I Am Zlatan

by David Lagercrantz

  I was thinking about it constantly. Not because I needed Guardiola’s love, exactly. He could hate me as far as I was concerned. Hatred and revenge get me going. But now I lost my focus, and I talked things over with the players. Nobody had any idea. I asked Thierry Henry, who was on the bench then. Thierry Henry is the best goal scorer in the history of the French national side. He’s brilliant. He was still amazing then, and he was also having a tough time with Guardiola.

  “He’s not talking to me. He won’t look me in the eye. What do you reckon happened?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Henry replied.

  We started to joke about it, like, “Hey Zlatan, did you make any eye contact today?” “Nah, but I caught a glimpse of his back!” “All right, you’re making some progress!” Silly stuff like that, and it did help a bit. But it was really getting on my nerves, and I would ask myself every day, every hour, what did I do? What’s wrong? I couldn’t find any answers, nothing. Only that his cold shoulder must have had something to do with the conversation about my position. There just wasn’t any other explanation. But that would be ridiculous if it was true. Was he trying to psych me out ahead of a chat about my position? I tried to step up to him. Go up to the bloke and look him in the eye. He was avoiding me. He seemed worked up. Sure, I could have scheduled a meeting and asked him, what’s going on? But there was no way I was going to do that. I had grovelled enough to him. This was his problem.

  Not that I knew what it was. I still don’t know, or maybe I do … I think the guy can’t handle strong personalities. He wants well-behaved schoolboys – and what’s worse, he runs away from his problems. He can’t cope with looking them in the eye, and that just made everything worse.

  Things got worse.

  The volcanic ash cloud came from Iceland. All flights throughout Europe were grounded, and we were supposed to face Inter Milan at San Siro. We went by coach. Some bright spark at Barça thought it was a good idea. I was free of injury then. But the journey was a disaster. It took 16 hours, and we arrived in Milan exhausted. This was our most important match so far: the semi-final in the Champions League, and I was prepared for boos and hysteria at my old home ground, no problem – quite the opposite, in fact. I feed on that kind of thing. But the situation otherwise was rotten, and I think Guardiola had a hang-up about Mourinho.

  José Mourinho is a big star. He’d already won the Champions League with Porto. He’d been my manager at Inter. He’s nice. The first time he met Helena, he whispered to her: “Helena, you have only one mission. Feed Zlatan, let him sleep, keep him happy!” That bloke says whatever he wants. I like him. He’s the leader of his army. But he cares, too. He would text me all the time at Inter, wondering how I was doing. He’s the exact opposite of Guardiola. If Mourinho lights up a room, Guardiola draws the curtains. I guessed that Guardiola was trying to match up to him.

  “It’s not Mourinho we’re up against. It’s Inter,” he said, almost as if we were sitting there imagining we were going to play football against the manager, and then he got started on his philosophising.

  I was barely listening. Why should I? That was advanced bullshit, about blood, sweat and tears and that. I had never heard a football manager talking like that! Absolute rubbish! But now he was actually coming up to me. This was the training session at San Siro, and people were there checking us out, and they were like, “Ibra’s back!”

  “Can you play from the first whistle?” Guardiola asked.

  “Definitely,” I replied. “I’m up for it.”

  “But are you ready?”

  “Absolutely. I’m good.”

  “But are you ready?”

  He was like a parrot, and I was getting some bad vibes.

  “Listen, it was a terrible journey, but I’m on form. My injury’s healed. I’ll give a hundred per cent.”

  Guardiola looked doubtful. I couldn’t figure him out, and afterwards I rang Mino Raiola. I’m constantly on the phone to Mino. Swedish journalists always say, Mino’s hurting Zlatan’s image. Mino is this, Mino is that. Shall I spell it out here? Mino is a genius. So I asked him, “What is this bloke on about?”

  Neither of us could figure it out. We were getting pissed off. But I got to play in the starting line-up, and we were up 1–0. Then things took a turn. I was substituted out after 60 minutes, and we lost 3–1. That was rubbish. I was furious. But in the past, like when I was with Ajax, I used to dwell on a loss for days and weeks. But now I had Helena and the kids. They help me to forget and move on, and so I focused on our return to Camp Nou. It was important to recover, and the atmosphere kept getting ratcheted up every day.

