I Am Zlatan Read online

  But nothing more came of it. There was so much going on around me, and I was restless and carried on, nothing really stuck. But one day I went to Stockholm again with the national squad, and I mean, that city – where do all the fit girls come from? It’s crazy – they’re everywhere. Me and some mates went to the Café Opera, and of course, it caused a bit of a stir, and as usual I sized up the situation with that look I’d grown up with: any problems coming up? Is there somebody going to give us shit? There’s always something.

  But things were better then. This was before everybody took my picture with their mobiles, and a lot of them don’t even ask. They just snap a picture right in my face, and sometimes I go off on one. But this time, I was just having a look round and suddenly I caught sight of her, like, wow, it’s the girl from Forex, and I went over and started chatting to her: Alright, are you from Malmö as well, and she started going on about how she worked at such-and-such a place, and I didn’t have a clue. That career stuff was totally beyond me in those days, and I was probably pretty arrogant. That’s how I rolled back then.

  I didn’t want to let anybody get too close. But afterwards I regretted it, I should have been nicer, and I was happy when I saw her in Malmö again. I started seeing her around all the time. She had a black Mercedes SLK which was often parked by Lilla Torg square, and I would often cruise by there. In those days I didn’t have my Merc SL any longer, I’d changed it for a red Ferrari 360.

  Everybody in town knew that was my car. There was a lot of, “Check it out, there goes Zlatan,” and it’s true, if I wanted to keep a low profile, that car wasn’t a bright idea. But the guys who’d sold me the Mercedes had promised me: you’ll be the only one in the country with that one! That was just sales talk. It was bullshit. I saw another one just like it in town that summer and thought straight away, they can go to hell. I don’t want this car any more, and then I phoned some people who sold Ferraris and asked, have you got any in stock? Sure, they said, and so I went there and picked one out and traded in my SL as part payment. It was a stupid thing to do – I lost money on the deal, and my finances weren’t in great shape in those days. But I didn’t care.

  I took pride in my cars – it was a matter of principle, so that’s why I cruised round in a Ferrari and felt well cool. Sometimes I’d see her in her black Merc, the girl called Helena, and I’d think: gotta do something about that, I can’t just look, so I got her mobile number off an acquaintance and spent some time thinking it over. Should I ring her up?

  I sent her a text, something like, “Alright, how’s it going? Think you’ve seen me around,” and then I finished with: “The guy in the red one” – the guy in the red Ferrari, that is – and got a reply: “The girl in the black one” she wrote, and I thought: this could be the start of something, who knows?

  I phoned her and we met up, nothing special at first, just lunch a few times and I went along out to her country house, and I checked out her interior design stuff, the wallpaper and traditional ceramic-tiled wood stoves and all that, and honestly, I was impressed. It was something completely new to me. I’d never met a single girl who lived like that, and I don’t think I still really grasped what it was she did. She had something to do with marketing for Swedish Match, a tobacco company, but I understood she was pretty high up in her line of work, and I liked that.

  She wasn’t at all like the younger girls I’d met. There was none of the hysteria, not at all – she was cool. She liked cars. She’d left home when she was 17 and worked her way up, and I wasn’t exactly a superstar to her. Or as she put it: “Come on, Zlatan, you weren’t exactly Elvis who’d beamed in.” I was just a crazy bloke to her, who wore hideous clothes and was totally immature, and sometimes she’d tease me a bit.

  “Evil super bitch deluxe”, I’d reply, or Evilsuperbitchdeluxe as all one word, in a single breath, because she’d go round in wicked stiletto heels and tight jeans and fur coats and stuff. She was like Tony Montana in Scarface, only a girl, whereas I was slobbing around in tracksuits again. The whole thing between us was so wrong it somehow felt right, and we had a good time together. “Zlatan, you’re an absolute idiot. You’re so much fun,” she said, and I really hoped she meant it. I enjoyed being with her.

