I Am Zlatan Read online

  “Have a look at this. This is what I’ve drawn up for you,” he said, and I looked down at the papers. It said a hundred and sixty thousand kronor a month, which was definitely a lot of money – it was like, wow, am I gonna get that? But I had no clue whether it was a good rate on the market, and I said so.

  “Is that good?”

  “Damn right it’s good,” said Hasse. “It’s four times what you’re earning now,” and I thought, okay, I’m sure he’s right, I guess it is a lot of money, and I could sense how tense he was.

  “Go for it,” I said.

  “Brilliant, Zlatan! Congratulations!” Then he went out, saying he was going to negotiate a little, and when he came back in he was beaming with pride. It was like he’d just closed the greatest deal in the world.

  “They’ll stump up for your new Mercedes as well, they’ll pay for it,” he added. I thought that was awesome too, and replied, “Wow, cool.”

  But I still knew nothing else about the deal, didn’t even consider that the part about the car was just small potatoes to them – because really, do you think I was prepared for those negotiations?

  Was I, hell. I didn’t know a thing about what football players earned or what gets deducted in tax in the Netherlands, and I really didn’t have anyone who was speaking for me or representing my interests. I was nineteen years old and came from Rosengård. I knew nothing about the world. I had about as much of a clue as Cecilia out there, and as you know, I thought Hasse Borg was my friend, sort of like my second dad. I never realised that he had only one thing on his mind: earning money for the club, and in fact, it was only much later that I even grasped what that pumped-up vibe in the room was all about. But of course, the men in suits were still in the middle of their negotiations.

  They hadn’t decided on a price for me yet, and the whole reason they called me in was because it’s obviously easier to agree a transfer if you sign the player and set his salary first, because then you know what sort of money you’re talking about, and if you’re so slick that you make sure the bloke gets paid less than anybody else in the whole team then it’s easier to get a fat sum for him. So in short, it was a strategic game and I was sacrificed. But I had no idea then. I just strolled out into the foyer and even gave a little shout of joy or something, and I think I was really good at keeping my mouth shut. The only person I told was my dad, and he was smart enough to have his doubts about the whole thing. He just didn’t trust people. But as for me, I just let it happen, and the following day I went up to Borås to play with the Under-21 national side against Macedonia. It was a qualifying match for the UEFA European Championship and my debut with the Swedish youth squad, and it should have been a major thing. But my mind was obviously on other things, and I remember I met with Hasse Borg and Leo Beenhakker again and signed the contract. They had finished their negotiations by then.

  But we still had to keep it secret until two o’clock that afternoon when the news would be announced in the Netherlands, and I found out that a whole load of agents from abroad had come to town to check me out. But they’d come too late. I was set for Ajax. I was walking on air, and I asked Hasse Borg, “How much was I sold for?” and the answer – I’ll never forget it.

  He had to repeat it. It was like I couldn’t comprehend it, and maybe he gave the figure in guilders first, and I wasn’t familiar with that currency. But then I realised how much it was, and I just completely lost it.

  All right, I had been hoping for a record sum. I’d wanted to go for more than John Carew, but it was something else to see it written down in black and white. It was mind-boggling. Eighty-five fucking million kronor! But above all, no Swede, no Scandinavian, not even Henke Larsson, not even John Carew, had been sold for anywhere near that much, and of course I realised it would get reported all over. I wasn’t unfamiliar with publicity.

  But even so, when I bought the papers the following day – it was completely insane. It was a Zlatan orgy in the press. It was the guy with the golden shorts. It was Zlatan the Incredible. It was Zlatan this and Zlatan that, and I read and savoured it, and I remembered when me and Chippen and Kennedy Bakircioglü from the national youth squad went out for something to eat in Borås. We were sitting there in a café having a soft drink and a pastry, when suddenly some girls around our age came up, and one of them said, sort of shy, “Are you the eighty-five million kronor guy?” I mean, what can you say to something like that?

  “Yep,” I said, “that’s me.” My mobile was ringing constantly.

