Diego Costa is back for PSG v Chelsea on ITV tonight.
A Round of 16 game that has both Diego and Zlatan Ibrahimovic is one I can’t wait to see.
Sparks will fly, I reckon.
As a young football fan, I always thought the most exciting thing in football was a big man with skill.
Later on, as a reporter, I reckoned the most exciting thing was a big man with pace and skill.
Zlatan can do stuff nobody else can do, things that Zidane couldn’t do, things Rivaldo or Van Basten couldn’t do.
My best friend Doug said I should read I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, so I did.
Why is this superstar so volatile?
Well, he’s a ghetto kid from Rosengard, a Malmo suburb full of Somalis, Turks, Yugos, Poles and Swedes: “We lived in a flat up four flights of stairs and we didn’t go in for hugs and that sort of thing. Nobody asked, How was your day today, little Zlatan? There was nothing like that. There was no adult around who helped with your homework.”
His Mum and Dad split when he was two.
His Dad had been a bricklayer in Bosnia until the war, when the Serbs took over their town.
His Croatian Mum was a cleaner who worked 14 hours a day and cried a lot. His sister Sanela was two years older, and there were two half-sisters as well. As time went on, one of his half-sisters took to drugs. As a kid he was rowdy and hyper and, surprisingly, small for his age. When he fell off the roof of a childcare centre, he ran home crying with a black eye.
Mum was devastated in 1990 when Social Services gave custody of Zlatan and Sanela to his Dad. His special needs teacher quit after she got hit in the face by a football aimed by him. When his BMX was nicked, he stole a bike and he carried on doing that as a teenager.
Over the next 20 years as a pro footballer, there were plenty of punches and headbutts, some suspensions, many controversial incidents as well as 327 goals for his seven clubs.
Born in 1981, young Zlatan’s first heroes were Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali.
His favourite footballers were Ronaldo and Romario, whose moves he’d copy. Hed rewind the video and then rewind again and again, studying their feints and tricks, to see exactly what their feet had done. He admits, “Often I would sleep with my football and think of the tricks I was going to do the next day. It was like a film that was rolling constantly.”
At Malmo he wanted to be sold to Ajax for a record fee, to go down in history. Another Swedish player, Limpar, had gone to Arsenal for, he says, £3 million, and John Carew, a Norwegian centre forward had been sold to Valencia for £5 million, a record in Scandinavia.
At the press conference in Amsterdam he wore his coolest clothes and beamed.
But, having cost £6 million, he realised he was subject to huge expectations. He writes: “I was happy and uncertain. I was big and small at the same time, and I tasted champagne for the first time in my life and made a face, sort of like: What kind of shit is this? Beenhaaker gave me the number nine shirt, which has been worn by van Basten.”
His wages quadrupled to £14,000 a month but he found out he was the lowest-paid player at Ajax.
Lost and lonely, he was befriended by Maxwell, a young Brazilian left back who arrived that the same time. When coach Co Adriaanse was sacked following an CLQ defeat by Celtic, Ronald Koeman took over and soon sent Zlatan home from training for not giving 100%.
When he was struggling, with Mido and Machlas in the team ahead of him, it looked like he might be moved on, especially after Koeman said, “In purely qualitative terms, Zlatan is our best striker, but it takes other qualities as well to succeed at Ajax. I doubt whether he can achieve them.”
After Ajax he joined Juventus, then Inter Milan with Jose Mourinho, then Barcelona with Pep Guardiola, then AC Milan.
At Juventus the coach was Fabio Capello, who asked him to watch a video, saying, “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.”
Ibra is now in his third season at Paris Saint-Germain, who finished a point above Barcelona in Group F this season.
Why is this autobiography such compulsive reading?
Because it’s so raw, honest and fearless.
Who else would call Pep Guardiola a coward or describe Barcelona as a conformist squad of schoolboys?
He’s six foot five and has scored 51 goals for Sweden in 101 games.
Since he’s now 32, Ibra won”t be around for many more seasons. Hope he has a good game. Really hope he doesn’t allow Chelsea to wind him up.
17th February 2015