  But she came from a respectable nuclear family in a small town called Lindesberg – the kind of family where they say, “Darling, could you please pass me the milk,” whereas in my family we’d generally threaten to kill each other over the dinner table, like I said, and there were many times when she didn’t even understand what I was saying. I didn’t understand anything about her world, and she knew nothing about mine. I was 11 years younger and lived in the Netherlands and was a nutter with dodgy friends. It wasn’t exactly an ideal situation.

  That summer, some mates and I went down to gatecrash a party she’d organised for loads of celebs and big shots in the resort town of Båstad during the annual tennis tournament there. The people on the door didn’t want to let us in, at any rate they weren’t going to let my mates in, and it turned into a big song and dance. There was always something.

  Like the time I played in an international match in Riga and flew into Stockholm in the evening, I took a taxi with Olof Mellberg and Lars Lagerbäck to the Scandic Park Hotel. Our game hadn’t been much to write home about. We’d only managed to draw 0–0 against Latvia in the World Cup qualifier. I always have a hard time getting to sleep after matches, especially when I’ve played badly. My mistakes whirl around in my head, so some mates and I decided to go and check out a club, Spy Bar, in the city centre. It was late, and I was walking up a flight of stairs.

  But I hadn’t been standing there very long before a girl came up and was coming on really strong, and of course, I had some mates nearby. If you see me out and about, you can be sure I’ll have some homeboys around somewhere. Not just because of all the to-do around me. It’s something about my personality. I easily end up with the bad guys. We gravitate towards each other, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. They’re as nice as all the rest. But sure, things can kick off, and this girl, she came up close and said something silly, she just wanted to get a reaction, and suddenly her brother turned up and grabbed me, and, well, he shouldn’t have done that.

  You don’t mess around with my mates. One of them took the brother and another took hold of her, and I realised straight away, nope, I don’t want to be a part of this. I wanted out, but you see, that was the first time I’d been to Spy Bar and it was late and packed with people and I couldn’t find the way out.

  I ended up in the toilets instead, and over where I had been standing there was already a big commotion, and I started to get stressed out. I’d played in an international match.

  This would make the headlines, I thought, there’ll be a scandal, and then a new security guy turned up and it was no more Mr Nice Guy.

  “The owner wants you to leave the premises.”

  “Tell that swine there’s nothing I’d rather do,” I hissed, and so he and a few others followed me out, and I got out of there.

  It was half past three in the morning – I know that because I was caught on one of the security cameras, and what do you think happened? Did they bother with any confidentiality stuff? Not quite. It ended up in the Aftonbladet tabloid and in all the headlines, and you have no idea – it was as if I’d murdered seven people. The papers were screaming all kinds of stuff and they claimed I’d been reported for sexual assault. Sexual assault? Can you imagine? That’s just sick, and as usual, anyone who’d happened to touch me that night went to the papers and milked it for all it was worth.

  I headed back to Amsterdam. We had matches coming up, including a Champions League game against Lyon, and I refused to speak to the press. Mido went out and spoke on my behalf. We troublemakers had to help each other out. But really, I’d had about enough now, and it didn’t surprise me at all when it emerged that it was the Aftonbladet that had made sure the girl reported me to the po
lice, and I issued a public statement, saying I was going to stick it to that paper. I was going to sue them. But what do you think happened? I didn’t get a damn thing, only an apology, and so I started to be more on my guard. I started to change.

  There had been too much bad stuff in the papers, and sure, I’d never wanted just the usual dull fluff in the media: Zlatan trains, Zlatan is good, Zlatan looks after himself. Not at all. But this crossed the line, and I wanted to get noticed for my football again. It had been a long time since anyone had written anything positive about that.

  Even the World Cup had been a disappointment. I’d had such high hopes, and for a while it had seemed like I wouldn’t get to go at all. But Lagerbäck and Söderberg selected me in the end, and I liked both of them – especially Söderberg of course, the whole team’s teddy bear. At one training session I picked him up and hugged him out of sheer joy. I cracked two of his ribs. He could hardly walk, but he was nice. I shared a room with Andreas Isaksson. Andreas was the third goalie then, a good bloke, I guess. But come on, his habits! He went to bed at nine o’clock at night and I’d be lying there festering, and of course my mobile would ring, I’d be like, “Yeah, great, finally somebody to talk to!” But Andreas just grumbled and I’d hang up. I didn’t want to disturb him. I’m a nice guy, really. But the following evening my phone rang around the same time and he was asleep again, or pretending to be asleep.

