I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  “I apologise as well,” said Mellberg. “Erm … what are you going to say to the media?” he added, and there was some discussion about that. I was silent through the whole thing. I had nothing to say about it, and maybe Lagerbäck thought that was odd. Most of the time I don’t exactly hold my tongue.

  “And how about you, Zlatan? What do you say?”

  “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Just that. Nothing!”

  I noticed straight away, that made them worried. I’m sure they’d have been more at ease if I’d come out all cocky. That would’ve been my style. But this was something new. Nothing! It was stressing them out, like, what’s Zlatan planning now? And the more confused they got, the calmer I felt. It was strange, in a way. My silence was upsetting the balance. I got the upper hand. Everything felt so familiar. It was Wessels department store again. It was school. It was the Malmö FF youth squad and I was listening to Lagerbäck’s little lecture on how clear they’d been about the rules with the same level of interest I’d listened to the teachers at school, like, you just go ahead and yak, I’m not arsed. But it’s true, there was one thing that pissed me off. It was when he said:

  “We’ve decided that the three of you will not play against Liechtenstein,” and don’t think I cared about that – I’d already bloody packed. Lagerbäck could have sent me up to Lapland and I wouldn’t have kicked up a fuss, and really, who cares about Liechtenstein? It was the word we that got my back up. Who the hell was this we?

  He was the boss. Why was he hiding behind other people? He should’ve been man enough to say, “I’ve decided,” I would’ve respected him then, but this – this was cowardly. I fixed him with a really hard stare but still said nothing, and then I headed back up to my room and phoned Keki. In situations like this, you need your family.

  “Come and pick me up!”

  “What have you done?”

  “Got in too late.”

  Before I cleared off, I spoke to the team manager. He and I have always been on good terms. He knows me better than most in the national side and he knows about my background and the way I am. He knows that I don’t forget things easily. “Look, Zlatan,” he said, “I’m not worried about Chippen and Mellberg. They’re regular Swedish guys, they’ll take their punishment and come back, but with you, Zlatan … I’m worried Lagerbäck is digging his own grave.”

  “We’ll see,” was all I said, and an hour later I was gone from the hotel. Me and my little bro took Chippen along with us. It was him, me, Keki and another of my mates in the car, and we stopped off at a petrol station. Then we saw the tabloid headlines.

  It must have been the biggest fuss ever made about a broken curfew! It was basically as if a flying saucer had landed and things would just get worse, and the whole time I was in touch with Chippen and Mellberg. I became a bit like a father to them, saying:

  “Calm down, lads. In a while this’ll just be an advantage. Nobody likes nice boys.”

  But honestly, I was getting more and more annoyed about the whole thing. Lagerbäck and the rest were playing this us-against-them business. It was just ridiculous. Not that long ago I was been in a fight with a guy at Milan, Oguchi Onyewu is his name. I’ll tell you about it later, it was really brutal. Of course, nobody thought that punch-up was a brilliant thing. But the management defended me publicly, saying I was fiery and keyed up, something along those lines. They kept up a united front. That’s what they do in Italy. They defend their own in public and criticise in private. But here in Sweden, it became bad guys and good guys. It was handled really badly, and I said so to Lars Lagerbäck.

  “It’s water under the bridge to me,” he said. “You’re welcome to come back.”

  “Am I? Well, I’m not coming. You could’ve given me a fine. You could’ve done anything. But you went to the media and hung us out to dry. I’m not standing for that,” and that was that.

  I said no to the national side, and dismissed the whole thing from my mind. Well, sort of. I was reminded about it constantly, and if I’m honest, there was one thing I regretted. I should’ve taken that scandal up a notch, since I was out of the squad anyway. What the hell, sitting in a place that was practically empty with just one drink, and coming in an hour late? What was that? I should’ve smashed up a bar and crashed a car into a fountain up there on Avenyn and staggered back in nothing but my pants. That would’ve been more like a scandal on my level. This was a farce.

