The Zlatan Appreciation Thread

[The Infamous]

yeah it was questionable at the time but i was proved right. called it way back in rwd days

 

sheva was the best striker at the time but ZI had everything his assists and goals made him the best striker in europe from ages ago

 

i said hes better than rooney as well way back and people thought i was trolling. happy how their careers have gone in polar opposite directions

[O Fenomeno]

Whoever the flavour of the month at that time in the prem is always better than Ibra

Torres

Rooney

RVP

Suarez

Etc etc

[Black.]

Never them man can't even lace his boots

[Creed Diskenth]

Never them man can't even lace his boots

[Thizz]

[Benicio del Toney]

lol

 

 

Ibra >>>>>

[Heero Yuy]

Legend

[Creed Diskenth]

lol

 

 

Ibra >>>>>

[Davicious X]

Loool if that trick worked the defender was doomed

[Sinister]

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic: A modern fairy tale

 

The boy from the ghetto has not merely become a great footballer - he has become a modern European fairytale.

 

 

I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic

(With David Lagercrantz)

Penguin, 352pp, £8.99

 

“Is there a more debased literary currency than footballers’ autobiographies?” the sociologist of football David Goldblatt once asked. Fans long to know about players’ lives behind the headlines, and yet you close Ashley Cole’s My Defence feeling dirty and stupid for having read it. Wayne Rooney’s attempts so far (for which HarperCollins paid £5m) read as if written by an eight-year-old for nine-year-olds.

What’s more, to paraphrase Woody Allen, not only is the food terrible but the portions are so small: few players write autobiographies any longer. Their clubs discourage them from speaking and they no longer need the money from tell-all books.

However, the genre may now be entering a golden age. “The Secret Footballer”, writing anonymously in the Guardian, offers lucid sociological accounts of dressing-room life. Arsenal’s former forward Dennis Bergkamp is about to publish a memoir that promises to be intelligent. And I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, perhaps the best recent autobiography by a footballer, has at last appeared in English.

Zlatan, as he is usually known, is a giant Swede with a ballet dancer’s feet. He has won the league title in nine of his past ten seasons, with clubs in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France. During his present stint at Paris Saint-Germain, the verb zlataner – which more or less means “to crush” – has entered the French language. Last year he scored four goals for Sweden in a game against England. But his book shows that he has an interesting mind, too.

Within two months of publication in 2011, Jag är Zlatan Ibrahimovic had sold 500,000 hardback copies in Swedish. By now millions of copies of the book have been sold in over 20 countries. What readers respond to is, first of all, the authentic voice (captured perfectly by the ghostwriter, David Lagercrantz). Like Diego Maradona in his compelling autobiography, Zlatan calls things as he sees them – often to his detriment.

To write the book, he reflects: “I had to go back in my memory, and sh*t, I realised I hadn’t always been a good person.” Yet the onetime bicycle thief and school bully isn’t presented in a vacuum. Zlatan tells an immigrant’s tale that resonates across Europe as he guides us through the milieu of toplevel football.

His parents, a violent Croatian charwoman and a drunken Bosnian janitor, separated when he was two. He was raised in Rosengård, a deprived area of Malmö. Almost everyone around him was an immigrant, so he grew up knowing almost nothing about Sweden. He never watched Swedish TV, didn’t visit the city centre until he was nearly 17, and lusted from afar after the blonde Swedish girls who lived in actual houses somewhere far from Rosengård. He imagined their parents saying, “Darling, could you please pass me the milk?”, or “Do you need any help with your Swedish history?”. His own relatives mostly exchanged death threats. In his words, “I felt inferior. I held tight to football.” This early section of the book offers a rare insight into European ghetto life.

When he joined Ajax Amsterdam at the age of 19 for a Swedish record transfer fee, his mother was distraught: “God oh God, Zlatan, what happened? Have you been kidnapped? Are you dead?” Seeing his face on TV, but not speaking much Swedish, she had assumed he was in trouble again.

