I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  It was a mess. Accusations were flying back and forth, and Luciano Moggi, who was never afraid of anything, hinted at a conspiracy, a coup. The cameras that had caught my punch came from Mediaset, Berlusconi’s media corporation, and of course Berlusconi was the owner of AC Milan. Hadn’t the images been handed over awfully fast to the disciplinary committee? Even the Minister of the Interior, Giuseppe Pisanu, commented on the matter, and there were disputes in the papers every day.

  But none of it helped. The ban was confirmed, and I would be out for the decider against AC Milan. This had been my season, and I wanted nothing more than to be part of it and win the league. But now I’d have to watch the match from the stands, and that was tough. The pressure was terrible, and the bullshit continued to flood in from every direction, and now it wasn’t just about my ban. It was about all sorts of things. It was a three-ring circus.

  This was Italy, and Juventus implemented a silenzio stampa – nobody was allowed to speak to the media. Nothing, no new arguments about my ban, could be allowed to disturb the final preparations. Everyone had to shut up and concentrate on the match, which was seen as one of the most important matches of the year in Europe. Both we and AC Milan had 76 points then. It was a thriller. The match was the hot topic of discussion in Italy and most people agreed, including the betting agencies: AC Milan were the favourites. There were eighty thousand tickets sold, AC Milan were on their home ground and I was banned – me, who was seen as the key player. Adrian Mutu also had a ban. Zebina and Tacchinardi were injured. We didn’t have our best gang together, while Milan had a brilliant line-up with Cafú, Nesta, Stam and Maldini in defence, Kaká in the midfield, and Filippo Inzaghi and Shevchenko up front.

  I had a bad feeling about it, and it was no fun at all when the papers wrote that my outbursts looked like they would cost us the league title. “He needs to learn to control himself. He needs to calm down.” There was that kind of crap constantly, even from Capello, and it was awful that I couldn’t be involved.

  But the team were incredibly motivated. The rage over what had happened seemed to fire everybody up, and 27 minutes into the first half Del Piero was dribbling up the left side and was stopped by Gattuso, the Milan guy who works harder than anybody else, and the ball flew back in a high arc, with Del Piero rushing after it. He gave it a bicycle kick, and the ball flew into the penalty area and found David Trézéguet, who headed it into the goal. But there was a lot of time remaining in the match.

  AC Milan put on an unbelievable amount of pressure, and 11 minutes into the second half Inzaghi broke free in front of the goal. He shot, and Buffon saved it, the ball bounced and Inzaghi got it back. He got a new chance, but was prevented by Zambrotta on the goal line and crashed into the goalpost.

  Both teams had one chance after another. Del Piero shot at the crossbar, and Cafú called for a penalty. There was stuff happening all the time. But the result stood. We won 1–0, and suddenly we were the ones who had the advantage, and not long after that I got to play again. A burden was lifted from my shoulders, and on the 15th of May we were meeting Parma at home at the Stadio delle Alpi, and there was huge pressure on me. Not just because it was my return after the ban. Ten leading football magazines had voted me the number 3 striker in Europe after Shevchenko and Ronaldo, and there was even talk that I might win the European Golden Shoe award.

  I was going to have a lot of eyes on me in any case, especially since Capello had benched Trézéguet, the hero of the Milan match, and it felt like I had to perform. I had to be fired up, up to a certain point, that is. There couldn’t be any new outbursts or bans, everybody made that absolutely clear to me. Every camera alongside the pitch would be on me, and as I entered the stadium, I could hear the fans chanting ‘Ibrahimović, Ibrahimović, Ibrahimović’.

  It was thundering around me, and I was itching to play, and we scored 1–0, and later in the 33rd minute, after a free kick from Camoranesi the ball came high towards me in the penalty area, and I’d been criticised for not heading well enough despite my height.

  Now I headed it for all I was worth into the goal, and it was fantastic. I was back, and just a few minutes before the final whistle a message flashed up on the electronic scoreboard in the stadium: Lecce had drawn 2–2 against AC Milan, and it looked like the Scudetto was ours.

