I said that the stars in Italy don’t jump just because the coach says so. That doesn’t apply with Capello. Every single player toes the line when he shows up. People behave around Capello, and I know of a journalist who asked him about it:
“How do you get that sort of respect from everyone?”
“You don’t get respect. You take it,” Capello replied, and that’s something that’s stuck with me.
When Capello gets angry, hardly anyone dares to look him in the eye, and if he gives you an opportunity and you don’t take it, you might as well be selling hot dogs outside the stadium, basically. You don’t go to Capello with your problems. Capello isn’t your mate. He doesn’t chat with the players, not like that. He’s the sergente di ferro, the iron sergeant, and it’s not a good sign when he calls for you. Then again, you never know. He breaks people down and builds them up. I remember one session where we’d just started on some positional training. Capello gave a blast on his whistle and yelled:
“Get inside. Off the pitch,” and nobody knew what was going on.
“What have we done? What’s this about?”
“You’ve been slacking off. You’ve been shit!”
There was no more training that day, and it was confusing, but of course, he had something in mind. He wanted us to come back the next day all fired up like warriors, and I liked that style, because like I said, I didn’t grow up with lots of cuddles. I like blokes with power and attitude, and Capello believed in me.
“You have nothing to prove, I know who you are and what you can do,” he said on one of my first days there, and that made me feel secure.
I could relax a little. The pressure had been terrible. A lot of newspapers had questioned the transfer, and they wrote that I didn’t score enough goals. A lot of them thought I’d just be sitting on the bench: how can Zlatan make it in a team like that?
“Is Zlatan ready for Italy?” they wrote.
“Is Italy ready for Zlatan?” Mino countered, and that was exactly right.
You had to respond with cocky retorts like that. You had to be tough back to them, and sometimes I wonder whether I would’ve made it without Mino. I don’t think so. If I’d landed at Juventus the way I arrived at Ajax, the press would have eaten me alive. In Italy they’re football-mad, and where Swedes write about a match the day before and the day after, they keep it up all week long in Italy. It just keeps going, and you’re being judged constantly. They look you up and down, and until you get used to it, it’s tough.
But now I had Mino. He was my protective wall, and I was on the phone to him constantly. I mean, Ajax, what was that? A nursery school in comparison! If I was going to score a goal in a training session I didn’t just have to get past Cannavaro and Thuram, there was Buffon in goal as well, and nobody treated me with kid gloves just because I was new – quite the opposite.
Capello had an assistant called Italo Galbiati. Galbiati is an older fellow – I called him the Oldie. He was a good guy. He and Capello are a little like good cop, bad cop. Capello says the harsh, tough stuff, while Galbiati takes care of the rest, and after the very first training session Capello sent him over to me:
“Italo, let him have it!”
All the others in the team had gone in to shower, and I was completely exhausted. I would have gladly called it a day as well. But a goalie from the youth team came over from the sideline, and I twigged what was going on. Italo was going to feed me balls – bam, bam. They came at me from all angles. There were crosses, passes, he chucked the ball, he gave me wall passes, and I shot at goal, one shot after another, and I was never allowed to leave the box – the penalty area. That was my area, he said. That’s where I was supposed to be and shoot, shoot, and there was no chance of taking a break or taking it easy. The pace was relentless.
“Go after them, harder, more determined, don’t hesitate,” Italo yelled, and the whole thing became a routine, a habit.
Sometimes Del Piero and Trézéguet came down as well, but most of the time it was just me. It was me and Italo, and there would be 50, 60, 100 shots at goal. Now and then Capello would turn up, and he’s just the way he is.
“I’m gonna knock Ajax out of your body,” he said.
“Okay, sure.”
“I don’t need that Dutch style. One, two, one, two, play the wall, play nice and technical. Dribble through the whole team. I can get by without that. I need goals. You understand? I need to get that Italian mindset into you. You’ve got to get that killer instinct.”
That was a process that had already started in me. I’d had my discussions with van Basten, and with Mino, but I still didn’t see myself as a real goal-getter, even though my position was out there in front. I felt more like the guy who had to know everything, and there were still a lot of feints and tricks from Mum’s yard in my head. But under Capello, I was transformed. His toughness was infectious, and I became less of an artiste and more of a bruiser who wanted to win at any price.
Not that I hadn’t wanted to win before. I was born with a winner’s mindset. But even so, don’t forget – football had been my way to get noticed! It was with all my moves on the pitch that I’d become something more than just another kid from Rosengård. It was all the ‘wow’s and ‘check that out!’s that got me going. I grew with the applause I got for my moves, and for a long time I’d probably have called you an idiot if you thought an ugly goal was worth just as much as a nice one!
