I Am Zlatan Page 4

  But he calmed down, and I lay on my stomach sobbing and got the injection in my spine. It emerged that I had meningitis, and the nurse lowered the blinds and switched off all the lights. I had to be in total darkness, and I was given medication and Dad kept a vigil by my bedside. At five o’clock the next morning I opened my eyes and the crisis was over, and I still don’t know what caused it. Maybe I wasn’t looking after myself properly.

  I wasn’t exactly getting a balanced diet. I was small and really puny in those days. Even so, I must have been strong in some way. I forgot about it and carried on, and instead of sitting at home moping around, I looked for a buzz. I was out and about constantly. There was a fire in me, and just like Dad I could explode – like, who the hell do you think you are? Those were tough years, I understand that now. Dad was up and down, often completely absent or furious: “I want you home by such-and-so time.” “You’re bloody well not doing that.”

  If you were a bloke in Dad’s world and something bad happened to you, you had to stand up and be a man. There was never any of that New Man stuff, none of that “I’ve got a pain in my belly today. I’m feeling a bit down.” Nothing like that!

  I learned to grit my teeth and get on with it, but also, don’t forget, I learned a whole load about sacrifice as well. When we bought a new bed for me at IKEA, Dad couldn’t afford the delivery charge. That would have cost an extra 500 kronor or something. So what could we do? Simple. Dad carried the mattress on his back the whole way from IKEA, completely mental, mile after mile, and I followed along behind with the legs. They hardly weighed anything. Even so, I couldn’t keep up.

  “Take it easy, Dad, wait.”

  But he just kept on going. He had that macho style, and sometimes he would turn up in his whole cowboy look at parents’ night at school. Everybody would wonder, who’s that? People noticed him. He got respect, and the teachers didn’t dare to complain about me as much as they had been planning to do. It was like, we’d better be careful with that guy!

  People have asked me what I would have done if I hadn’t become a footballer. I have no idea. Maybe I would have become a criminal. There was a lot of crime in those days. Not that we went out thieving. But a lot of stuff just happened, and not just bikes. We’d be in and out of department stores as well, and sometimes I got a buzz just from doing it. I got a kick out of nicking stuff, and I’ve got to be happy that Dad never found out. Dad drank, sure, but there were a lot of rules as well. You’ve got to do the right thing, and that. Definitely no stealing, no way. All hell would have broken loose.

  The time we got caught at Wessels department store in our puffa coats, I was lucky. We’d nicked stuff worth 1,400 kronor. It was more than just the usual sweets. But my friend’s dad had to come and collect us, and when the letter arrived at home, saying Zlatan Ibrahimović has been caught shoplifting, blah blah blah, I managed to tear it up before Dad saw it. I was caught up in it and carried on stealing, so yeah, things could have turned out badly.

  But one thing I can say for certain is that there were no drugs. I was totally against them. I didn’t just pour out Dad’s beer. I chucked out my mum’s cigarettes. I hated all drugs and poisons, and I was 17 or 18 before I got drunk the first time, and puked in the stairway like any other teenager. Since then I haven’t been drunk too many times, just one episode where I passed out in the bathtub after the first Scudetto with Juventus. That was Trézéguet, that snake, who egged me on to drink shots.

  Sanela and I were also strict with Keki. He wasn’t allowed to smoke or drink, or else we’d go after him. That was a special thing, with my little bro.

  We looked after him. For more delicate things, he’d go to Sanela. With tougher stuff, he’d come to me. I stood up for him. I took responsibility. But otherwise I wasn’t exactly a saint, and I wasn’t always that nice to my friends and teammates. I did aggressive stuff, the kind of thing that would make me go spare today if anybody did the same to Maxi and Vincent. But it’s true. Let’s not forget that. I had two sides even then.

