“Sit down,” he said, and okay, sure, of course, I sat down. In front of me was an old TV with an even older VHS player, and Capello inserted a videocassette into it.
“You remind me of a player I coached at Milan,” he said.
“I think I know who you mean.”
“Do you?”
“I’ve heard it a lot of times.”
“Excellent. Don’t get stressed out by the comparison. You’re not a new van Basten. You’ve got your own style, and I see you as a better player. But Marco van Basten moved more skilfully in the box. Here’s a film where I’ve collected his goals. Study his movements. Absorb them. Learn from them.”
Then Capello cleared off, and I was left alone in the changing room and started watching, and, well, it really was all van Basten goals, from every angle and direction. The ball just thundered in and Marco van Basten came up again and again, and I sat there for 10, 15 minutes and wondered when I could go.
Did Capello have somebody keeping watch outside the door? It wasn’t out of the question. I decided to watch the whole tape. It ran for 25, 30 minutes, and then I thought, okay. This ought to be enough. I left. I snuck out, and to be honest, I have no idea whether I learned anything. But I got the message. It was the usual: Capello wanted to get me to score goals. I had to get that into my head, into my movements, into my whole system, and I knew it was serious.
We were leading the league, jockeying for the top spot with AC Milan, and in order to win I needed to keep scoring goals. That was the truth, nothing else, and I remember I was really working hard up there in the box. But I was being guarded as well. The opposing defenders were on me like wolves, and word had got round that I had a temper. The players and spectators tried to provoke me all the time with insults and abuse and shit. Gypsy, vagrant, stuff about my mum and my family, they’d shout all kinds of crap, and from time to time I blew up. There were some headbutts, or markings in that direction. But I play best when I’m angry, and things really loosened up. On the 17th of April I scored a hat trick against Lecce, and the fans went crazy and the journalists wrote, “They said he wasn’t scoring enough goals. Now he’s already made fifteen.”
I was the third-highest goal scorer in the Italian league. People were saying I was Juventus’ most important player. There was praise everywhere, it was all, ‘Ibra, Ibra’. But there was something else in the air as well.
There were disasters lurking around the corner.
13
I HAD NO IDEA the police and prosecutors were bugging Moggi’s telephone, and that was probably a good thing. We and AC Milan were battling it out at the top of the league table, and for the first time in my life I was living together with someone. Helena had been pushing herself too hard. She’d been working for Fly Me in Gothenburg during the daytime and in a restaurant in the evenings, while she was also studying and commuting to Malmö.
She’d been working too hard and her health was suffering, and I told her, “Enough now. You’re moving down here with me,” and even though it was a major adjustment, I think she thought it was nice. It was like she finally had time to breathe.
I’d moved out of Inzaghi’s place into an amazing apartment with high ceilings in the same building on the Piazza Castello. It looked a little like a church, and there was a café called Mood on the ground floor where some guys who later became our friends worked. They sometimes served us breakfast, and although we didn’t have kids yet, we had Hoffa the pug, and that chubby little guy was great. We’d buy three pizzas for dinner – one for me, one for Helena and one for Hoffa, and he’d eat it all up except for the crusts, which he’d just dribble on and fling around the apartment – thanks a lot! That dog was our fat baby, and we had a good time. But we were definitely from different worlds.
On one of our holidays with my family we flew business class to Dubai, and Helena and me knew all about how you’re supposed to behave on flights and stuff. But my family are a bit different, and at six in the morning my little bro wanted a whisky, and Mum was sitting in the seat in front of him, and Mum is great of course, but she’s not one for messing around. She doesn’t like it when we drink alcohol, and you can understand that when you think about what she’s been through. So she took off her shoe. That was just her way of dealing with the issue, she took her shoe and whacked Keki right over the head with it. Just bang, boff, and Keki went nuts. He hit back. There was a huge commotion in business class at six o’clock in the morning, and I looked at Helena. She wanted to sink down into the floor.
