Few players carry themselves like Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
He’s all things. A once-in-a-generation athlete, a supernova ego, and a seemingly
immortal player. But he’s also the game’s pre-eminent hero character. He’s brash,
clever and brilliant, playful, dark and sincere. And he is almost certainly the last of his
kind.
Zlatan inhabits a territory all of his own.
But how?
An interesting piece of trivia is that Ibrahimovic has never actually finished in the top-three
of the Ballon d’Or voting.
Long before the Messi and Ronaldo duopoly, which has accounted for the last decade, there
was always a Kaka, an original Ronaldo or a Shevchenko ahead of him. And, while he may
have won league titles in Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands, he has never won the
Champions League and nor did he and the Swedish national team ever leave much of a mark in
international football.
And yet somehow that seems beside the point.
When he arrived at the LA Galaxy in the Spring of 2018, a full-page advert ran in the LA
Times to announce his signing. Dear Los Angeles, it read, “you’re welcome”.
Later in the year, the credit card company Visa ran an advertising campaign targeted
around the World Cup. In it, Ibrahimovic – who had retired from international football and
was no longer part of the Swedish squad – mockingly promised to enter the tournament by himself,
in an attempt to save the fans from a World Cup without him.
Both incidents were typical of brand Zlatan and, of course, a few eyes rolled. At around
the same period, his image became entwined with the lion iconography which was becoming
his trademark and – again – it’s the kind of behaviour that almost any other athlete
would be ridiculed for.
True, “Zlatan” is a role Ibrahimovic plays with a wink and a smile, but modern footballers
are generally taught to treat ego as kryptonite. It doesn’t make their public attempts at
humility any less hilarious, but that is still the rule. He, though, wears his self-regard
like a crown – and the public love him for it.
And it’s interesting to consider why – or how it is that he’s able to court that affection.
Having emerged at Malmo and cost Ajax a then-record €8.7m, Ibrahimovic’s ascent into the game’s
stratosphere began to accelerate. For eight straight seasons, beginning in 2003 and ending
in 2011, a team containing Ibrahimovic won a domestic league title. In chronological
order: one with Ajax, two at Juventus, three at Inter Milan, one at Barcelona and then,
finally, one while on-loan at AC Milan.
The impression created – and which grew over time - was two-fold: first, of Ibrahimovic
as a deliverer of guaranteed success. But – secondly – of a transient player, who
was nobody’s possession.
At the time, mobility between top, sometimes rival clubs wasn’t especially rare – particularly
in Italy. Ibrahimovic, however, was not only one of the last players to tread that path,
he was also unusually consistent – everywhere he went, whichever colours he wore, he would
score the same goals, endow the same success, and garnish his teams with the same blend
of force and technical flair.
That style is important, too. Culturally, he is a player without lineage. Leo Messi’s
technical profile is very obviously of a South American raised in Spain. Similarly, Cristiano
Ronaldo’s Iberian trickery is enabled by the physicality preached as law in English
football. The reality is never quite that neat but, in the abstract at least, most players
have roots.
Ibrahimovic less so – or at least those he does have lead back to the concrete. His
range of abilities aren’t typical of any particular region or area, nor of any philosophy.
He grew up playing street and neighbourhood football, where the premiums were expression,
strength and imagination and that never changed. He never acquired any of the identifying,
big club gloss and that makes him more of a global commodity.
It allows him to belong to football as a whole.
And his off-the-pitch personality, however much of an embellishment it may or may not
be, reflects that. His range is extraordinary. Not just the number of products he endorses,
but the different personalities he employs to be engaging and which are accepted as authentic.
For Volvo, he hunted in the wilderness. As epithets played over a moody soundtrack, he
stalked his prey with a cocked rifle. He dove into icy lakes, held his children in his mighty
arms and, of course, drove fearlessly through the rocky terrain in impenetrable fog.
For Xbox, he sat on a white throne in a cavernous mansion, challenging opponents to games of
FIFA which he would play with one hand on the controller. It was self-deprecating and
fun.
For Nike, he was deadly serious as the star of their Dare to Zlatan series. He juggled
footballs in fiery hell. He defeated a blue-eyed tiger in the Arctic and he dribbled a cannonball
between lightning strikes in the desert.
And many, many others, in which he’s mortal or otherwise.
His autobiography is much-maligned – it’s often depicted as a work of fiction. In reality,
it’s a subtle portrait which describes the difficulties of life as a second-generation
immigrant, the gift of an unbelievable talent, and also the realities of unimaginable fame.
Like much of his career, it shows Ibrahimovic as a fascinating contradiction.
He is both a fantasy character from a bedroom wall, and also the child of refugees forced
to flee the war in the former Yugoslavia. And perhaps that great distance explains why
he was able to be all things to the game, all at the same time.
The fiery enigma. The generational talent. The icon. The unstable element. The provocateur and the performing ego.