  The pressure was insane. It was like there were rumblings in the air, and we needed a big win in order to move on. But then … I don’t want to think about it, well actually I do, because it made me stronger. We won, 1–0. But it wasn’t enough. We crashed out of the Champions League, and afterwards Guardiola looked at me like it was all my fault, and I thought, that’s it. I’ve played my last card. After that match, it felt like I was no longer welcome at the club, and I felt rotten when I drove their Audi. I felt like shit when I sat in the locker room and Guardiola glared at me like a disturbance, an alien. It was mental. He was a wall, a brick wall. I didn’t see any signs of life from him, and every hour with the club I wished I could be out of there.

  I didn’t belong any more, and when we had an away match with Villarreal, he let me play for five minutes. Five minutes! I was seething inside, not because I was on the bench. I can deal with that, if the manager is man enough to say, you’re not good enough, Zlatan. You haven’t made the grade.

  But Guardiola didn’t say a word, not a peep, and now I’d had enough. I could feel it in my whole body, and if I’d been Guardiola, I would’ve been scared. I’m not saying I’m handy with my fists! I’ve done all kinds of shit. But I don’t get into punch-ups. All right, on the pitch I guess I’ve headbutted a few people. But still, when I get angry, the red mist descends. You don’t want to be nearby.

  Now, if I’m going to go into details here, I went into the locker room after the match and I hadn’t exactly planned any frenzied attack. But I was not happy, to put it mildly, and now my enemy was standing there, scratching his head. There weren’t many other people there.

  Touré was there, and a few others, and then there was the metal box where we put our kit from the match, and I was staring at that box. Then I gave it a kick. I think it went flying about three metres, but I wasn’t finished yet. Not by a long chalk. I yelled, “You haven’t got any balls,” and certainly even worse than that, and then I added, “You’re shitting yourself in front of Mourinho. You can go to hell!”

  I completely lost it, and you might have expected Guardiola to say a few words in response, something like, “Calm down, you don’t talk to your manager like that!” But he’s not the type. He’s a spineless coward. He just picked up the metal box, like a little caretaker, and then left, never to mention it again, not a word. But of course word got out. On the bus, everybody was beside themselves, going, “What happened? What happened?”

  Nothing, I thought to myself. Just a few words of the truth. But I didn’t feel like talking about it. I was furious. Week after week, my manager and boss had shut me out, with no explanations why. It was completely ridiculous. I’d had massive rows in the past. But the next day, we’d sorted things out and there were no hard feelings. Now, though, there was just silence and mind games, and I thought, I’m 28 years old. I’ve scored 22 goals and 15 assists here at Barça alone, and I’m still being treated like I don’t exist. Should I sit back and take it? Should I carry on trying to adapt? No way!

  When I realised I would be on the bench against Almeria, I remembered that line: Here in Barcelona we don’t turn up to training sessions in Porsches or Ferraris! What kind of nonsense was that, anyway? I’ll take whatever car I want, at least if I can wind up idiots. I jumped in my Enzo, put my f
oot down on the gas and parked up right in front of the door to the training facility. Of course, it was a huge circus. The papers wrote that my car cost as much as the sum total of all the Almeria players’ monthly wages. But I didn’t give a damn. The rubbish in the media was small potatoes in this context. I’d made up my mind that I was going to have my say.

  I’d decided to start to fight my corner, and you should know that that’s a game I know how to play. I’d been a fighter before, believe me. But I couldn’t neglect my preparations, and so I talked it over with Mino. We always plan our tricks together, both the smart ones and the dirty ones. And I rang round my mates.

  I wanted to see things from different perspectives, and my God, I got every kind of advice. The Rosengård lads wanted to come down and smash the place up, and of course that was nice of them, but it didn’t really seem like the right strategy under the circumstances, and of course I discussed things with Helena. She’s from a different world. She’s cool. She can be tough, too. But now she came out with some encouragement: “At any rate, you’ve become a better father. When you haven’t got a team you like, you make a team here at home,” she said, and it made me happy.