  If we could just beat Livorno in the next round, we’d secure our victory! But we didn’t even need that. On the 20th of May AC Milan lost after leading Parma 3–1, and we were the champions. People were weeping in the streets of Turin, and we rode through the city in an open-topped bus. We could hardly get through. There were people everywhere, and everybody was singing and cheering and screaming. I felt like a little kid, and we went out and ate and partied with the whole team, and I don’t drink that often. I’ve got too many unpleasant memories. But now I just cut loose.

  We’d won the championship title, and it was mental. No Swede had done it since Kurre Hamrin won with Milan in 1968, and there was no disputing that I’d been a part of it. I was voted best foreign player in the league and best player at Juventus. That was my personal Scudetto, and I drank and drank, and David Trézéguet kept egging me on. More vodka, more shots, he’s a Frenchman and pretty uptight, but he wants to be an Argentinian – he was born in Argentina – and now he really cut loose. There was vodka flowing everywhere. It was no use resisting, and I got drunk as a skunk, and when I got home to Piazza Castello everything was swimming around me and I thought, I’ll take a shower, maybe that’ll help. But everything kept spinning.

  As soon as I moved my head the whole world moved along with it, and finally I fell asleep in the bathtub. I was woken up by Helena, who just laughed at me. But I’ve told her never to breathe a word about it.

  14

  MOGGI WAS THE WAY HE WAS, but he garnered respect, and it was nice to talk with him. He made things happen. He got right to the point. He had power and he grasped things quickly. When I was renegotiating my contract the first time, of course it was an important thing to me. I was hoping for a better contract, and I really didn’t want to antagonise him, I wanted to do the polite thing, treat him like the big shot he was.

  The only thing was, I had Mino with me, and Mino doesn’t exactly bow and scrape. He’s nuts. He just strode into Moggi’s office and sat down in his chair with his feet on the desk, without a care in the world.

  “Bloody hell,” I said. “He’ll be here soon. Don’t wreck my contract. Sit over here with me.”

  “Go fuck yourself and be quiet,” he said, and really, I hadn’t expected anything else.

  Mino’s like that, and I knew the guy could negotiate. He was a master at it. Still, I was worried he’d ruin things for me, and I really didn’t feel too good when Moggi walked in with his cigar and everything and growled, “What the hell, are you sitting in my chair?”

  “Sit down and we’ll talk!” And of course, Mino knew what he was doing. They knew each other, him and Moggi.

  They had a whole string of disrespectful stuff behind them, and I got a massive improvement in my contract. But above all, I got a promise of a new deal. If I continued to play well and remained just as important to the club, I’d become the highest paid in the team, Moggi promised, and I was happy. But then the fuss started, and that was the first sign that something wasn’t right.

  That second year, I often shared a room with Adrian Mutu in hotels and camps, and I didn’t exactly have an opportunity to be bored. Adrian Mutu is Romanian, but he’d come to Italy and Inter Milan back in 2000 so he knew the language and everything, and he was a big help to me. But that guy partied, too. I mean, the stories he had! I’d lie there in the hotel room and just laugh at it all. It was crazy. When he was bought by Chelsea, he partied constantly. But of course it couldn’t last. He got caught with cocaine in his bloodstream and was sacked by Chelsea and got banned and caught up in a huge lawsuit. But when we were staying together, he’d been through treatment and
was calm and clean again, and we could laugh at all the craziness. But you understand, I didn’t have much to contribute on that front. What did falling asleep in the bath once amount to?

  Patrick Vieira also arrived at the club then, and you sensed it straight away, this is a tough guy, and it was surely not by chance that we came to blows. I don’t exactly go after the weaklings. With that type of bloke I give as good as I get, and at Juventus I’d got worse than ever. I was a warrior, and on this occasion I ran onto the pitch and Vieira had the ball.

  “Give me the fucking ball,” I yelled, and of course, I knew exactly who he was then.

