easy growing up, people forget that. I’m no talent who just waltzed out into Europe. I’ve fought against the odds. I’ve had parents and managers against me right from the start, and a lot of what I’ve learnt I’ve picked up in spite of what others have said. Zlatan just dribbles, they’ve complained. He’s this, he’s that, he’s wrong. But I carried on, I listened, I didn’t listen, and now at Ajax I was really tryin
g to figure out the culture and learn how they thought and played.

  I thought about what I needed to improve. I trained hard and tried to learn from the others. But at the same time, I didn’t give up my style. Nobody was going to get rid of what made my game my own, not that I was pig-headed or a troublemaker, I just kept fighting, and when I’m working on the pitch, I can seem aggressive. That’s just a part of my character. I demand as much from others as I demand from myself. But clearly, Co Adriaanse was annoyed with me. I was difficult, he said later, I was full of myself: I went my own way, and blah blah blah, and of course, he’s free to come out with whatever he wants to say, I’m not going to have a go at him. I accept the situation. The manager is the boss. I can only say that I really made an effort to fit in.

  But things didn’t improve. Nothing happened, other than we heard Co Adriaanse was going to get the sack, and that was good news, after all. We’d been thrashed by Henrik Larsson and Celtic in the Champions League qualifier and by FC Copenhagen in the UEFA Cup, but I don’t think it was the scores that brought him down. We were doing well in the league.

  He had to go because he couldn’t communicate with us players. None of us had any contact with him. We were living in a vacuum. It’s true that I like tough guys, and Co Adriaanse was really hard. But he crossed the line, there was nothing funny about his dictatorial style – no sense of humour, nothing – and of course we were all curious: who was going to replace him?

  There was talk of Rijkaard for a while, and that did sound good, not because a good player necessarily makes a good coach, but still, Rijkaard had been legendary with van Basten and Gullit in Milan. But it ended up being Ronald Koeman. I knew him as well, he’d been a brilliant free kicker at Barcelona. He brought Ruud Krol with him who’s another great player, and straight away I noticed they understood me better, and I started to hope that things would take a turn for the better.

  They got worse. I was benched five matches in a row, and Koeman sent me home from one training session. “You’re not into it,” he yelled. “You’re not giving it your all. You can go home.” Sure, I got out of there, my mind was on other things. It was no big thing, but of course, there were big headlines. Even Lars Lagerbäck was in the papers, saying he was worried about me, and there was talk that I might lose my place in the national squad, and that was no fun – not at all.

  The World Cup was coming up in Japan that summer, and that was something I’d been looking forward to for a long time. I was also worried that my shirt, number 9 at Ajax, would be taken away from me, not that I really cared. I don’t give a damn what it says on my back. But it would be a sign that they didn’t believe in me any more. At Ajax people talked about numbers constantly.

  Number 10 should be like this. Number 11 like that, and there was none better than 9, van Basten’s old number. It was a special honour to wear that one, and if you didn’t make the grade you lost it. That was how it worked, and now people kept saying that I wasn’t bringing enough to the team, and unfortunately, there was some truth in that.

  I’d only scored five goals in the league. That made six in total, and for the most part I’d sat on the bench and got more and more boos from our own fans. While I warmed up and got ready to go in, they’d roar, ‘Nikos, Nikos, Machlas, Machlas.’ It didn’t matter how bad he was, they didn’t want me in there. They wanted to keep him, and I thought, shit, I haven’t even started playing, but they’re already against me. If I made a bad pass there’d be a massive racket up there, boos or the same crap again: ‘Nikos, Nikos, Machlas, Machlas.’ It wasn’t bad enough that I wasn’t playing well. I had that stuff to tackle as well, and sure, it looked as if we were going to win the league title.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to be happy about it. I hadn’t been a serious part of it, and I couldn’t close my eyes to that any longer. There were too many of us in my position in the club. Somebody would have to leave and it looked like it was going to be me, I could feel it in my gut, and people were saying that I was just the number three centre forward, after Machlas and Mido. Even Leo Beenhakker, my friend, was quoted in the Dutch media saying:

  “Zlatan is often the player who launches our attack. But he doesn’t follow through at the goal,” and then he added, “If we sell him, we’ll certainly make sure it’s to a good club.”

  It was hanging in the air, and there were more and more of those statements. Koeman himself said: “In purely qualitative terms, Zlatan is our best striker, but it takes other qualities as well to succeed in the number 9 shirt at Ajax. I doubt whether he can achieve them,” and then came the wartime headlines: ‘Decision tonight’, said one. ‘Zlatan on the transfer list!’ It was impossible to tell what was true and what wasn’t, but the fact was that I’d been purchased for a huge sum of money and turned out to be a disappointment, and believe me, I felt it. It was as if I was about to be revealed as the over-hyped diva after all.