I usually headed to the training ground around a quarter to ten in Turin, but one day I was running late, and I was rushing around in the apartment and I think we could smell smoke. That’s what Helena says, anyway. I dunno. What I do know is that when I opened the door to leave, there was a fire outside the front door. Somebody had gathered up some roses and set fire to them. We all had gas cookers in the building, and in the stairwell nearby there was a landing with a gas pipe along the wall. Things could have turned out really badly. There could have been an explosion. But we fetched water in buckets and put out the fire, and I just wished I’d opened the door thirty seconds sooner. I would’ve caught that idiot red-handed and massacred him. Starting a fire right outside our door? That’s sick! And with roses, too. Roses!
The police never found out who did it, and in those days the clubs weren’t as careful about security as they are now, so we forgot about it. You can’t go round worrying all the time. There are other things to think about. There was new stuff all the time, and lots had happened. Early on in Turin I’d had a visit from two clowns from Aftonbladet.
That’s when I was living at the Meridien hotel. Aftonbladet wanted to patch up our relationship, they said. I meant money to them, and Mino thought it was time to bury the hatchet. But remember, I don’t forget. Stuff gets etched in my memory. I remember and I get my own back, even if it’s ten years later.
When the guys from the paper arrived, I was up in my hotel room, and I think they’d been chatting with Mino for a while when I came down, and I immediately sensed: this isn’t worth it. A personal ad! A fabricated police report! ‘Shame on you, Zlatan!’ all across the country! I didn’t even say hello. I got even more furious. What were they playing at? So I bossed them around, and I think I scared them out of their wits, to be honest. I even chucked a bottle of water at their heads.
“If you were from my ’hood, you wouldn’t have survived,” I said, and maybe that was harsh.
But I was sick of it and furious, and it’s probably impossible to explain to all of you what kind of pressure I was under. It wasn’t just the media. It was the fans, the spectators, the coaches, the club management, my teammates, the money. I had to perform, and if there weren’t any goals, I had to hear about it from every level, and I needed to vent. I had Mino, Helena, the lads in the team, but there was also other stuff, simpler things, like my cars. They gave me a sense of freedom. I got my Ferrari Enzo around this time. The car was part of my terms in the contract negotiations. There had been me, Mino and Moggi and then Antonio Giraudo, the chief executive, and Roberto Bettega, the club’s international guy, and we were sitting in a room discussing my contract when Mino said, “Zlatan wants a Ferrari Enzo!”
Everybody just looked at each other. We hadn’t expected anything else. Enzo was Ferrari’s latest bad boy: the most awesome car the company had ever manufactured, and only 399 of them were ever made, and we thought we might have asked for too much. But Moggi and Giraudo seemed to view it as a reasonable request. After all, Ferrari is owned by the same corporate group as Juventus. It was like, of course the guy should have an Enzo.
“No problem. We’ll sort one out for you,” they said, and I thought, wow, what a club!
But of course, they didn’t get it. When we had signed, Antonio Giraudo said in passing, “And that car, that’s the old Ferrari, right?”
I was startled. I looked at Mino.
“No,” he said, “the new one, the one they only made 399 of,” and Giraudo gulped.
“I think we have a problem,” he said, and we did.
There were only three cars left, and there was a long waiting list for them with loads of heavyweight names on it. What were we going to do? We phoned the Ferrari boss, Luca di Montezemolo, and explained the situation. It was difficult, he said, virtually impossible. But he finally gave in. I’d get one if I promised never to sell it.
“I’ll keep it until the day I die,” I replied, and honestly, I love that car.
Helena doesn’t like to ride in it. It’s too wild and bumpy for her liking. But I go nuts in it – and not just for the usual reasons. It’s cool, awesome, fast: here I am, the guy who made it in life. The Enzo gives me a feeling that I’ve got to work harder in order to deserve it. It prevents me becoming complacent, and I can look at it and think: If I don’t make the grade, it’ll be taken away from me. That car became another driving force, a trigger.
Other times when I needed a boost I’d get a tattoo done. Tattoos became like a drug for me. I always wanted something new. But they were never impulsive things. They were all thought through. Even so, I was against them in the beginning. Thought they were, like, bad taste. But I got tempted anyway. Alexander Östlund helped me find my way, and the first tattoo I got was my name across my waist in white ink. You can only see it when I have a tan. It was mainly a test.