  Patrick Vieira had been team captain at Arsenal. He’d won three Premier League titles with them and won the World Cup and the European Championship with France. He wasn’t just anybody, not by a long chalk, but I really screamed at him. I had reason to, and I mean, this was elite football, we weren’t meant to be wiping each other’s arses.

  “Shut up and run,” he hissed.

  “Just pass me the ball and I’ll be quiet,” I answered, and then we went for each other, and people had to come and separate us.

  But honestly, it was nothing, it was just proof that we both had that winner’s mindset. You can’t be nice in this sport. If anybody knew that, it was Patrick Vieira. He’s the type who gives a hundred per cent in every situation, and I saw how he boosted the entire team. There aren’t many football players I have that kind of respect for. There was a brilliant quality to his play, and it was amazing to have him and Nedvěd behind me in the midfield, and I got off to a good start in my second season with Juventus.

  Against Roma I got a ball from Emerson right on the centre line, but I never brought it down. I backheeled it over Samuel Kuffour, the Roma defender. I backheeled it high and long, because I could see that Roma’s end of the pitch was empty, and I rushed after it. I shot off like an arrow, and Kuffour tried to keep up. He didn’t have a chance, he grabbed at my shirt and fell, and I brought the ball down on a half-volley, it bounced around my feet and Doni, the goalkeeper, rushed out and I shot – bang – a hard shot that thundered up in the corner of the goal. “Mamma mia, what a goal,” as I said to the press afterwards, and it looked like it was going to be a good year.

  I won the Guldbollen in Sweden, the prize awarded to the best player of the year, and of course that was fun, but it wasn’t without complications. The award ceremony was organised by that tabloid, Aftonbladet, and I hadn’t forgotten. I stayed at home. The Winter Olympics were held in Turin the following year. There were people everywhere, with parties and concerts in the Piazza Castello, and in the evenings Helena and I would stand on the balcony and watch. We were happy together and decided to start a family, or rather, we just let it happen. I don’t think you can really plan something like that. It should just happen. Who knows when you’re ready? Sometimes we went back to Malmö to visit my family. Helena had sold her place in the country and we often stayed at Mum’s, in the terraced house I’d bought her in Svågertorp, and occasionally I’d play a little football on her lawn. One day I took a shot.

  I really kicked it hard, and the ball went right through the fence. It made a big hole, and of course Mum wanted to kill me – she’s got a temper, that woman. “Now get out of here and buy me a new fence. Go!” she roared, and of course in situations like that there’s only one thing to do: you obey. Helena and I drove to the DIY centre. But unfortunately you couldn’t buy just a few planks of wood. We had to buy a whole section of fencing, the size of a shed, and it wouldn’t fit in the car, no way. So I carried it on my back and on my head for two kilometres. It was like the time Dad carried my bed, and I got back absolutely knackered, but Mum was happy, and that was the main thing, and like I said, we were having a nice time.

  But on the pitch I was losing some of my flow. I started feeling too heavy. I was up to 98 kilograms, and it wasn’t all muscle. I was often eating pasta twice a day, and I discovered that was too much, and so I reduced the weight training and the food and tried to get back into shape. But there was some hassle. Like what was up with Moggi? Was he playing at something? I couldn’t figure it out.

  We were supposed to renegotiate my contract. But Moggi kept stalling. He came up with excuses. He’d always been a player and a wiseguy, but now he was absolutely hopeless. Next week, he’d say. Next month. There was always something. It went back and forth, and finally I was fed up. I told Mino, “I don’t give a damn. Let’s sign now! I don’t want to argue any more.”

  We’d come up with an agreement that looked all right and I thought, enough is enough, I wanted it to be over and done with. But nothing happened then either, or rather, Moggi said fine, good, we’ll sign in a few days’ time. First we were going to play against Bayern Munich in the Champions League. That was at home in Turin, and during the match I encountered a centre back called Valérien Ismaël. He was on me the whole time, and because he’d taken me down really badly I kicked him and got a yellow card. But it didn’t stop there.