  You don’t ask for respect. You take it. It’s easy to feel little when you’re new at a club. Everything is new, and everybody’s got their roles and their places and their talk. It’s easiest to take a step back and get a feel for the mood of the place. But then you lose your initiative. You lose time. I came to Inter Milan to make a difference and make sure the club won the league title for the first time in 17 years. In that case you can’t hide, or play it safe, just because the media are criticising you and because people have preconceived opinions. Zlatan’s a bad boy. Zlatan’s got problems with his temper, all that stuff. It’s easy to let it get to you and try to show you’re the opposite, a nice guy. But then you’re letting yourself be controlled.

  It wasn’t exactly ideal that the events from Gothenburg were being trotted out in all the Italian papers right then. It was like, look, this guy doesn’t care about the rules, that one who was so expensive. Isn’t he overrated? Or an outright mistake? There was a lot of that. The worst was a so-called ‘expert’ from Sweden, who said:

  “The way I see it, Inter Milan have always made some strange purchases, they just invest in individualists… Now they’ve acquired another problem.”

  But like I said, I thought about what Capello had said. It’s about taking respect. It was like setting foot in a new yard in Rosengård. You can’t back down or worry that somebody might have heard something or other about you. Instead, you’ve got to step up, and I gave it all that attitude I’d picked up at Juventus: Alright, lads, here I come, now we’re gonna start winning!

  I gave dirty looks at training sessions. I had my winner’s mindset, all that wild attitude and willpower. I was worse than ever. I went mental if people didn’t give a hundred per cent on the pitch. I screamed and made noise if we lost or played a poor match, and I took on a leading role in a totally different way to how I had done previously in my career. I could see it in people’s eyes: it was up to me now. I was going to lead them onwards, and I had Patrick Vieira by my side again. A lot of things are possible when you’ve got him there with you. We were two winning fiends who gave all we had to increase the motivation in the team.

  But there were problems in the club. Moratti, the president and owner, has done loads for Inter Milan. He’s spent over €300 million on acquiring players. He’s invested in guys like Ronaldo, Maicon, Crespo, Christian Vieri, Figo and Baggio. He’s taken an amazingly aggressive line. But he also had another quality. He was too generous, too kind. He’d give us hefty bonuses after winning a single match, and I reacted against that. Not that I’ve got anything against bonuses and benefits. Who does? But these bonuses weren’t handed out after league or cup titles. It could be after just one match, and not even an important one.

  It was sending the wrong signals, I thought, and sure, as a player you don’t just go up to Moratti. Moratti comes from a posh family with old money. He is power. He is money. But I’d acquired a certain standing at the club, so I did it anyway. Moratti isn’t a difficult person. He’s easy to talk to, so I said to him:

  “Hey!”

  “Yes, Ibra?”

  “You’ve got to take it easy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “With the bonuses. The guys could get complacent. Hell, one match won, that’s nothing. We get paid to win, and sure, if we bring home the Scudetto, go ahead and give us something nice if you want, but not after just one win!”

  He got i
t. There was an end to that, and don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think I could manage the club better than Moratti, not at all. But if I saw something that could have a negative impact on the team’s motivation, I’d point it out, and that stuff with the bonuses was really just a little thing.

  The real challenge was the cliques. That bothered me right from day one, and it wasn’t just because I was from Rosengård, where everybody just got along in one big jumble – Turks, Somalis, Yugos, Arabs. It was also because I’d seen it clearly in football, both at Juventus and at Ajax: every team performs better when the players are united. At Inter Milan, it was the opposite. The Brazilians sat in one corner, the Argentinians in another, and then the rest of us in the middle. It was so superficial, so lazy.

  Okay, sure, sometimes you sort of get cliques forming in clubs. It’s not good when that happens. But at least people usually choose their friends and stick with the ones they get on with. Here, it was according to nationality. It was so primitive. They played football together. Otherwise they lived in separate worlds, and that drove me crazy. I knew straight away that had to change or we wouldn’t win the league title. Some might say, what does it matter who we eat lunch with? Believe me, it matters. If you don’t stick together off the pitch, it shows in your game.

