Sam Wallace on the making of Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Ahead of a first English cup final, Sam Wallace travels to the Swede’s home town and discovers how he overcame poverty – and more talented teammates – to set himself on the road to stardom
In a restaurant in Malmo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s childhood friend Tony Flygare is feeding spaghetti to his twoyear-old daughter and explaining in detail just how much Manchester United’s world-famous No 9 owes to his upbringing in the Swedish city, even 16 years since he left. “I was the big star. I played for the junior national teams and when I came back after the games I was wearing that badge on my tracksuit and it set off fireworks in Zlatan. He wanted everything that I had. I told him I would come to Malmo [the city’s big club] and take his place in the youth team and I did. That was the case for five years – as he has said, I overshadowed him.” This is Malmo in 2017, and still the argument rages over the legacy of the striker who, at 35, and on another red-hot goalscoring streak, will play his first cup final in England at Wembley tomorrow. Which of his junior teams deserve the solidarity payments due from Uefa? And was Ibrahimovic right to accuse Malmo of exploiting him in the deal to sell him to Ajax in 2001? The man himself had his say in his bestselling autobiography I Am Zlatan published in 2011, and visiting the places of his childhood, brought to life in the vivid early chapters, it can be hard to reconcile the volcanic author with the quiet Swedish city. Rosengard, the suburb populated by immigrant families that Ibrahimovic called home, is in parts a shrine to its most famous son. While Malmo admit they might not have their new stadium were it not for his £7.4 million sale to Ajax. As for Ibrahimovic, he has never forgiven his hometown club, or rather the then-sport director Hasse Borg, for what the player alleges was a stitch-up over his contract that made him the lowest paid player at Ajax and caused him to engage the services of super-agent Mino Raiola. Flygare has a view on that, too. “If it wasn’t for Hasse Borg, Zlatan wouldn’t be where he is, he would be sitting here next to me. I can’t understand why he hates Hasse Borg. He did everything in his power to make Zlatan’s career. He told Zlatan he would make so much money one day he would never be able to spend it all. It should be me talking s--- about Hasse Borg. He forced me out because he couldn’t handle Tony and Zlatan together. We were crazy guys.”
Their story, or rather Zlatan’s story, begins at apartment 87, Cronmans vag 5a, Rosengard, where he first lived with his mother Jurka and sister Sanela. The apartment is unoccupied now, preserved like a museum and opened by the caretaker every Wednesday so local schoolchildren can sit on Zlatan’s bed or at the table where Zlatan would joke family life was so harsh they would shout at each other, “Get the milk, a--hole!”.
From the window they can see the Zlatan Court, paid for by Nike and built on the sand pitch where he honed his skills, obsessed with Ronaldo and Romario to the extent that when he first met goalkeeper Thomas Ravelli he had no idea who Sweden’s 1994 World Cup hero was.
A short distance away, in his office at FC Rosengard, sits the 57-year-old Ivica Kurtovic, surrounded by the trophies won by the club, including Malmo’s “Immigrants’ Cup”. Kurtovic is the fresh-faced coach on the team group picture from a five-a-side competition won by a side including Ibrahimovic and Flygare.
That team was FBK Balkan, a local club for whom Kurtovic – of Croat heritage – established the youth structure in the early 1990s. Since 2008 he has been in charge of FC Rosengard, formed in part from Malmo Sports, who were another of the young Ibrahimovic’s clubs.
Why is this important? Because being a former Zlatan team is worth money to clubs trying to provide football for boys and girls from poor families. FC Rosengard and FBK Balkan, as well as third club, BK Flagg, are still in dispute over who is due the solidarity payments accrued from Ibrahimovic’s many big-money transfers.
It is a relatively tiny amount, relating to one year up to just after his 12th birthday in October 1993. But Kurtovic is upset that Malmo, the big professional club whom Ibrahimovic joined aged 12 have earned millions in these payments over the years. FBK Balkan say they are due all the estimated 100,000 kronor [£9,000] from the time in question. The Swedish football association, Kurtovic says, has been no help. It would be easy to resolve had the records of boys’ football not been destroyed in an office flood years ago.
Ibrahimovic paints an often bleak picture of life in Rosengard. His father, Sefik was a heavy drinker later haunted by the destruction of his Bosnian hometown Bijeljina by Serb paramilitaries. Jurka struggled to look after her children and was arrested for handling stolen goods. Zlatan himself often went hungry. He fostered a deep resentment of the wealthy Swedish boys he played football against with their doting fathers and expensive boots.