  I was both disciplined and wild, and I came up with entire philosophies about that. My thing was that I had to both talk the talk and walk the walk. So not just be like, I’m awesome, who are you? Of course not – there’s nothing quite as naff – but I also didn’t want to just perform and say mealy-mouthed stuff like the Swedish stars did. I wanted to be great and give it some swagger as well. Not that I believed I would turn out to be some kind of superstar, exactly. Jesus Christ, I was from Rosengård! But maybe I turned out a bit differently because of that.

  I was rowdy. I was mental. But I had character as well. I didn’t always get to school on time. I had a hard time getting up in the mornings – still do – but I did my homework, at least some of the time. Maths was dead easy. Just bam, bam and I could see the answer. It was a bit like on the football pitch. Images and solutions came to me in a flash. But I was bad at showing my workings, and the teachers thought I was cheating. I wasn’t exactly a pupil they expected to get good exam results. I was more the kid who got kicked out of lessons. But I did actually study. I would cram before exams and then forget everything the day after. I wasn’t exactly a bad kid. I just had a hard time sitting still, and I would chuck erasers and that kind of thing. I had ants in my pants.

  Those were difficult years. We moved house constantly; I don’t exactly know why. But we rarely lived at any one place for more than a year, and the teachers took advantage of that. You have to transfer to the school in the area where you live, they said, not because they were sticklers for the rules, but because they saw an opportunity to get rid of me. I changed schools often and had a hard time making friends. Dad had his on-call shifts and his war and his drinking, and really bad tinnitus in his ears. It was like a ringing noise inside him, and I was looking after myself more and more and trying not to worry about the chaos in our family. There was always something. People from the Balkans are a hard lot. My sister with the drugs had broken off contact with Mum and the rest of us, and I suppose it wasn’t entirely unexpected after all the rows about drugs and the treatment centres. But even my other half-sister was cut off from the family. Mum just kind of erased her, and I don’t even know what it was about. There was some to-do about a boyfriend, a bloke from Yugoslavia. He and my sister had had a row and for some reason Mum took the bloke’s side, and so my sister flipped out and she and Mum had a terrible slanging match, and that wasn’t good. But still, it shouldn’t have been such a big deal.

  That wasn’t exactly the first time we had a row in our family. But Mum had her pride, and I’m sure both she and my sister got into some sort of deadlock. I recognise that. I don’t forget things either. I’ll remember a nasty tackle for years. I remember shit that people have done to me, and I can bear incredible grudges. But this time it went too far.

  There had been five of us kids at Mum’s, and now suddenly there were only three: me, Sanela and Aleksandar, and there was no going back. It was like it was carved in stone. Our half-sister was no longer one of us, and the years passed. She was gone. But fifteen years later, her son phoned my mum. My half-sister had had a son – a grandson for my Mum, in other words.

  “Hi, Grandma,” he said, but Mum didn’t want any part of it.

  “Sorry,” she said, and simply hung up.

  I couldn’t believe it when I heard. I got a pain in my stomach. I can’t describe the feeling. I wanted to sink into the floor. You shouldn’t do that! Never, ever! But there’s so much pride in my family that messes things up for us, and I’m just glad I had football.

  3

  IN ROSENGÅRD, we had different council estate neighbourhoods, and no estate was worse than any other – well, the one we called the Gypsy estate was looked down upon. But it wasn’t like all the Albanians or Turks stayed together in one spot. It was your estate that counted, not the country your parents had come from. You stuck with your estate, and the neighbourhood where Mum lived was called Törnrose
n, which means Briar Rose. There were swings, a playground, a flagpole and a football pitch where we played every day. Sometimes I didn’t get to join in. I was too small. Then I’d blow up in an instant.

  I hated being left out. I hated losing. Even so, winning wasn’t the most important thing. Most important were the feints and the nice moves. There was a lot of: “Hey, wow! Check that out!” You were supposed to impress the lads with tricks and moves, and you had to practise and practise until you were the best at them. Often, mothers would shout from the windows.

  “It’s late. Dinner’s ready. Time to come in.”