  It impacts on motivation and team spirit. In football, the margins are so small that those kinds of things can be the deciding factor, and I saw it as my first big test to put an end to that stuff. But I realised it wasn’t enough to just talk the talk.

  I went round saying, what is this crap? Why are you sitting in these groups like schoolkids? And sure, a lot of them agreed with me. Others got a little embarrassed, but nothing happened. Old habits die hard. Those invisible barriers were too high. So I went up to Moratti again, and this time I made it as clear as I could. Inter hadn’t won the league title for ages. Was that going to carry on? Were we going to be losers just because people couldn’t be bothered to talk to one another?

  “Of course not,” said Moratti.

  “So we need to break up these groups. We can’t win if we don’t work as a team.”

  I don’t think Moratti had really grasped how bad things were, but he did understand my reasoning. It was totally in line with his philosophy, he said.

  “We need to be like one big family at Inter. I’ll speak to them,” he said, and it wasn’t long before he went down to speak to the lads, and you could see straight away the kind of respect everyone had for him.

  Moratti was the club. He didn’t just make decisions. He owned us as well. He gave a little speech. He was all fired up, talking about unity, and everybody was glaring at me, of course. It sounded like what I’d been saying. Is Ibra the one who snitched? I guess most of them were convinced of that. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get the team together, and the atmosphere actually improved, a bit at a time. The cliques were broken, and everybody started to spend time with each other.

  We were more fired up and united, and I went round and talked to everybody, trying to get everyone together even more. But of course, that in itself won’t win you the league title. I remember my first match. It was against Fiorentina, in Florence. It was the 19th of September 2006, and of course Fiorentina wanted to beat us at any price. Their team had also been dragged into the Italian football scandal and started the season on minus 15 points, and the spectators at the Artemio Franchi were seething with hatred.

  Inter had emerged from the scandal completely unscathed, and many people thought that stank. Both teams were dead set on winning: Fiorentina to regain their honour, and us to get some respect in order to finally aim for the Scudetto.

  I played from the start alongside Hernán Crespo up front. Crespo was an Argentinian who’d come from Chelsea, and we got off to a good start together, at least on the pitch, and a little way into the second half I received a long pass inside the penalty area and made a half-volley shot into the goal, and you can just imagine. It was such a relief! That was my debut, and following that I became increasingly integrated into the team and it felt completely natural to say no to the Swedish national team’s qualifiers for the European Championships against Spain and Iceland in October. I wanted to focus entirely on Inter and my family. Helena and I were counting the days. We were going to have our first baby, and we’d decided the birth would be in Sweden, at the university hospital in Lund. We trusted Swedish health care more than any other system, in spite of everything. But it wasn’t that easy. There were issues.

  There was the media, and the paparazzi. There was the whole hysteria, and we took security staff along with us and notified the hospital’s management, who closed off Ward 44 in the maternity hospital. Everyone who entered was security-checked. There were police patrolling outside, and we were both nervous. There was that peculiar hospital smell in there. People were running down the corridors, and we could hear shouts and voices. Have I mentioned that I hate hospitals? I hate hospitals. I’m well when other people are well. If people are ill around me, then I get ill myself, or at least that’s how it feels. I can’t explain it. But hospitals give me stomach-ache. There’s something in the air and in the atmosphere, and I usually get out of there as soon as I can.

  But now I was determined to stay put and be there for everything, and it made me tense. I get loads of letters from all over the world, and usually I don’t open them. It’s a matter of fairness. Since I can’t read and answer them all, I often leave them unopened. Nobody should be singled out for special treatment. But sometimes Helena can’t help herself, and we hear the most awful stories, like there’s a sick child with a month left to live who idolises me, and Helena asks, what can we do? Can we sort out tickets for a match? Send an autographed shirt? We really try to help. But it doesn’t feel good. It’s a weakness of mine, I admit, and now I was supposed to spend the night at the hospital, and I was worrying about that, but it was worse for Helena, of course. She was all worked up. It’s not easy being chased while you’re giving birth to your first child. If anything goes wrong, the whole world will find out about it.