  In the 90th minute I was down in the penalty area and sure, I should have kept my cool. We were ahead 2–1 and the match was nearly over. But I was annoyed with Ismaël and gave him a scissorkick and got another yellow card. I was sent off, and obviously, Capello was not happy. He gave me a bollocking. That was only proper. What I’d done was unnecessary and stupid, and it was Capello’s job to teach me a lesson.

  But Moggi, what did he have to do with it? He declared that my contract was no longer valid. I’d blown my chance, he said, and I went crazy. Was I supposed to miss out on my deal because of one mistake?

  “Tell Moggi I’m never going to sign, no matter what he comes up with,” I told Mino. “I want to be transferred.”

  “Think about what you’re saying,” Mino said.

  I had thought about it. I refused to accept it, and that meant war, nothing else. This was it. This would have to do, so Mino went to Moggi and laid it on the line: watch out for Zlatan, he’s stubborn, crazy, you risk losing him, and two weeks later Moggi finally turned up with the contract. We hadn’t expected anything else. He didn’t want to lose me. But that still wasn’t the end of it. Mino arranged meetings. Moggi postponed them, and came up with excuses. He had to travel, he had to do this and that, and I remember it clearly: Mino phoned me.

  “Something’s not right,” he said.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I can’t put my finger on it. But Moggi’s behaving strangely.”

  Soon it wasn’t just Mino who was sensing it. Something was up. Something was happening in the club, and it wasn’t anything to do with Lapo Elkann, although that was a big enough thing. Lapo Elkann was the grandson of Gianni Agnelli. I’d met him a few times. We didn’t really hit it off. A guy like that is on a different planet. He was a playboy and a fashion plate and had barely anything to do with the running of Juventus. It was Moggi and Giraudo who ran things, not the family who owned the club. But it’s true, the guy was a symbol of the club and of Fiat, and he was later included in lists of the world’s best-dressed people, and all that. His scandal was a massive thing.

  Lapo Elkann took an overdose of cocaine, and not just with anybody. He took it with transsexual prostitutes in an apartment in Turin, and was taken by ambulance to hospital, where he lay in a coma, breathing on a respirator. It led all the news broadcasts in Italy, and Del Piero and some other players appeared in the media expressing their support. Of course, the whole thing had nothing to do with football. But afterwards it was still seen as the thing that sparked off the catastrophe in the club.

  I have no idea when Moggi himself found out about the suspicions. But the police must have started questioning him long before the affair exploded in the media. As I understand it, everything started with the old doping scandal – where Juventus was actually cleared in the end. The police had bugged Moggi’s phone in connection with that and got to hear a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with doping, but whic
h still seemed dodgy. It seemed that Moggi was trying to get the ‘right’ referees for Juventus’ matches, and so they kept him under surveillance, and obviously a load of shit came out, at least they thought so when everything was assembled, even though I don’t set a lot of store by their evidence. Most of it was about Juventus being number one. I’m sure of it.

  As always when somebody is on top, others want to drag them down into the dirt, and it didn’t surprise me at all that the accusations emerged when we were about to claim the league title again. It looked bad, we realised that straight away. The media treated it like World War III. But it was bullshit, like I said, most of it. Referees giving us preferential treatment? Come on! We’d struggled hard out there.

  We’d risked our necks and didn’t have any damn referees in our pockets, no way. I’ve never had them on my side, to be honest. I’m too big for that. If some guy slams into me I stand still, but if I crash into him he goes flying several metres. I’ve got my body and my playing style against me.

  I’ve never been mates with the referees, nobody in our team had been. No, we were the best and had to be brought down. That was the truth, and there was also a load of dodgy stuff in that investigation. For example, it was conducted by Guido Rossi, a bloke with close ties to Inter Milan, and Inter Milan emerged from the mess surprisingly unscathed.

  A lot of things were either ignored or exaggerated in order to make Juventus out to be the big villain. AC Milan, Lazio and Fiorentina along with the referees’ association also came off badly. But things were worst for us, because it was Moggi’s telephone that was bugged and investigated from top to bottom. Still the evidence was never that strong. Okay, things didn’t look brilliant either, that’s true.