  People were sucking up to me and congratulating me and generally being envious – all except one, that is: Mum. She was absolutely beside herself. “My God, Zlatan, what’s happened?” she wailed. “Have you been abducted? Have you gone and died?” She’d seen me on TV and hadn’t really caught what they were saying, and of course what normally happens if you’re from Rosengård and end up in the media, it usually means bad news.

  “It’s all right, Mum. I’ve just been sold to Ajax,” I told her, and then she got angry instead. “Why didn’t you say anything? Why do we have to find out about these things from the TV?”

  But she calmed down – I find it really touching when I think about it – and the next day John Steen Olsen and I headed down to the Netherlands, and I was wearing that pink sweater and the brown leather jacket, which were the coolest clothes I owned, and I gave a press conference in Amsterdam. There was a massive commotion with photographers and journalists sitting and lying all over the place, and I was beaming. I looked down. 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, like: what kind of shit is this? Beenhakker gave me the number 9 shirt, which had been worn by van Basten.

  It was almost too much, and in the midst of all this some guys were making a documentary about me and Malmö FF entitled Blådårar (‘Blue Maniacs’), and they came along to Amsterdam and filmed me with the club’s sponsor in a Mitsubishi car showroom, and I’m walking round in my brown leather jacket and checking out all the cars.

  “It’s weird to just come in here and pick one. But I guess you get used to it,” I say, and then grin.

  It was that first, amazing feeling that anything was possible. It was a fairy tale, it really was, spring was in the air and I went out to the Ajax home ground and stood there in the empty stand, thinking, with a lollipop in my mouth, and all the while the journalists were getting more and more out of control. They ran the story about the ghetto kid who got the chance to live his dream, and the next day they wrote about how Zlatan had got a taste for life as a pro and a life of luxury, and this was when the Allsvenskan season was about to start. Hasse Borg had made a deal that I would stay at Malmö FF for another six months, so I went straight back to the training ground from Amsterdam. It was a little chilly that day, I remember.

  I’d just had a haircut and I was happy and hadn’t seen my teammates in a while. But now they were all just sat there in the locker room with newspapers on their laps, reading about me and my ‘life of luxury’. There’s a scene in the film. I stride in, laughing, take off my jacket and give a little shout of joy, a wild little ‘yee-ha’ and they look up. I almost feel sorry for them.

  They all look miserable. Of course, they’re all green with envy, and worst of all is Hasse Mattisson, the one who fought with me at Gunnilse. He looks totally destroyed, but still, he’s a sound bloke. He’s the team captain and he means well. He makes an attempt: “I’ve gotta say, congratulations. That’s brilliant! Might as well seize the chance,” he says, but he’s fooling no one – least of all the camera.

  The camera pans from his sad eyes to me, and I’m sitting there on the bench beaming, happy as a little kid, and maybe, I dunno, I might have been a little manic during those days. Stuff had to be happening all the time. I wanted action, more action. Like, keep the drama and the show going, and that’s why I did a whole load of stupid stuff. I got blond
streaks in my hair, and I got engaged, not that it was such a dumb thing to get engaged to Mia. She was a nice girl, she was studying web design and she was blonde and pretty, and she was going places. We’d met in Cyprus the previous summer, where she was working in some bar, and we exchanged phone numbers and started hanging out together in Sweden and having fun together. But the engagement was kind of a whirlwind thing, and because I wasn’t experienced in dealing with the media yet, I told Rune Smith from the Kvällsposten tabloid about it. That’s the one where he asked, “What did she get for an engagement present?”

  “Whaddaya mean, present? She got Zlatan.”

  She got Zlatan!