  Would anything go wrong? I had all kinds of those thoughts. But it went fine, and afterwards I felt joy, of course, happiness. It was a lovely little boy, and we’d done it. We were parents. I was a dad, and there was no question in my mind that anything could be wrong with him, not when we’d made it through this ordeal and all the doctors and nurses seemed so happy. It wasn’t on the map, but the drama wasn’t over – not by a long chalk.

  We named the boy Maximilian. I don’t really know where we got the name from. But it sounded brilliant. Ibrahimović was brilliant in and of itself. Maximilian Ibrahimović was even more so. It sounded both good and powerful, and of course we ended up calling him Maxi, but that was fine too. Everything felt so promising, and I left the hospital almost straight away. Not that it was easy, exactly. Outside there were journalists all over the place. But the security bloke put a white coat on me, like, Dr Ibrahimović. Then they put me in a laundry basket – completely nuts, a massive great basket, and then I curled up in there like a ball and was pushed down passageways and corridors into the underground car park, and only once we were down there did I hop out and get changed, and then I headed off to Italy. It fooled everybody.

  Things didn’t go so well for Helena. It wasn’t easy for her. It had been a difficult birth, and she wasn’t as used to the commotion as I was. I hardly even thought about it any longer. It was just a part of my life. But Helena got more and more stressed, and she and Maxi were smuggled out in separate cars to my mum’s terraced house in Svågertorp. We thought she’d be able to take a breather there. But we were naive. It only took an hour before the journalists started gathering outside, and Helena felt like she was being hunted and trapped, and soon afterwards she flew to Milan again.

  I was already there, set to play a match against Chievo at San Siro. I was on the bench. I hadn’t slept much. Roberto Mancini, our manager, didn’t think I’d be a
ble to focus properly, and I’m sure that was sensible. My thoughts were all over the place, and I looked out towards the pitch and up towards the spectators. The Ultras, Inter’s hardcore fans, had hung a huge white banner from the stands. It looked like a giant sail flapping in the wind, and there was something written, or spray-painted, on the cloth in blue and black letters. It said ‘Benvenuto Maximilian’, which means ‘Welcome Maximilian’, and I wondered, “Who the hell is Maximilian? Have we got a player by that name?”

  Then I realised. It was my son. The Ultras were welcoming my little boy to the world! That was so beautiful I wanted to cry. Those fans are not to be messed with. They’re tough blokes, and I’d end up in fierce fights with them in the future. But now… what can I say? This was Italy at its best. It was their love for football and their love for children, and I took out my mobile and took a photo and sent it to Helena, and honestly, there are few things that have touched her heart like that. She still gets tears in her eyes when she talks about it. It was as if San Siro was sending them its love.

  We’d also got a new puppy. We called him Trustor, after this Swedish financial affair where some people had cleared all the money out of a company. So now I really had a family. I had Helena, Maxi and Trustor.

  I was playing Xbox constantly in those days. I went completely overboard. It was like a drug. I couldn’t stop, and I’d often sit with little Maxi on my lap and play.

  We were living in a hotel in Milan then while we waited for our own apartment to be ready, and when we rang the kitchen to order food, we could tell they were tired of us, and we were tired of them. The hotel was getting on our nerves, so we moved to the Hotel Nhow on the Via Tortona, and that was better, but still chaotic.

  Everything was new with Maxi, and we noticed that he was vomiting a lot and wasn’t putting on weight – the opposite, in fact. He was getting thinner. But neither of us knew how things were supposed to be. Maybe that was normal. Somebody said that infants sometimes lose weight for a while after they’re born, and he seemed strong, didn’t he? But the milk came back up, and his vomit seemed really thick and looked strange. He was sicking up all the time. Was it supposed to be like that? We didn’t have a clue, and I phoned my family and my friends, and they all reassured me, saying they were sure it was nothing serious, and that’s what I thought too – or at least that’s what I wanted to think, and I tried to come up with explanations for it.