He quickly discovered he had been cheated in negotiations – he was Ajax’s worst-paid player. Nor did the club help the teenager adapt to his new country. Sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a rented home, unable to cook for himself, he lost weight and underperformed. Like many young players, he soon realised that the only person in football who might look after you is your agent. He found a fat little Dutch-Italian ex-waiter named “Mino” Raiola, who became his soulmate. Here’s a specimen of their dialogue:

Zlatan: f*ck you.

Raiola: Go and f*ck yourself.

Zlatan: I want to get out of here.

Raiola: Go to Turin then.

Zlatan: What you talking about?

Raiola: I might have something with Juventus.

Zlatan moved onwards and upwards. At Inter Milan he encountered his favourite manager, José Mourinho, a flirt who seduces his players with smiles, text messages and deep knowledge of their family lives. In 2009

Zlatan joined the best club in the world, Barcelona. Barça’s stars – Lionel Messi, Xavi and Andrés Iniesta – turned out to be good boys who went around in tracksuits instead of Gucci and obeyed the manager. “It was just like a school,” he recounts with horror. The coach, Pep Guardiola, cold as a Swede, told him that Barça players didn’t drive flash cars. But Rosengård boys, Zlatan argued, absolutely do. Once again, just as in his immigrant childhood, he felt like an outsider.

Messi showed himself to be more egotistical than he is usually portrayed: annoyed that Zlatan was playing in his favourite central position, he arranged for the Swede to be moved to a more marginal role. Soon Zlatan clashed with Guardiola. Zlatan threatened violence. Guardiola stopped talking to him. Zlatan called him “an idiot” and, worse, “a philosopher”. After a year he left Barça.

The book has a happy end. Zlatan bought the posh pink house in Malmö that he had fantasised about as a teenager. On the wall he has hung a photograph of his dirty feet – the feet that paid for everything. But this is more than simply a financial triumph. The boy from the ghetto has not merely become a great footballer: he has become a Swede, captain of the national team, married to a beautiful posh blonde, accepted by the quiet, polite, blond people. I Am Zlatan is a modern European fairy tale.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2013/09/i-am-zlatan-ibrahimovic-modern-fairy-tale

[Sinister]

Wrong thread - delete

[Kuffir]

was a wicked read

[Anderson]

Whos got a pdf link?

Is this the same as the one that was out about a year or two ago?

[Kuffir]

ye

[Benicio del Toney]

Some interesting quotes

 

On a small, dusty pitch in the estate, Ibrahimovic and his friends tried outrageous tricks and flicks, spins and shots. The lack of space meant you had to be quick with your head and your feet. Zlatan quickly found his calling.

"When we played football in Rosengard, it was all about putting the ball between people's legs, doing different things," he adds. "After every trick people were like 'oohhh' 'eeeyy'. It was all about who had the hardest shots, the best trick, the craziest move. I loved it."

 

"For me to succeed as a footballer was difficult because of my background," he explains. "But I was difficult too. At one training session I head-butted my team-mate. If I could put myself in that moment today I would say to myself 'don't ever do that', but I was an angry young man.

"The player got a letter from his parents and asked people to sign it to kick me out of the club. I did many stupid things, I made many mistakes, but I learnt from everything. I still make mistakes, I still learn from them. Nobody is perfect. I had a lot of walls to break through to get here."

 

"Who thought the guy from Rosengard would be the captain of the Swedish national team? Who thought the guy from Rosengard would break the goal records? I was never considered one of the big talents, never."

[Benicio del Toney]

The ghetto breeds the most skillful ballers but they are the ones least likely to make it, especially in a country like this.

[Black.]

One of the best books I've read

[The Somalian]

 

[Creed Diskenth]

 

"Training starts when i say so"

 

He needs to touch prem

[Agony]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aTP8DGdaOk

[Thizz]

http://www.101greatgoals.com/blog/zlatan-ibrahimovic-helps-psg-teammate-lucas-out-in-the-gym-by-hitting-with-a-stick-during-a-workout-instagram/

 

 

[The Infamous]

Happy birthday @Cristiano. I have sent your new favourite outfit in the post #DareToZlatan pic.twitter.com/HWNKdq46J5

 

 

Thank you for the birthday present @Ibra_official. It will look better on me than you though.

 

convo between ibra and CR