  I had a lot of kickabouts with the kids, and I tried to make sure everybody was doing all right, and of course I sat around with my video games. That’s a bit of an addiction with me. I get completely sucked in. But since the years with Inter when I could stay up till four or five in the morning and go to training sessions on just two or three hours’ sleep, I’ve set some boundaries for myself: no Xbox or PlayStation after 10 o’clock.

  I couldn’t just fritter my time away, and I really tried to dedicate those weeks in Spain to the family, and just cool off in the garden, even have an occasional Corona. That was the good side of things. But at night, when I lay awake, or in training sessions when I saw Guardiola, my dark side woke up. The rage just throbbed in my head, and I clenched my fists and planned my retaliation. No, I came to realise, there was no turning back now. It was time to take a stand and become my old self again.

  Because don’t forget: You can take the boy out of the ghetto, but you can never take the ghetto out of the boy!

  2

  I GOT A BMX BIKE from my brother when I was little. I named it Fido Dido.

  Fido Dido was a fierce little cartoon guy with squiggly hair. I thought he was the coolest thing ever. But my bike got nicked from outside the Rosengård swimming pool, and my dad came up there with his shirt open and his sleeves rolled up. He’s the sort who’s like, nobody lays a hand on my kids! Nobody takes their stuff. But not even a tough guy like my dad could do anything about it. Fido Dido was gone, and I was absolutely heartbroken.

  After that, I started nicking bikes. I picked the locks. I got to be an expert at it. Boom, boom – and the bike was mine. I was the bicycle thief. That was my first thing. It was quite innocent. But sometimes it got out of hand. One time I got dressed all in black, Rambo-style, and took a massive pair of boltcutters and nicked a military bike. I definitely got a buzz from that. I loved it. But to be honest, it was more for the kicks than the bikes. I started sneaking round in the dark, and I chucked a few eggs at windows and that sort of thing, and I only got caught a few times.

  One time that was pretty embarrassing happened in Wessels department store out in Jägersro shopping centre. I deserved it, to be honest. A mate and me went into a department store wearing big puffa coats in the middle of the summer, totally stupid thing to do, and under our coats we had four table tennis bats and some other rubbish we picked up. “And just how do you plan to pay for this lot?” the security guard asked us when we got caught. I took out six 10-öre coins – less than one krona – from my pocket: “With these, innit.” But the bloke had no sense of humour, and I resolved to be more professional in future, and I guess I ended up a pretty skilled little terror in the end.

  I was small as a kid. I had a big nose and a lisp, and had to go to a speech therapist. A woman came to school and taught me how to say ‘S’, which I thought was humiliating, and I guess I needed to get my revenge. Besides that, I had ants in my pants. I couldn’t sit still for a second and was constantly running around. It was like nothing bad could happen to me as long as I ran fast enough. We lived in Rosengård outside Malmö in southern Sweden, and the area was full of Somalis, Turks, Yugos, Poles, all sorts of immigrants, and Swedes. All of us lads played at being cocky. Anything could set us off, and things weren’t easy at home – not by a long chalk.

  We lived in a flat up four flights of stairs in those days, and we didn’t go in for hugs and that sort of thing. Nobody asked, “How was your day today, little Zlatan?” There was none of that. There was no adult around who helped with your homework or asked you about your problems. You had to deal with things yourself, and there was no whining if someone had been nasty to you. You had to grit your teeth, and there was chaos and rowing and a fair bit of smacks and slaps. But sure, sometimes you’d hope for a bit of sympathy. One day I fell from a roof at the day care centre. I got a black eye and ran home bawling, expecting to get a pat on the head, or at least a few kind words. I got a clip round the ear.

  “What were you doing up on the roof?”

  There was no, “poor Zlatan.” It was: “Bloody idiot, climbing up onto a roof, I’ll give you a hiding.” I was completely shocked and ran off. Mum had no time for giving comfort, not in those days. She worked her fingers to the bone to provide for us – she was really a fighter. But she couldn’t cope with much else. She’d had it tough, and all of us had a terrible temper. There was no Swedish-style civilised conversation at home, like, “Darling, could you please pass me the butter,” more like, “Get the milk, you arsehole!” There were doors slamming and Mum who cried. She cried a lot. She’s got my love. She’s had to work hard her whole life. She would clean for, like, fourteen hours a day, and every now and then we would go along and empty wastebaskets and stuff to get a little pocket money. But sometimes Mum would blow a fuse.

