I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  I still sort of thought like that. I didn’t feel awkward around that sort of people any more, quite the opposite, but I remembered the pain – the pain of standing outside that world, knowing that you don’t live on the same terms. You don’t forget those sorts of feelings, and I still dreamt of revenge – of showing them all that I was no longer the kid with Fido Dido in Rosengård. That I was someone who could own the wickedest house, and Helena and I really needed a home in Malmö.

  We couldn’t stay with Mum in Svågertorp any longer. We had another baby on the way. I wanted a fence of my own to wreck, so Helena and I would drive around here and there and rate the houses. It was this fun thing we did. We made Top 10 lists, and which house do you think came in at Number 1? The pink one in Limhamnsvägen of course, and it wasn’t just because of my old dreams. That house was really brilliant. It was the nicest one in Malmö, but of course, there was one problem.

  There were some people living there and they didn’t want to sell, and what can you do? That was the question. We decided not to give up. Maybe give them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Not that I was going to send some Rosengård lads round their way, exactly. This had to be handled with style, but even so, we decided to go on the offensive, and one day Helena was at IKEA.

  She bumped into a friend there, and they got talking about the pink house.

  “Oh, some good friends of mine live in that pile,” her friend said.

  “Set up a meeting. We want to speak to them,” Helena told her.

  “Are you joking?”

  “Not at all,” and so she did.

  The friend rang and explained the situation, and was told that the couple really didn’t want to sell, no way. They liked living there and the neighbours were so nice and lovely and the grass was green, and the view towards Ribersborg Beach and the Øresund Strait was terrific, blah blah blah. But the friend had been given her instructions and told them that we weren’t going to take that as an answer from her. If they wanted to stay there, no matter what we were willing to pay, they’d have to tell us to our faces, and wouldn’t it be fun to meet Zlatan and Helena over a cup of coffee? Not everyone got to do that.

  They clearly thought that would be fun, so Helena and I went over, and I knew straight away that I had the upper hand. I am who I am, we’ll sort it, but even so, I was in two minds. As I walked through those gates, I felt big and small at the same time, both the kid who gawked at those houses during the Mile and the guy who was a huge star. At first I just went round with Helena and checked it out, “Very nice, very nice, what a lovely place you’ve got here.” I behaved and was polite and all that. But over coffee I couldn’t restrain myself any longer.

  “We’re here because you’re living in our house,” I said, and the man started laughing, like, how funny, and sure, I had a gleam in my eye. It was a sort of joke, a line from a movie. But I continued:

  “You can take it as a joke if you want. But I’m serious. I intend to buy this house, I’ll make sure you’re happy, but we’re going to have it,” and then he went on, saying it wasn’t for sale, not under any conditions.

  He was adamant, or rather, he pretended to be, but now I could hear it. It was like on the transfer market. It was a game. The house had a price for him. I could see it in his eyes and I could sense it in the atmosphere, and I explained my thinking: I don’t want to do things I don’t know how to do. I’m a footballer. I’m not a negotiator. I’ll send a guy to do a deal.

  Not Mino, if that’s what you’re thinking. There’s got to be a limit somewhere. I sent a lawyer, and don’t think I’m a fool who just pisses his money away. I’m a tactician. I’m careful. There was no, “Get it at any price,” none of that. It was, “Make sure you get it for as little as possible.” Afterwards, we sat at home waiting. It was a bit of a drama. But then the call came. “They’ll sell for thirty mil,” and there was nothing to discuss. We bought it for thirty million kronor, and honestly, for that kind of money I bet that couple went skipping out of the house.

  I’d done it. Sure, it wasn’t free. We’d paid to be able to kick them out. But this was just the beginning. We went mad with renovating the place. We didn’t cut any corners. We couldn’t make the garden wall higher. The council said no. What could we do? We wanted a higher wall so no fans or stalkers could stand out there and look in on us. So we dug ourselves deeper instead. We lowered the level of the plot. There were loads of things like that. We really went to town, and that wasn’t always popular.