Then I got more daring. I heard the expression, ‘Only God can judge me’. They could write whatever they wanted in the papers. Scream anything at all from the stands. They still couldn’t get at me. Only God could judge me! I liked that. You have to go your own way, so I got those words tattooed on me. I got a dragon as well, because in Japanese culture the dragon stands for a warrior, and I was a warrior.
I got a carp – the fish that swims against the current – and a Buddha symbol to protect against suffering, and the five elements: water, earth, fire and the rest. I got my family tattooed on my arms: the men on my right because the right side stands for strength: Dad, my brothers and later on my sons, and then the women on my left, closest to the heart: Mum, Sanela, but not my half-sisters who split with the family. It felt obvious then, but later I spent some time thinking about it: who’s family and who’s not? But that was later on.
I was focused on football then. Often it’s clear early in the spring who will become the league champions. There’s some team that stands out. But that year it was a hard fight right to the end. We and AC Milan both had 70 points, and the papers wrote a ton about it of course. The stage was set for a drama. On the 18th of May we were going to meet at San Siro. It felt like the real league final, and most people thought Milan would win. Not just because they had the home advantage. In the season opener against us at Stadio delle Alpi we’d drawn 0–0. But AC Milan had dominated play, and many people considered them to be the best side in Europe then, despite our strong team, and nobody was really surprised when AC Milan went to the Champions League final again. We had the odds stacked against us, they said, and things weren’t exactly looking up after our match against Inter Milan.
It was the 20th of April, just a few days after my hat trick against Lecce, and I was being praised everywhere, and Mino had warned me that Inter Milan would be guarding me really hard. I was a star. Inter Milan had to block me or psych me out.
“If you’re going to survive, you’ve got to give it both barrels. Otherwise you haven’t got a chance,” Mino said, and I responded the way I always do:
“That’s no problem. Tough stuff gets me going.”
But I was definitely nervous. There’s an old hatred between Inter Milan and Juventus, and that year Inter Milan had a really brutal line of defence. Marco Materazzi was one of them. To this date, nobody has been given more red cards in Serie A than him. Materazzi was known for playing dirty and aggressive. A year later, in the summer of 2006, he gained global notoriety when he said something really crude to Zidane during the World Cup final and got headbutted in the chest. Materazzi trash-talked and played rough. Sometimes he was called ‘The Butcher’.
Inter Milan also had Iván Córdoba, a short but athletic Colombian, and also Siniša Mihajlović. Mihajlović was a Serb, so there was a lot written about that, how the match was going to be a mini-Balkan War. That was bullshit. What happened on the pitch had nothing to do with the war. Mihajlović and I later became friends at Inter Milan, and I’ve never cared where people come from. I don’t give a damn about that ethnicity crap, and honestly, how could I do anything else? We’re all mixed together in our family. My dad’s Bosnian, my Mum’s Croatian and my little brother has a father who’s a Serb. No, it wasn’t about that at all.
But Mihajlović was really tough. He was one of the world’s best free kickers, and he trash-talked a lot. He’d called Patrick Vieira ‘nero de merda’, you black shit, in a Champions League match, and that had led to a police investigation and suspected racist abuse. Another time he kicked and spat on Adrian Mutu who’d just started playing for us, and he got an eight-match ban for that. He could go off like a bomb. Not that I want to make a big thing of it, not at all. What happens on the pitch, stays on the pitch. That’s my philosophy, and to be honest, you’d be shocked if you knew what goes on out there, there are punches and insults, it’s a constant fight, but to us players it’s business as usual, and I’m just mentioning this stuff about the Inter Milan defenders to give you an idea that these guys were not to be taken lightly. They could play nasty and hard, and I realised immediately that this is brutal, this is no ordinary match. It’s insults and hate.