  She’d hit us with a wooden spoon, and sometimes the spoon would break and I’d have to go out and buy a new one, as if it were my fault she’d hit me so hard. I remember one day in particular. While I was at the day care centre I’d thrown a brick and it somehow bounced and broke a window. When Mum heard about it, she went spare. Anything that cost money made her crazy, and she hit me with the spoon. Bang, boom! It hurt, and maybe the spoon broke again. I dunno. Sometimes there weren’t any of those spoons at home, and one time Mum came after me with a rolling pin. But I managed to get away, and I talked it over with Sanela.

  Sanela is my only full sibling. She’s two years older than me. She’s a tough girl, and she thought we ought to pull Mum’s leg a bit. Bloody hell, hitting us over the head like that? Mad! So we went to the supermarket and bought some of those spoons, like three for 10 kronor, and gave them to Mum as a Christmas present.

  I don’t think she got the irony. She didn’t have any space for that sort of thing. There had to be food on the table. All of her energies went towards that. There were a lot of us at home, including my half-sisters who later vanished from the family and broke off contact with all of us, and then my little brother Aleksandar, known as Keki, and there wasn’t enough money. There wasn’t enough of anything, and the older siblings looked after us younger ones. We wouldn’t have made it otherwise, and there was a lot of instant noodles with ketchup, and eating at friends’ places or at my auntie Hanife’s. She lived in the same block of flats and had been the first of all of us to come to Sweden.

  I hadn’t even turned two when Mum and Dad got divorced, and I don’t remember any of it. That’s probably just as well. It wasn’t a good marriage, from what I understand. It was noisy and messy, and they’d got married so Dad could get a residency permit, and I assume that it was natural that all of us ended up with Mum. But I missed my dad. He was better off and there was more fun stuff going on around him. Sanela and I would meet up with Dad every other weekend. H
e’d often turn up in his old blue Opel Kadett, and we’d go to the Pildamm Park or out to Ön, the island off the coast of Malmö, and get burgers and ice creams. One time he splashed out and got us each a pair of Nike Air Max, those cool trainers that cost, like, a thousand kronor. Mine were green and Sanela’s were pink. Nobody else in Rosengård had trainers like those, and we felt totally wicked. Things were good with Dad, and we could get 50 kronor for a pizza and a Coke. He had a good job and only one other son, Sapko. He was our fun weekend dad.

  But things got tougher. Sanela was brilliant at running. She was the fastest in her age group in the whole Skåne region in the 60-metre dash, and Dad was proud as a peacock and would drive her to training sessions. “Good, Sanela. But you can do better,” he used to say. That was his thing. “Do better, do better, don’t settle for that,” and this time I was along in the car. That’s how Dad remembers it, anyway, and he noticed it straight away. Something wasn’t right. Sanela was very quiet. She was struggling not to cry.

  “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied. Then he asked again, and finally she told him. We don’t need to go into details; it’s Sanela’s story. But my dad, he’s like a lion. If anything happens to his kids, he goes wild – especially if it’s about Sanela, his only daughter, and there was a huge to-do with hearings and investigations by social services and custody disputes and shit. I didn’t understand much of it. I was about to turn nine.

  It was the autumn of 1990, and they shielded me from that. Even so, I knew something was up. Things weren’t going smoothly at home. It wasn’t the first time. One of my half-sisters was doing drugs, hard stuff, and she’d hidden some at home. There was often a lot of uproar surrounding her, and dodgy people who would ring up and a lot of fear that something serious would happen. Another time Mum got arrested for receiving stolen goods. Some acquaintances had told her, “Look after these necklaces!” and she obeyed them. She didn’t realise. But they turned out to be stolen goods, and the police burst in at home and arrested her. I have a vague memory of it, like an odd feeling: where’s Mum? Why’s she gone?