But now I was starting to realise that nobody’s going to thank you for your artistry and your backheels if your team lose. Nobody even cares if you’ve scored a dream goal if you don’t win, and gradually I got to be tougher and even more of a warrior on the pitch. Of course I didn’t stop that ‘listen, don’t listen’ business either. No matter how strong and tough Capello was, I held onto my own stuff. I remember my Italian lessons. It wasn’t always easy with the language. On the pitch it was no problem. Football has its own language. But outside I was completely lost sometimes, and the club sent a tutor for me. I was supposed to meet with her twice a week and learn grammar. Grammar? Was I back at school here? I didn’t need that. I told her, “Keep the money and don’t say anything to anybody – not your boss, nobody. Stay at home. Just pretend you’ve been here, and really, don’t take it personally,” and sure enough, she did as I said.
She took off and pretended. It was like, thanks, see ya, but don’t think that means I ignored the Italian.
I really did want to learn, and I picked it up in other ways, in the changing room and at the hotel, and I found it easy to grasp. I learned fast, and I was dumb and cocky enough to yak away even when my grammar was wrong. Even in front of journalists, I’d start off in Italian before switching to English, and I think they appreciated that. Like, here’s a guy who might not be able to do it, but he’s trying, and that’s the way I did it with most things – I listened. I didn’t listen.
But still, I was soon transformed both in my head and my body. I remember my first match with Juventus. It was the 12th of September and we were playing against Brescia, and I started on the bench. The Agnelli family who own the team were up in the VIP section, and they were obviously checking me out, like, is he worth the money? After half-time I came on for Nedvěd, who’s one of Mino’s guys as well and who’d been honoured as the European Player of the Year the previous year. He’s probably the biggest training addict I’ve ever met. Nedvěd would go cycling on his own for an hour before our training sessions. Afterwards he’d go running for another hour. He wasn’t an easy guy to replace, and sure, it’s no disaster if things go badly in your first match. But it doesn’t help either, and I remember I was running along the left sideline and got two defenders on me. The situation felt deadlocked. But I made a burst, broke through and heard the supporters shouting from the stands: “Ibrahimović, Ibrahimović!” That was awesome, and it wouldn’t be the last time.
People started calling me ‘Ibra
’ then – it was Moggi who thought of it – and even ‘Flamingo’ for a while. I was still really skinny. I was six foot five but weighed only 84 kilograms, or 13 stone and 3 pounds, and Capello didn’t think that was enough.
“Have you ever done any weight training?” he asked.
“Never,” I said.
I’d never even picked up a barbell, and he regarded that as a minor scandal. He got the physio to drive me hard in the gym, and for the first time in my life I started to care about what I was stuffing into my face – all right, maybe there was still too much pasta, and that would become apparent later on. But everything was more thorough at Juventus, and I put on weight and became a heavier, more powerful player. At Ajax the guys were sort of left to fend for themselves. Strange, really, with all those young talents! In Italy we ate both before and after our training sessions, and before our matches we stayed at a hotel and had three meals a day together. So it was no wonder I got bigger.
I got up to 98 kilograms at my heaviest, and that felt like too much. I got a little clumsy, and had to ease up on the weight training and do more running instead. But overall I changed into a tougher, faster and better player, and I learned to be absolutely ruthless against the big stars. It’s not worth it to step out of the way. Capello made me understand that. You’ve got to stand your ground. You can’t let the stars hem you in – the opposite, in fact. They’ve got to get you going, and I moved my positions forward. I grew. I got respect, or rather, I took it.
Step by step I became who I am today, the one who comes out of a loss so seething with rage that nobody dares come near, and sure, that can seem negative. I frighten a lot of younger players. I yell and make noise. I have outbursts of rage.
But I’ve retained that attitude since Juventus, and just like Capello, I stopped caring about who people were. They could be called Zambrotta or Nedvěd, but if they didn’t give their all at a training session, they’d hear about it. Capello didn’t just knock Ajax out of me. He made me into a guy who comes to a club and expects to win the league, no matter what, and that’s helped me a lot, no doubt about it. It transformed me as a football player.
But it didn’t make me any calmer. We had a defender in the team, a French guy called Jonathan Zebina. He’d played for Roma with Capello and had won the Scudetto with them in 2001. Now he was with us. I don’t think he was doing very well there. He had personal problems, and he played aggressively at training sessions. One day he tackled me really violently. I went up to him, right in his face:
“If you wanna play dirty, say so beforehand, and I’ll play dirty too!”
Then he headbutted me – bang, just like that – and things happened fast after that. I didn’t have time to think. It was sheer reflex. I hit out at him, and it happened right away. He hadn’t even finished headbutting me. But I must have hit him hard. He dropped down onto the grass, and I have no idea what I expected to happen. Maybe a furious Capello running up, shouting. But Capello just stood there a little way away, totally ice-cold, as if the thing had nothing to do with him. Of course everybody was talking, like, what happened? What was that about? The whole place was buzzing, and I remember Cannavaro – Cannavaro and I always helped each other out.
“Ibra,” he said, “what have you done?” For a moment I thought he was upset.
But then he winked, like, that damned Zebina deserved it. Cannavaro didn’t like the guy either, not the way he’d been behaving recently, but Lilian Thuram, a Frenchman, took a completely different attitude.
“Ibra,” he began. “You’re young and stupid. You don’t do stuff like that. You’re crazy.” But he didn’t have a chance to continue. A roar echoed over the pitch, and there was only one person who could shout like that.