  I hadn’t lived up to expectations. This was my first major setback. But I refused to give up. I’d show them. That thought kept going round in my head, day and night, and to be honest, I had no other choice, whether I was going to be sold or not. I had to show I was good, whatever happened. The only thing was, how was I supposed to do that when I didn’t get to play? It was a catch-22. It was hopeless, and I sat there on the bench, fuming: Are they stupid, or what? It was like being back in Malmö FF’s youth squad.

  That spring, we qualified for the final in the Holland Cup. We were going to face Utrecht at De Kuip in Rotterdam, the same stadium where the UEFA Cup final had been played two years earlier, and the crowd was electric. It was the 12th of May 2002. There were flares and stuff and brawls in the stands. Ajax are Utrecht’s arch-rivals. No other team is more important to beat, and the fans were burning with hatred and hungry for revenge after our league victory. You could almost smell it, and for us it was a chance to take home the double and show that we really were back after a few lean years. But obviously, I’d hardly get a chance to be a part of it.

  I spent the entire first half and a good chunk of the second sitting on the bench and saw Utrecht make 2–1 on penalties and believe me, we felt it. The wind went out of our sails completely, the Utrecht supporters were going mad, and not far away from me, Koeman sat moping in his suit and his red tie. He seemed to have completely given up. Put me in there, I thought, and in the 78th minute I actually got to play. Something had to happen and of course, I was impatient. I was up for it and wanted everything all at once as usual that year, and we kept up the pressure, but the minutes ticked away and things seemed hopeless. We didn’t get it in, and I remember I made one shot that I really thought would go in, but it hit the crossbar.

  It was no use, and then it was full time and a few minutes of stoppage time, but it was still hopeless. There would be no cup celebration, and the Utrecht fans were cheering in the stands. Their red banners were waving around the entire stadium, and you could hear their songs and chants and you could see their flares, and there were 30, then 20 seconds left. That’s when a long pass came into the penalty area past several Utrecht defenders and reached Wamberto, one of the Brazilians in our team, and he was probably offside, but the linesmen didn’t see it, and Wamberto put his foot on the ball and shot a goal, and it was mental. We were saved in the final seconds of stoppage time, and the Utrecht fans clutched their heads in desperation. But it wasn’t over yet.

  We went into extra time, and in those days many cup matches were decided by a golden goal – like sudden death in ice hockey – and that’s what would happen now. The team that scored a goal would immediately win the match, and just five minutes into extra time a new pass came, this time from the left, and I jumped up and headed it, and got the ball back soon after.

  I took it down on my chest. I was boxed in really tight, but I turned and kicked it with my left foot, not a brilliant shot by any means. The ball bounced on the grass. But my God, it was well placed and went into the goal. I tore off
my shirt and rushed out to the left, completely delirious with joy and as thin as a rake. You could see my ribcage. It had been a tough year. There had been a load of crap in the press and my game had been seized up for long periods. But now I was back. I’d done it. I’d shown them all, and the entire stadium went mad. It was absolutely pulsating with joy and disappointment, and the main thing I remember is Koeman, who ran over to me and shouted into my ear:

  “Thank you very much! Thank you very much!”

  That was a happiness I can’t even describe, and I just ran around there with the whole team and felt everything let loose.

  9

  I WAS A TYPICAL BLOODY YUGO, she thought, with a gold watch and a flash car and I played my music too loud. I was definitely not her type. But I didn’t know any of that.

  I thought I was pretty awesome, and I was sitting there in my Merc SL outside the Forex bureau de change at Malmö Central railway station while Keki, my little brother, was exchanging some money inside. The season was over in the Netherlands, and this might have been either before or after the World Cup in Japan – I don’t remember, but it doesn’t matter – anyway, there I was and this girl burst out of a taxi. She was angry about something.

  Who the hell is that? I wondered.

  I’d never seen her before, and in those days I still felt pretty much at home in Malmö. I’d been going back there whenever I got a chance, and I thought I knew what there was to know. But this girl… where had she been hiding? She wasn’t just pretty. She had a wicked attitude, like, don’t try anything on with me, and she was a bit older, which was exciting. I asked around: Who is she? Who is that girl? I found out through an acquaintance that her name was Helena. Okay, Helena, I thought. Helena. I couldn’t get her out of my head.