  “In a minute,” we’d say and carry on playing, and it could get late and start raining and all hell could break loose, but we just carried on playing.

  We were completely inexhaustible, and the pitch was small. You had to be quick with your head and your feet, especially with me being little and puny and easily getting tackled, and I learned wicked new stuff all the time. I had to. Otherwise I didn’t get any ‘wows’, nobody would get me going. Often I’d 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.

  My first club was called MBI, Malmö Ball and Sporting Association. I was just six years old when I started. We played on a gravel pitch behind some green shacks, and I would ride to training sessions on stolen bikes and probably wasn’t all that well-behaved. The coaches sent me home a couple of times, and I would shout and swear back at them. I constantly heard, “Pass the ball, Zlatan!” That annoyed me, and I felt like a fish out of water. At MBI there were immigrant kids as well as Swedes, and many of the parents would grumble about my tricks from the estate. I told them to go to hell and changed clubs many times before I ended up at the FBK Balkan club. That was something else!

  At MBI, the Swedish dads would stand around and call out, “Come on, lads. Good work!”

  At Balkan it was more like: “I’ll do your mum up the arse.” They were mental Yugoslavians who smoked like chimneys and flung their boots about, and I thought, “Great, just like at home. I love it here!” The coach was a Bosnian. He’d played at a pretty high level down in Yugoslavia, and he became a sort of father figure to us. Sometimes he’d drive us home, and he’d give me a few kronor for an ice cream or something to take care of my hunger.

  I stood in goal for a while. I don’t know why. Maybe I had flown into a rage at the old goalkeeper and said something like, “You’re useless, I could do it better myself.” I’m sure it was something like that. But there was one match where I let in a load of goals, and I went mental. I roared that everyone was shit. That football was shit. That the whole world was useless, and I was going to take up ice hockey instead:

  “Hockey is way better, you arseholes! I’m gonna be a hockey pro! Get bent!”

  That was it. I looked into all that stuff about ice hockey and thought, shit! All the kit you needed! A proper protective suit! It cost a bomb. So the only thing to do was knuckle down and carry on with that crap, football. But I stopped being the goalkeeper and came up into the forward line, and I got to be pretty awesome.

  One day, we had a match, and I wasn’t there. Everybody was shouting, where’s Zlatan? Where’s Zlatan? It was just a few minutes before kick-off, and I bet the coach and my teammates wanted to strangle me. “Where is he? How the hell can he not turn up for such an important match?” Then they caught sight of a character who was pedalling like mad on a stolen bike, heading straight for the coach. Was that nutter going to crash into him? No, I skidded to a stop in the gravel right in front of the coach and ran straight onto the pitch. I gather the coach was absolutely furious.

  He got gravel in his eyes. He got completely splattered. But he let me play, and I assume we won. We were a good gang. One time I got pulled up for some other crap, and I was put on the bench for the first half. Our team was down, 4–0, against a bunch of snobs from Vellinge, it was the brown kids versus the posh kids, and there was loads of aggression in the air. I was so mad I was about to explode. How could that idiot put me on the bench?

  “Are you stupid?” I asked the coach.

  “Calm down. You’ll come back on soon.”

  I came on in the second half and scored eight goals. We won 8–5 and taunted the rich kids, and sure, I was good. I was technical and could see chances all the time. On the pitch at Mum’s I had become a little master at coming up with unexpected moves in tight spaces. Even so, I’m sick of all the people who go round quacking, “I saw straight away that Zlatan would turn into something special, blah blah blah. I practically taught him everything he knows. He was my best mate.” That’s bullshit.

  Nobody said anything. Not as much as they said afterwards, anyway. No big clubs came knocking on the door. I was a snot-nosed kid. There was no, “Oh, we’ve got to be nice to this little talent.” It was more like, “Who let the brown kid in?” and even then I was really inconsistent. I could score eight goals in one match and then fail to come up with anything in the next.