  It was the kind of remark that just popped out, that sounded cocky, totally in line with my media image, and that one still gets dredged up all the time. The only thing was, a few weeks later, Mia got nothing. I broke off the engagement because a mate had convinced me that you have to get married within a year, and I was just generally doing a lot of impulsive things. I was on fast-forward. There was too much happening around me. Our Allsvenskan season opener was approaching, and as you can imagine, that was where I was supposed to show I was worth those eighty-five million kronor. The previous day Anders Svensson and Kim Källström had scored two goals in their Allsvenskan season openers, and people were saying I wouldn’t be able to cope with my new star status. Maybe I was just an overhyped teenager. As often happened in those years, they were saying that I’d just been built up by the media, and I felt I had to perform. It was a lot to deal with, and I remember that Malmö Stadium was reaching boiling point. It was the ninth of April, 2001.

  I had my blue Merc convertible and was as proud of it as anything. But when Rune Smith interviewed me before the match, I didn’t want to be photographed with it. I didn’t want to seem too cocky. It felt like it would just come back and bite me on the arse, and I was hearing some concerns: the pressure would get too big, and stuff, and that wasn’t all that easy to deal with. I was nineteen, and everything had happened so fast. Still, I got a buzz from it. Things were on another level now. But that feeling of wanting to get back at everybody who hadn’t believed in me and circulated petitions and everything else was something I’d had for a long time. I’d been driven by revenge and rage ever since I started playing, and now there were tons of expectations and concerns hanging in the air. We were going to be playing AIK. That was no easy opener.

  The last time we’d played them we were humiliated and got relegated to the second division. Now, ahead of this season, many people saw AIK as one of the favourites to win the Allsvenskan League, and really, what were we? We’d just come out of the Superettan without even leading the league. Even so, people thought the pressure was on us, and they were saying it was mainly down to me, the eighty-five million kronor kid. The stands were packed at Malmö Stadium, nearly 20,000 people were there, and as I ran out through the long tunnel with the blue floor towards the pitch I could hear the roar outside. This was big, I realised, this was our return to the Allsvenskan, and yet it was almost incomprehensible.

  There was a sea of banners and placards in there, and as we lined up, they were shouting something I couldn’t hear at first. It was ‘We love Malmö,’ and my name as well. It was like a giant chorus, and the banners said things like, ‘Good luck Zlatan’ and I just stood there on the pitch and soaked everything in with my hand to my ear, like, give me more, give me more. To be honest, all the doubters were right about one thing at least. The stage was set for a flop. It was too much.

  The starting whistle went at a quarter to nine, and the roar got even louder. In those days the main thing wasn’t scoring goals. It was the show, the artistry, everything I’d been practising over and over again, and early on I forged a tunnel towards an AIK defender and managed a few dribbles. Then I faded out of the action and AIK took command of the match with one chance after another, and for a long time it didn’t look good for us. Maybe I wanted too much. That was something I was aware of even then. If you want too much, it’s easy to get stuck.

  But I tried to ease up, and in the thirtieth minute I got the ball outside the penalty area off Peter Sörensen. It didn’t feel like a brilliant chance at first. But I feinted. I backheeled the ball and advanced, and shot a broadside into the goal and my God, it hit me like a punch – here comes the explosion, now it’s happening, and I went down on my knees in a goal celebration as the entire stadium roared, ‘Zlatan, Zlatan, SuperZlatan’ and all kinds of stuff. After that it was as if I was being carried aloft.

  I did one fancy move after another, and in the ninth minute of the second half I got another nice ball from Sörensen. I was on the right side and rushed down towards the goal line. It didn’t look suitable for making a shot, not at all, and everybody was thinking, he’ll make an assist, he’ll pass it. But I made a shot at goal. From that impossible angle, I got the ball in and the spectators went absolutely nuts. I walked across the pitch really slowly with my arms stretched wide, and that face I made! That’s power. That’s: Here I am, you bastards who just complained and tried to get me to give up football.

  It was revenge, it was pride, and I imagine everybody who’d thought the eighty-five million kronor was too high a price was eating their words now, and I’ll never forget the journalists afterwards. The atmosphere was electric, and one of them said:

  “If I say the names Anders Svensson and Kim Källström, what do you have to say?”

  “I say Zlatan, Zlatan,” and people laughed and I stepped out into the spring evening, and there was my Mercedes convertible, and it was amazing.