  The houses in that neighbourhood are usually passed down as inheritances. Daddy’s money pays, and nobody from my sort of background had moved in before. It’s all posh people, and there’s nobody who speaks like me, who says stuff like ‘the wickedest house’ and that. Here they use words like ‘distinguished’ and ‘extraordinary’.

  But I wanted to show that a bloke like me could get in here with his own money. That was important to me right from the start, and I hadn’t expected everybody to give me a round of applause. But I was still surprised. What, they’re going to do this and that? They carried on like that constantly. They moaned. But we didn’t care, and made that house just the way we wanted it.

  It was Helena who worked at it. She was incredibly thorough and got help from various museums and whatever. I wasn’t as involved as she was. I don’t have the same instinct for those things, but there was one thing I contributed. On the red feature wall in the foyer I hung a big picture of two dirty feet. When my mates turned up, they were all like, awesome, wicked, cool place you’ve got here.

  “But what are these disgusting feet doing here? How can you have this shit on your wall?”

  “You idiots,” I said. “Those feet have paid for all of this.”

  18

  I REMEMBER WHEN I SAW HIM at the training ground. It was pretty nice, I have to say – a sense that something was still the same, even after all the changes from one club to another. But I couldn’t come up with anything better than yelling:

  “Hey, you following me or something?”

  “Of course. Somebody’s got to make sure you’ve got cornflakes in the fridge.”

  “But I refuse to kip on a mattress on your floor this time.”

  “If you’re nice, you won’t have to.”

  It felt good to have Maxwell there at Inter. He’d arrived a few months before me, but then he injured his knee and had to go through physio, so it was a while before I saw him. I don’t think I know of a more elegant player. He’s the aggressive Brazilian defender who dares to play beautifully far back in defence, and I often enjoy just watching him play. Sometimes, though, I’m surprised he got to be so good. Guys who are that nice don’t usually make it in football. You’ve got to be tough and hard, and I felt like that’s how I’d become after my years at Juventus, and now I’d been in the thick of things more than ever and contributed to the league title my first year at Inter. Not just in matches, but generally as a result of my attitude.

  All that rubbish with the Brazilians in one corner and the Argentinians in the other was over, and every month my status in the club increased, and of course Moratti noticed that. He was good to me and made sure my family were doing well, and I continued to shine on the pitch. We were at the top of the league table again. The whole miserable ’90s, when Inter never really succeeded, were gone. Things had turned out the way I’d hoped. The whole team got a boost when I came, and of course Mino and I realised we had were in a good bargaining position.

  It was time to renegotiate my contract, and nobody does that better than Mino. He used all his tricks on Moratti. I’ve no idea how their discussions went. I was never there for the negotiations, but there was talk that Real Madrid wanted me then, and he drove at that one hard and put pressure on Moratti. But really, it wasn’t all that necessary. The situation was different now. When I signed with Inter, I was so desperate to leave Juventus that Moratti could easily exploit that. In this bu
siness, you always aim for your opponent’s weak points. That’s part of the game. You put a knife to their throat. During the negotiations, he reduced my pay four times. But we were going to get even with him. Mino and I were agreed on that, and Moratti was no longer as strong now. Given how important I’d become to the team, he couldn’t afford to lose me, and it didn’t take long for him to say:

  “Give the guy what he wants.”

  I got a brilliant deal. Later, when the details filtered out, there was even talk of me being the world’s highest paid footballer. But at the time, nobody knew about it yet. One of Moratti’s stipulations was that the negotiations had to remain secret for six or seven months, but we knew that sooner or later it was going to explode, and really, the big thing wasn’t the pay deal in itself, but the hype it generated.