Kurtovic is a kind, sympathetic man and he is clear-eyed about that time. “I see Zlatan as he was, like all the kids – a great big talent struggling to get through everyday problems. He had problems with his family. It was the same for a lot of kids. Maybe his were extremely
‘They didn’t see anything in Zlatan. I would be the star. It was like, Zlatan is good but he can win a silver medal’
bad with not a lot of money. Maybe he had less than others but there were no big fortunes around here.”
Kurtovic says that “today people want to make him [Zlatan] everything”. He adds: “I don’t think that’s right but maybe he enjoys that picture. If something stuck out about him then he was determined. He would put his head where others wouldn’t dare to put a finger.
“He knew what he wanted and he was not afraid of that. He had no more talent than others. I had a group of them. You have to have more than that. What people often forget is that he worked hard for it. I would be cycling home and he would be there, under the one street light, with the ball trying to find a new way to do a trick. People forget that.”
Kurtovic is not the only one who says that Ibrahimovic went through a major growth spurt as a teenager that changed him dramatically and which also meant that he briefly lost his sense of co-ordination.
He took up karate at the local Enighet club and that helped him but there was a time in his midteens when Zlatan told his coaches at Malmo that he would quit football.
Ola Gallstad, the assistant youth team coach at Malmo during Ibrahimovic’s years there, remembers that time. Gallstad has been at the club since he was a teenage youth team player and, now 45, he is Malmo’s event manager. “Zlatan had some problems when his football was not good,” he says. “He said that if he couldn’t play at the highest level he wouldn’t play at all. He had such a high level every day. He was such a talent.”
Gallstad is the coach from whom Ibrahimovic famously stole a bicycle. As a teenager he was a compulsive bike thief and one day, “hungry and impatient” saw it standing outside the stadium. Even he tells this story in his autobiography with a little sheepishness, realising he had overstepped the mark.
Gallstad laughs about it. His recollection was that Ibrahimovic took it from inside the dressing room. “Everybody asks me, ‘Did you have a lot of problems with Zlatan?’ It’s a process. When you have young players you have many problems. Zlatan? He was not an extreme problem.”
Gallstad admits that when Malmo sold Ibrahimovic to Ajax the club needed the money. He could have left when they were relegated in 1999, the nadir for Sweden’s all-time most successful club. The finances were shot, but they turned it around and in 2009 moved into their new Swedbank Stadium. There was a pivotal moment towards the end of Malmo’s relegation season when they were awarded a penalty in a game against Halmstads.
Already trailing, senior Malmo players refused to take responsibility and instead Flygare stepped up, but missed.
The one thing he and Ibrahimovic agree on is that it was a sliding doors moment. “Tony,” Ibrahimovic wrote later, “ended up in the freezer.”
“From that moment it was like Zlatan got wings,” Flygare says. “It was a feeling of life and death.”
In the Swedish second division, Ibrahimovic became the team’s star and leading goalscorer and after a few games back in the top tier, he was sold. Flygare never played for Malmo again.
Flygare says the two boys first met in a class in which they were being taught Serbo-Croat. “Zlatan was always saying, ‘I speak this better than you, you are not a real Balkan guy’. ”
Indeed, there seemed no end to their competitiveness. “My idol was Alan Shearer,” Flygare says, “Zlatan joked with me that English football was so boring.”
Flygare ended up writing a book, Once I Was Bigger Than Zlatan. He has also overcome a gambling problem. He has not
‘Zlatan would put his head where others wouldn’t dare put a finger’
seen Ibrahimovic since the two of them were 19 but even now the rivalry seems real for him. “My mother had it really tough,” Flygare says, “she came here when she was 15, she had two children on her own and then a third ‘child’, which was Zlatan. She raised me and my sister and also had Zlatan under her wing. I heard him say I earned good money off his name. Come on, when I was hanging out with him, he was like my little brother.
“I would like to say he learned a lot of things from me – a lot which wasn’t good but a lot which helped him in his career. It is the winning mentality.”
Flygare alleges that the Malmo youth team manager of the time Johnny Gyllensjo “couldn’t handle two foreign guys in the same team, big egos, big problems” and that his own career was subsequently sacrificed.
“Write that down,” he urges me. He is warming to his theme now. “They didn’t see anything in Zlatan, I would be the big star. It was like ‘Zlatan is also good but he can take the silver medal’. ”
For all this Flygare is not a bitter man, just a straight talker astonished now at how fine the margins are between success and failure. He is on paternity leave caring for his daughter and there is one last thing he will say about his old friend.
“Zlatan doesn’t look back. He only looks forward. I respect him for thinking that way. He wouldn’t be a top player otherwise. He doesn’t care if it is me or anyone else. He will crush us all.”