  But it took me a long time to reach my car. There were kids everywhere who wanted my autograph, so I spent ages doing that – nobody should be left out, that was part of my philosophy. I had to give something back, and only afterwards did I climb into my new car and blast out of there while the fans screamed and waved their autograph books, and that would have been plenty. But it wasn’t over yet. That was just the beginning, and the next day the newspapers came out, and what do you think? Did they write anything?

  They wrote bloody reams.

  Back when we crashed out of the Allsvenskan, apparently I’d said, “I want people to forget me. Nobody should know I exist. Then when we’re back, I’ll strike down on the pitch like a bolt of lightning,” and the papers dug up that quote.

  I became the bolt of lightning that struck. I was the most amazing thing and people even started talking about Zlatan Fever in Sweden. I was everywhere, in every branch of the media, and people were saying it wasn’t just young kids and teenagers reading. It was little old ladies at the post office, it was old men at the off-licence, and I heard jokes like, “Alright, how are things? How you doing?” “I think I’ve caught Zlatan Fever.” I was walking on air. It was absolutely incredible. Some guys even recorded a song that swept the nation. It was played everywhere. People had it as the ringtone on their phones: Oh hiya, Zlatan and me, we’re from the same town, they sang, and I mean, how do you deal with something like that? They’re singing about you. But sure, there was another side to it all as well, and I saw that in our third fixture in the Allsvenskan. It was the twenty-first of April. It was in Stockholm, where we were away to Djurgården.

  Djurgården were the team that had been relegated to the Superettan along with us and who also made it back up at the same time – Djurgården won the league and we finished second, and to be honest, they had really trounced us in the Superettan, first by 2–0 and then 4–0, so in that sense they definitely had the psychological advantage. But still, we’d beaten both AIK and Elfsborg 2–0 in our first matches, and above all, Malmö FF had me. Everybody was going, Zlatan, Zlatan – I was hotter than volcanic lava, and people were saying that Lars Lagerbäck, the coach of the Swedish national team, was sitting in the stands to observe me.

  But of course, even more people were worked up now: what the hell’s so special about that guy? One of the tabloids got hold of Djurgården’s
entire defending line-up. They were three burly blokes, I remember, standing with their arms folded in the centre spread underneath the headline: ‘We’re the ones planning to put a stop to Zlatan the over-hyped diva’, and I guess I was expecting a really nasty atmosphere on the pitch. There were reputations at stake, so of course there was going to be a lot of trash-talking, but a shiver still went over me when I came on at Stockholm Stadium.

  The Djurgården fans were seething with hatred, or if it wasn’t hatred, at least it was the worst mindgames I’ve ever experienced: “We hate Zlatan, we hate Zlatan!” It was thundering all round me. The entire arena was baiting me, and I heard a bunch of other chants, loads of nasty shit about me and my mum.

  I’d never experienced anything like it, and okay, I could understand it in a way. The fans couldn’t run down and play ball themselves, so what could they do? They targeted the best player from the opposing side, tried to break me, I suppose it’s only natural. That’s how it is in football. But this crossed the line, and I was furious. I’d show them, and in a way I played more against the spectators than against the actual team. But just like in the match against AIK, it took a while before I got into the game.

  I was tightly marked. I had those leeches from the newspaper on me, and Djurgården dominated for the first twenty minutes. We’d just bought in a guy from Nigeria. Peter Ijeh was his name, and he had a reputation as a brilliant goal-scorer. He would lead the league in goal scoring the following year. But at this point he was still in my shadow. Well, who wasn’t? In the 21st minute he got a pass from Daniel Majstorović, our centre back, who would later become a good friend of mine.

  Peter Ijeh made it 1–0, and then in the 68th minute he made a nice through pass to Joseph Elanga, the other African recruit we’d made that year, and Elanga managed to see off a defender and shoot 2–0. The spectators booed hysterically, they yelled, and of course, I was useless, I was no good. I hadn’t made any goals, just like those defenders had said I wouldn’t, and sure, up to that point I hadn’t been particularly good.