There was a load of crap about my family and my honour, and I responded by striking back hard. There’s nothing else you can do in that situation. If you waver, you’ll be crushed. You’ve got to channel your rage to give even more on the pitch, and I played an extremely physical, tough game. It wasn’t going to be easy to face Zlatan, not for a second, and at that time I’d been gaining in strength. I wasn’t the skinny Ajax dribbler any more. I was bigger and faster. I was no easy prey, not in any sense, and afterwards Inter Milan’s coach Roberto Mancini said:
“That phenomenon Ibrahimović, when he’s playing at that level, he’s impossible to mark.”
But God knows they tried, they gave me plenty of tackles, and I was just as tough in return. I was wild. I was ‘Il Gladiatore’, as the Italian papers put it, and just four minutes in Córdoba and I smashed our heads into each other, and were both left lying on the pitch. I got up, groggy. Córdoba was bleeding heavily, stumbled off and needed stitches. He returned with a bandage round his head, and nothing let up. Not at all! Instead, there was something serious brewing, and we cast dark looks at each other. This was war. It was nerves and aggression, and in the 13th minute Mihajlović and I landed together after a collision.
For a moment we were confused. Like, what happened? But then we discovered that we were sitting on the grass next to each other, and the adrenaline rush came, and he made a gesture with his head. I responded by miming a headbutt. I’m sure it looked ridiculous, it was meant as a threat, but I just pushed my head against him. Believe me, if I’d really headbutted him he wouldn’t have got up. It was more of a touch, a way of showing: I’m not giving in to you, you bastard! But Mihajlović put his hand up to his face and dropped to the ground; of course it was all an act. He wanted to get me sent off. But I didn’t even get a warning, not then.
That came a minute later in a tackle with Favalli. It was an ugly match in general, but I was playing well and was involved in almost all our goal attempts, but Inter’s goalkeeper Francesco Toldo was brilliant. He made one save after another, and we conceded one goal. Julio Cruz headed it in, and we tried everything to equalise. It was close, but we didn’t manage it, and there was war and revenge in the air.
Córdoba wanted to get me back, he kicked me in the thigh and got a yellow card. Materazzi was trying to psych me out, and Mihaj
lović continued with his insults and his tackles and shit, and I was working hard. I powered my way through. I fought and had a good shot at goal just before half time.
In the second half I shot from far away and hit the outside of the goalpost, right by the corner, and then I had a free kick, which Toldo saved with an incredible reflex.
But there was no goal, and with just a minute left on the clock Córdoba and I clashed again. We collided, and straight afterwards, like a reflexive movement, I gave him another whack, a punch to the chin or the throat. It was nothing serious, I thought, it was part of our fight on the pitch, and the referee never saw it. But it had consequences. We lost, and that was hard. The way things looked in the league table, this match could cost us the Scudetto.
But the Italian league’s disciplinary committee examined video stills of my punch to Córdoba and decided to issue me with a three-match ban, and that was a minor disaster. I was going to miss the closing fight in the series, including the decisive match against AC Milan on the 18th of May, and I felt I’d been treated unfairly. “I haven’t been judged honestly,” I told the journalists. All that shit I’d taken, and I was the one being punished.
That was hard, and considering the significance I’d had for the team, it was a blow for the entire club, and the management appealed and called in Luigi Chiappero, the star lawyer. Chiappero had defended Juventus against the old doping charges, and now he maintained not only that my hit was part of a play for the ball, or at least in close connection with it. I’d also been subjected to attacks and insults throughout the entire match, he said. He even hired a lip-reader to try to analyse what Mihajlović had yelled at me. But it wasn’t easy. A lot of it was in Serbo-Croatian, so instead Mino went out and said that Mihajlović had said things that were too crude to repeat, stuff about my family and my mum.
“Raiola is nothing but a pizza chef,” Mihajlović retorted.
Mino had never been a pizza chef. He’d helped out with other things in his parents’ restaurant and countered: “The best thing about Mihajlović’s statement is that it now proves what everybody already knew, that he’s stupid. He doesn’t even deny that he was provoking Zlatan. He’s a racist, he’s shown us that before.”
I Am Zlatan Page 19