  If you’re seen as the highest paid in the world, people look at you differently. Another spotlight gets switched on. The public, other players, the supporters and sponsors start to view you in a new light, and what it is they say? Whoever has, will be given more. As you approach the top, you carry on upwards. It’s pure psychology. Everybody’s interested in the one who’s Number 1. That’s how the market works, and even though I don’t think anybody’s worth that kind of money, I knew my value on the market, and it was in my blood now: never get screwed over again like in the Ajax deal. But it’s true, with high salaries there comes a load of other stuff, like more pressure. You’ve got to deliver and continue to shine.

  But I liked it, too. I wanted the pressure on me. It got me going, and midway through the season I’d scored 10 goals in the team, and there was hysteria everywhere. It was all, ‘Ibra, Ibra’, and in February it looked like we’d secured the league title again. People thought nothing could stop us. But then I started having trouble with my knee. I tried to ignore it, thought oh, never mind, it’s nothing. But it kept coming back and it got worse every time. We’d finished top of our group in the Champions League, and things were looking promising there as well.

  But in the first knockout stage match we were up against Liverpool, and in that first match at Anfield I could feel the injury was restricting me. Our playing was a disaster, and we lost 2–0. I was in real pain afterwards, and I couldn’t put it off any longer. I went for an examination, and pretty soon the diagnosis came back. I had an inflamed knee tendon.

  The knee tendon extends from the quadriceps, the thigh muscle. I sat out the league match against Sampdoria. That was no big deal, I thought, either for me or the team. Sampdoria weren’t Liverpool. The guys ought to be able to manage without me. We’d had an incredible run of victories in the league. We’d even broken the record for the number of consecutive matches won in Serie A. But it didn’t help.

  Play was deadlocked against Sampdoria. That was one of the first signs that something had started to go wrong, and it looked like we were going to lose. Hernán Crespo rescued it for us with a header in the final minutes. We ended it 1–1 by the skin of our teeth, and things continued like that. After my injury, whether that was the cause of it or not, we lost our flow. We drew 1–1 against Roma as well and lost to Napoli, and I listened to Mancini and the others. They sounded worried. I had to play again. We couldn’t lose our advantage in the league, and so I was sent for treatment. I needed to get fit quickly, and soon thereafter, on the 18th of March 2008, I was put in against Reggina.

  Reggina were second-bottom in the league, and it’s really debatable whether it was necessary to have me on the pitch. I was in pain. I was playing on painkilling injections, and Reggina shouldn’t have been a problem. But the nerves had spread throughout the team. Their confidence had vanished while I was away, and Roma and AC Milan had been creeping up on us week by week in the league table, so I guess Mancini didn’t want to risk it. We’d gone from being a winning machine to feeling unsure when we faced the bottom teams in the league, and I couldn’t say no, especially not when the doctor said it was okay, though under pressure. In a way, that knee didn’t belong to me.

  The management owned my flesh and bones, in a sense. A footballer at my level is a bit like an orange. The club squeezes it until there’s no juice left, and then it’s time to sell the guy on. That might sound harsh, but that’s how it is. It’s part of the game. We’re owned by the club, and we’re not there to improve our health; we’re there to win, and sometimes even the doctors don’t know where they stand. Should they view the players as patients or as products in the team? After all, they’re not working in a general hospital, they’re part of the team. And then you’ve got yourself. You can speak up. You can even scream, this isn’t working. I’m in too much pain. Nobody knows your body better than you yourself.

  But the pressure is intense, and usually you want to play and not give a damn about the consequences. It’s a risk you run. I might be able to be useful today, but ruin things both for myself and the club in the longer term. Those questions come up all the time. What should you do? Who should you listen to? The doctors, who are still more cautious, or the manager who wants to put you in and is often just thinking about the match at hand, like, who cares about tomorrow, make sure we win today?

  I played against Reggina, and Mancini was proved right – at least in the short term. I scored my 15th goal in that match and led us to victory, and sure, that was a relief. But it also meant that the club wanted me to play the next match and then the next, and I went along with it. What else could I do? I got more injections and more painkillers, and all the time I heard it, sensed it: We’ve got to have Ibra in there. We can’t afford to let him rest, and I don’t really blame any of them. Like I said, I wasn’t a patient. I was the one who’d been leading the team ever since I started at the club, and it was decided that I would also play in our second leg against Liverpool in the Champions League, which was really important, both to me and the team.