  I hung out a lot with a guy called Tony Flygare. We had the same teacher for our community language lessons. His mum and dad are from the Balkans too, and he was something of a tough guy as well. He didn’t live in Rosengård, but nearby in a street called Vitemöllegatan. We were both born in the same year, but his birthday is in January and mine is in October, and that did make a difference. He was bigger and stronger, and he was seen as a bigger footballing talent than me. There was a lot of attention on Tony: “Check him out, what a player!” and I ended up being overshadowed by him a bit. Maybe that was a good thing, I dunno. I had to grit my teeth and fight as the underdog. But like I said, in those days I was no big name.

  I was a wild kid, a terror, and I really had no control over my temper. I carried on blowing my stack at players and referees, and I kept changing clubs the whole time. I played for Balkan. I came back to MBI and then to Balkan again and then to the BK Flagg club. It was all a mess, and nobody exactly gave me a lift to training sessions, and sometimes I’d look over at the parents on the sidelines.

  My dad was never there, either among the Yugos or the Swedes, and I don’t really know how that made me feel. That’s just how it was. I looked after myself. I’d got used to it. But maybe it did hurt. I can’t really tell. You just get used to the circumstances in your life, and I didn’t think too much about that. Dad was the way he was. He was hopeless. He was amazing. He was up and down. I didn’t count on him, not the way other people count on their parents. But sure, I did hope sometimes. Like, bloody hell, imagine if he’d seen that wicked move, that awesome Brazilian piece? I mean, Dad had periods when he was totally committed. He wanted me to become a lawyer.

  I can’t claim I thought very much of that idea. In my circles, people didn’t exactly go on to become lawyers. We did crazy stuff and dreamt of becoming tough guys, and we didn’t exactly get much parental support – there was no, “Shall I explain the history of Sweden to you?” There were beer cans and Yugo music and empty fridges and the Balkan War. But sometimes, you know, he’d take the time and chat about football with me, and I was over the moon every time. I mean, he was my dad, and one day he came up to me – I’ll never forget this, there was something formal in the air:

  “Zlatan, it’s time you started playing for a big club.”

  “What do you mean, a big club? What’s a big club?”

  “A good team, Zlatan. A top squad, like Malmö FF!”

  I don’t think I really understood.

  What was so special about Malmö FF? I didn’t know anything about that kind of thing, about what was worthwhile and what wasn’t. But I knew of the club. I’d played against them with Balkan so I thought, why not? If Dad says so. But I had no idea where the football stadium was, or anything else in the city for that matter. Malmö might not have been far away. But it was another world. I would turn seventeen before I went into the city centre, and I knew nothing of life there.
But I learned the way into the training sessions, and I rode there in, like, 30 minutes with my kit in a supermarket carrier bag, and of course I was nervous. At Malmö FF it was serious. No more of the usual, come on and play, lads! Here you had to go through tryouts and qualify, and I noticed straight away that I wasn’t like the rest of them. I got ready to pack up my stuff and head home. But already on the second day, I heard these words from a coach called Nils:

  “Welcome to the team.”

  “Are you serious?” I was 13 then, and there were a couple of other foreigners there already, including Tony. Otherwise it was just regular Swedes, including the kind from the posh suburbs. I felt like I was from Mars. Not just because my dad didn’t have a big, fancy house and never turned up at matches. I talked differently. I dribbled the ball. I would go off like a bomb, and I took a beating on the pitch. Once I got a yellow card because I bawled out my teammates.

  “You can’t do that!” the referee said.

  “You can go to hell, too,” I roared and cleared off.

  Things started smouldering among the Swedes. Their parents wanted me out of there, and I thought for the thousandth time, I don’t give a damn about them. I’ll change to another team again. Or I’ll start doing taekwondo instead. That’s cooler. Football is shit. Some idiot father of somebody in the team went round with a petition. “Zlatan must leave the club,” it said, and all kinds of people signed that thing. They smuggled it round, saying “Zlatan doesn’t belong here. He’s got to be chucked out! Sign here, blah blah blah.”