  “What the fuck, Zlatan,” he hissed and then I snapped, I mean, what is this? Asleep at nine o’clock? “If you open your mouth again I’m going to chuck your bed out of the window.” That was a good line – not just because we were on the 20th floor, but also because it got results.

  The following day I had my own room, which was great, but otherwise I wasn’t doing so well personally. . We were in the ‘group of death’, as it was called, with England, Argentina and Nigeria, and there was such an amazing atmosphere, such great stadiums and perfect pitches, and I wanted to get in there and play more than ever. But I was seen as too inexperienced. I was put on the bench. Even so, I was voted man of the match in a telephone vote. Totally crazy! I was seen as the best one on the pitch, and I hadn’t even taken my tracksuit off. That was the old Zlatan Fever again, and in fact I only played five minutes against Argentina and a little while against Senegal in the final of the group phase, where I did get a few chances. No, I thought Lars and Tommy were still sticking with the same eleven too much and not giving us younger players a chance. But that was how things were, and I got out of there and headed back to Amsterdam.

  I had a strategy. I wasn’t going to worry as much about what other people said, just go for it. That was my objective, but it didn’t help much, not at first. Things started pretty much as they had ended – on the bench. Competition for places up front was still fierce, and I had my critics, including Johan Cruyff who was always talking trash about me, and who was up there already back then with his views about my technique.

  But other things happened too: Mido, my friend, declared publicly that he wanted to be transferred. Not a particularly good tactic, to be honest. He wasn’t exactly a diplomat; he was like me, only worse. Later on, when he’d been on the bench against Eindhoven, he came into the locker room and called us all miserable cunts. That sparked off a massive row and insults were flying, and I responded by saying that if anybody was a cunt it was him, and then he picked up a pair of scissors that were lying there on the bench and flung them at me, completely nuts. The scissors whizzed past my head, straight into the concrete wall and made a crack in it. Of course I went over and gave him a smack, a slap. But ten minutes later we left with our arms round each other, and much later I found out that our team manager had kept those scissors as a souvenir, something to show his kids, like, Zlatan nearly got these in his face.

  At any rate, things were kind of up and down with Mido, and now he’d cocked it up again. Koeman had fined him and shut him out, and now there was another guy. His name was Rafael van der Vaart , a Dutchman, a real arrogant sort, like a lot of the white guys in the team, even if he wasn’t exactly posh. He’d grown up in a caravan and lived like a gypsy, as he put it, and he’d played football in the street with beer bottles for goalposts, and he claimed that had sharpened his technique. At the age of ten he’d been signed to the Ajax youth academy and trained hard – and sure, he was good. Only the previous year he’d been voted European talent of the year or something. But he tried to be a tough guy and he wanted to get noticed and be a leader, and there was a rivalry between us right from the start.

  Now he had injured his knee, and with both him and Mido out of action I got start at home to Lyon. This was my debut in the Champions League – I’d only played in a qualifier before – and of course that was great. The Champions League was a long-time dream of mine, and the pressure in the stadium was intense. I’d brought over a load of mates and sorted them out with tickets far down on the sidelines near the goal, and I remember I got a ball early on from Jari Litmanen, the Finn. I liked him.

  Litmanen had played for Barcelona and Liverpool and had just joined us, and he was like a catalyst for me straight away. A lot of guys at Ajax played mainly for themselves. They wanted nothing more than to get sold on to a bigger club, and it often felt like we were competing more against one another than against the other clubs. But Litmanen really was a team player. He was the real deal, I thought, and now when I got the ball off him I went down the sideline and was fronted by two defenders, one right in front of me and another to my right. I’d been in similar situations many times, and had gone over them again and again.