  The Champions League had become something of a fixation. I wanted to win that damned tournament. But because we’d lost the first leg, we were fired up for a big win in order to go through, and of course we tried everything. We worked hard. But our game didn’t really gel now either, and I wasn’t on top form at all. I missed a load of chances, and in the 50th minute Burdisso got sent off.

  It was hopeless. We had to struggle even harder. It wasn’t helping, and I was feeling it more and more: this isn’t working. I’m in too much pain. I’m destroying myself, and finally I limped off with pains shooting up my knee, and I will never forget that.

  The away fans booed and jeered me, and you know, when you’re injured you’re constantly asking yourself, should I play or go off, and how much am I prepared to sacrifice for this match? Not because you know – there’s no way of knowing. It’s like roulette. You have to place your bet and hope you don’t lose everything: an entire season, anything. I’d stayed on the pitch a long time because that’s what the manager wanted and because I thought I could do something for the team. But the only thing that happened was that my injury got worse and we lost, 1–0. I’d put my health on the line and hadn’t got a damn thing in return, and the English fans were screaming at me. I’ve never really got on with the English spectators or the press, and now I was being called a ‘whingeing primadonna’ and ‘Europe’s most overrated player’. Normally that kind of stuff just gets me going. It’s like when those parents signed petitions to get rid of me – I just fight harder to show those bastards. But now I didn’t have a body to fight back with. I was in pain and the mood in the team was miserable. Everything had changed. All the harmony and optimism was gone. Something is wrong at Inter, the journalists wrote, and Roberto Mancini announced that he was leaving the club. He was getting out, he said. Later he retracted it. Suddenly he wasn’t leaving at all, and people started to mistrust him. What did he want? As a manager you can’t flip-flop like that: I’m not staying. I’m staying. It’s unprofessional, and we kept losing points.

  We’d had a big lead at the top of the league table, but it was shrinking
all the time. We only managed a 1–1 draw against Genoa and lost at home to Juventus. I was there for that one as well. I was such an idiot, I couldn’t say no. But afterwards I was in so much pain I could hardly walk, and I remember coming into the changing room and wanting to tear every damn thing off the walls, and I screamed at Mancini and was absolutely nuts. Enough was enough. I needed rest and some physio. Never mind the drama in the league – I couldn’t help them. I had no choice. I was forced to step down. But believe me, it wasn’t easy. It was shit.

  You’re sitting there. The others go out and train. You trot off to the gym, and from the window you can see your teammates on the pitch. It’s like watching a film you should be in, but you’re not allowed. That hurts. That feeling is worse than the actual injury, and I decided to escape the whole circus. I headed to Sweden. It was spring, and beautiful. But I didn’t enjoy it, not in the slightest.

  I had only one thought in my head, and that was to get fit again, and I had myself examined by the doctor for the Swedish national side, and I remember he was shocked. How had they let me play for so long on painkillers? There were only two months until the European Championships, hosted by Switzerland and Austria, and now that tournament appeared to be hanging in the balance.

  I’d worked myself too hard, it was shit, and I had to do everything I could to get fit again. I phoned Rickard Dahan. He was a physiotherapist at Malmö FF, and we’d known each other since my time at the club. We started working hard together, and somebody told me about a doctor.

  He was up north in Umeå, so I flew up there and got some injections that killed some cells in my knee tendon, and I improved. But I was far from fit, and I still couldn’t play. It was hopeless, and I was furious and irritable and no fun to be around, and the lack of flow continued in the league. The lads could secure the Scudetto against Siena, just one win and everything would be over. Patrick Vieira made it 1–0, and the fans in the stands started dancing and singing. It looked like it would hold, in spite of everything, and Balotelli, a young talent who’d gone in instead of me, scored another goal. Things simply couldn’t go wrong, not against a club like Siena.