“Thuuuraaam,” Capello screamed. “Shut your mouth and get out of there,” and of course, Thuram made himself scarce, he was like a little kid, and I left as well. I had to cool down.
Two hours later I saw a guy in the massage room who was pressing some ice against his face. It was Zebina. I must have hit him hard. He was still in pain. He would have a black eye for a long time, and Moggi slapped a fine on both of us. But Capello never did a thing. He didn’t even summon us to a meeting. He said only one thing:
“That was good for the team!”
That was it. That’s what he was like. He was tough. He wanted adrenaline. You could get into fights, and be as tightly wound as an animal. But there was one thing you were definitely not allowed to do: question his authority or act recklessly. Then he’d go spare. I remember when we were playing in a Champions League quarter-final against Liverpool. We lost 2–0, and before the match Capello had explained our tactics and determined who would be marking who in Liverpool’s corners. But Lilian Thuram decided he was going to mark another guy. He went for a different Liverpool player, and at that point they scored a goal. In the changing room afterwards, Capello did his usual round, back and forth, while the rest of us sat there on the benches in a circle around him, wondering what was going to happen.
“Who told you to mark a different player?” he asked Thuram.
“Nobody, I thought it was better that way,” Thuram replied.
Capello breathed in and out a couple of times.
“Who told you to mark a different player?” he repeated.
“I thought it was better that way.”
It was the same explanation again, and Capello asked the question a third time and got the same answer once again. Then the outburst came – it had been lying in wait inside him, like a bomb.
“Did I tell you to mark a different player, huh? Is it me who makes the decisions here or somebody else? It’s me, you hear? It’s me who tells you what to do. You got that?”
Then he gave the massage table a kick and it spun towards us with a hell of a speed, and in situations like that nobody dares to look up. Everybody just sat there around him, staring at the floor – Trézéguet, Cannavaro, Buffon, each and every one. Nobody moved a muscle, and nobody would do something like what Thuram had done ever again. Nobody wanted to meet those same furious eyes. There was a lot of that. It was tough. They were no mean expectations. But I continued to play well.
Capello had taken out Alessandro Del Piero to make room for me, and nobody had benched Del Piero in ten years. Putting Del Piero on the bench was like benching the club icon, and it outraged the fans. They booed Capello and screamed at Del Piero – “Il pinturicchio, il fenomeno vero”.
Alessandro Del Piero had won the league seven times with Juventus and had been a key player every year. He’d brought home the Champions League trophy with the club, and he was loved by the family that owned the team. He was the big star. No, no ordinary coach would put Del Piero on the bench. But Capello was no ordinary coach. He never cared about history or status. He just went out with his team, and I was grateful for that. But it also put pressure on me. I had to play especially well when Del Piero was on the bench, and in fact, I was hearing less and less of his name from the stands. I heard ‘Ibra, Ibra’, and in December the fans voted me Player of the Month, and that was big.
I was about to make a serious breakthrough in Italy, and yet, and of course I knew this, it takes so little in football. One minute you’re a hero, the next you’re shit. The special training with Galbiati had produced results, no doubt about that. By being fed balls in front of the goal I’d become more effective and tougher in the box. I’d absorbed a whole range of new situations into my bloodstream, and I didn’t need to think so much – it just happened: bam, bam.
But don’t forget: being dangerous in front of the goal is a feeling, an instinct. You either have it or you don’t. You can conquer it, sure, but you can just as well lose it again when your confidence disappears, and I’d never seen myself as just a goal-scorer. I was the player who wanted to make a difference at every level. I was the one who wanted to be able to do everything, and sometime in January I lost my flow.
He still had Del Piero on the bench, and I assumed he was shouting to motivate me, at least I hoped so. Surely Capello wanted the players to believe in themselves, but they couldn’t be too sure and cocky either. He hates overconfidence, so that’s why he does that. He builds players up and knocks them down, and I had no idea where I stood now.
“Ibra, come in here!”
My fear at being summoned will never leave me, and I started to wonder: have I nicked a bike again? Headbutted the wrong guy? On the way to the changing room where he stood waiting, I tried to come up with some smart excuses. But it’s hard when you don’t know what it’s about. You can only hope for the best, and when I went in, Capello was wearing only a towel.
He’d taken a shower. His glasses had fogged up, and the changing room was in just as much of a state as usual. Luciano Moggi loved nice things. But the changing rooms were supposed to be grotty. That was part of his philosophy. “It’s more important to win than to have a nice-looking place,” he often said, and okay, I suppose I can go along with that. But if there were four of us showering at the same time, the water would rise up past our ankles, and everybody knew it was no use complaining. Moggi would just see it as a confirmation of his theory.
“You see, you see, it doesn’t have to be pretty in order to win,” so that’s why the place looked the way it did, and Capello came up to me half-naked in that grotty room, and I wondered again: what is this? What have I done to you? There’s something about Capello, especially when you’re alone with him, that makes you feel small. He grows in stature. You shrink.
I Am Zlatan Page 18