  It was kind of similar to that time with Henchoz in the Liverpool match, but there were two guys now, and I dribbled it to the left, a two-footer, and the defenders were both on me. It was looking like a dead end, but then I sensed a gap between them, a little corridor, and before I even had a chance to think about it I was through and got in front of the goal, saw another opening and shot, a low shot that struck the post and went in, and I went absolutely nuts.

  It wasn’t just a goal, it was a beauty as well, and I raced over to my mates on the sidelines and cheered with them, and the whole team followed me, completely wild, and not long after that I scored another goal. It was completely mental. That was two goals in my Champions League debut, and people started saying that Roma were after me, and Tottenham as well.

  I was on a roll, and normally if things are going smoothly in football, I haven’t got a problem in the world. But things weren’t going well in my personal life. I just wasn’t settling in down there. I was in a sort of vacuum. I was going back to Sweden far too often and doing stupid stuff, and I was still in touch with Helena, mainly via texting, without really knowing where that was leading. Was it just a crazy thing, or was it something more?

  In October we played a UEFA Cup qualifier against Hungary at Råsunda Stadium. It felt good to be back. I hadn’t forgotten the chants from the year before, but things didn’t start off well, and some of the Stockholm papers wrote things like I was an overhyped figure who just elbowed my way through. This was an important match. If we lost, our European championship dreams would go up in smoke, and both I and the national squad had something to prove. But Hungary scored 1–0 after just four minutes, and it didn’t seem to make any difference how many chances we had. We just couldn’t equalise; it felt hopeless. Then in the 74th minute a high cross came over from Mattias Jonson, and I went up to head it. The goalie flung himself against me and tried to box the ball away, and I don’t know if he actually made contact with the ball. He definitely bashed into me, and everything went black. I went down.

  I was out for five, ten seconds and when I came to, the players were standing in a circle around me and I didn’t know what was going on. What’s this? What’s going on? Everyone in the stands was screaming, and the lads looked both happy and concerned.

  “It was a goal,” said Kim Källström.

  “Really? Who scored it?”
/>   “You did. You headed it in.”

  I felt groggy and nauseous, and a stretcher came out and I got onto it. The team doctor was there and I was stretchered off, but then I heard the chanting again: ‘Zlatan, Zlatan’. The whole stadium was shouting, and I waved to the spectators. I was really on a high, and the whole team came alive. Okay, so the score stayed at 1–1 and we ought to have won. For one thing, Kim Källström had a blatant penalty in the final minutes which the referee chose not to see. But I remembered that, feeling so awful and yet so good, and soon afterwards I got sick in another way, with a terrible fever that affected only 250 people in all of Sweden, and something unexpected happened that changed a lot of things.

  It was the 23rd of December. I was at Mum’s place. I might not have had a brilliant start to the season, but I was pretty happy, in spite of everything. I’d scored five goals in the Champions League, more than in the Dutch league in fact, and I remember Koeman had told me, “You know, Zlatan, we’re in a league as well,” but somehow that’s how I functionedw. A stronger opposition got me going, and anyway, now I was at home in Rosengård.

  We were off until the start of January, when we would go to a training camp and play matches in Cairo, and I really needed some rest. But it was crowded at Mum’s, and people were shouting and making noise and rowing with each other. There was no peace and quiet anywhere. There was me, Mum, Keki and Sanela, and we usually had a Christmas like everybody else, a simple Christmas dinner at four o’clock and then opening presents afterwards, and sure, it could have been really nice. But I couldn’t be bothered now. I had a headache and my whole body ached. I needed to get away and get some peace and quiet, or at least talk to somebody other than my family. The only thing was, who could I ring?

  Everybody was with their own families, I mean, Christmas is sacred. But maybe Helena? I gave it a try. Not that I expected anything much. She worked all the time, and presumably she was at her parents’ place in Lindesberg. But she answered. She was at her place out in the country. She said she didn’t like Christmas.