Why Football will never have another Zlatan Ibrahimovic ever again

Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s mainstream portrayal in the media involves narratives that show him to be this all-encompassing emperor who is lion-willed and sharp-tongued. His reputation has been moulded in the form of someone who dominates, proves people wrong and wins matches and trophies alike. His tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve comes across as rambunctious to some, but his all-conquering will to succeed often evades others.

Be it down to the superficial nature of these narratives or the media’s general nature of curating content that sells, a lot of subtle narratives around Ibrahimovic pass people by. There is often a limited understanding of why Zlatan is what he is and how he became such an icon in the game. After all, his broken background as an immigrant in Sweden, coupled with several social changes in the country and his tactical uniqueness in that historical context makes the now 41-year-old someone who is a very true representation of those times.

And largely due to those social, tactical and demographic aspects of the world, I’ve been very intrigued by this man, who has a very vulnerable and delicate side to him that indirectly keeps him going at 41.

Currently injured at Milan and likely to return sometime in 2023, Ibrahimovic doesn’t seem too keen on retiring despite the Rossoneri not exceptionally missing him. Despite the injuries and age, Ibrahimovic remains more than just a goalscorer in 2022 though, which is not something even the great Cristiano Ronaldo can say at this point. But there is a growing clamour for him to consider retirement from a truly unique career that has been shaped by several aspects that seem invisible now. And perhaps, they keep him going too.

Ibrahimovic’s book ‘I Am Zlatan’ only provides a brief look into the psyche that shaped him, as he talks about how it felt to come from a broken background. Young Ibra lived in an area in Rosengård which was full of Somalian, Yugoslavian, Polish and Turkish immigrants. His mother (a Catholic Croatian) and his father (A Muslim Bosnian) separated when he was quite young and after living with his mother for some years, he left to live with his father because of serious legal issues surrounding his mother and half-sister. He has admitted that his mother would often beat him with a spoon - sometimes till a point when the spoon broke and he had to go and buy a new one.

His dad protected him and his sister like they meant the world to him, but Zlatan admits that the war had hit him hard. He had lost a majority of his family in the conflict and he turned out to be a heavy drinker - something young Zlatan struggled to understand the reason for. He admits that his father drank to ‘drown his sorrows’. That too, alone.

In general terms, it wasn’t pretty. It was the imperfectly perfect concoction of how a typical immigrant family is portrayed, especially when it lives in a highly-populated residential area where chaos ensues. Zlatan has stated that no one would ask him as to how he was during those times and kindness from others was incredibly rare to come by - even from family. People had to work very hard to make ends meet and provide for their families. And as it generally happens, family members display passive aggression even in non-household scenarios. The same happened for Zlatan, who would steal bikes with no malintention and he would often headbutt people when angry. It was a rather normal expression.

Sweden has witnessed two different waves of immigration from Eastern Europe. Zlatan’s parents arrived in the country during the first wave, well before the Yugoslav Wars of 1991. The first wave came about due to Sweden’s neutral status in World War I and the fact that the country’s industries and factories weren’t left ravaged by the conflicts. Masses from Eastern Europe immigrated to Sweden in search of employment, which was readily available in the 1970s and Yugoslavs were the second biggest immigrant group at that point. Researches in migration to Sweden have shown that those Yugoslavs who came to the country during the first wave of immigration found it harder to integrate into the mainstream society, as compared to those from the second wave.

It is during these times of pandemonium that street football became a vital part of Ibrahimovic’s life and therefore, it becomes important to understand street football’s popularity. The likes of Johan Cruyff, Eusebio, Pele and Alfredo di Stefano are all examples of footballers who had a street football background and it showed in the way they expressed themselves on the field in a technical manner. Cruyff has stated in his autobiography that the reason why street football improves the technical ability of kids is because they are scared to fall on rough surfaces and do their best to avoid hitting the floor. As a result, kids learn how to stay on their feet, keep the ball with themselves and control it. But over time, street football’s identity has changed and a lot of it comes down to increasing urbanisation.

The number of people living in urban areas stood at about 2 billion in 1990 and it has crossed 4 billion in 2022. Spaces for street football have taken a hit, making sure that it has become an activity that is largely left to those residing in the outskirts of the posh districts. And in those outskirts reside the immigrants, the economically weaker and the marginalised. A majority of the kids from those sections - as Zlatan’s example shows, aren’t economically well off and their parents often work multiple jobs to put food on the plate. The fact that some of modern-day football’s best street footballers - Jadon Sancho, Paul Pogba, Kylian Mbappe and N'golo Kante, have a visible immigrant background says it all.

Zlatan was the same and his background is a definition of the changing times in football and demographics in Sweden - almost like Wayne Rooney being the perfect representation of street football in working class Liverpool. Amidst the ensuing chaos around Zlatan and within him, he resorted to street football and one of his first football clubs was also an immigrant football club called FBK Balkan, where he would play with children who also came from immigrant backgrounds. Once he moved to Malmo, he has admitted that he just felt different. He didn’t have a big house and he spoke differently because of his accent.

The Swedish parents conspired against Zlatan during his time at Malmo - not like he ever backed out of a fight because of his background. He had been involved in a scuffle with a teammate who was Swedish and word spread that young Ibrahimovic should be kicked out. Because of his street football tendencies, Zlatan was a dribbler - something he was constantly doing outside the organisation football academies. It proved to be something different in the organised setups, which were less individualistic and often less technical than young Ibra. But he was villanised for this approach, which seemed alien to others. Because of how he was, how he behaved, his identity and how he played, Zlatan was seen as someone who perhaps didn’t belong there. And he developed an antagonistic side to him at a very early age due to the societal and social situations that wrapped him.

It was only fitting that Zlatan’s early role model was the Brazilian Ronaldo or R9. Another street footballer who was more than just a pure goalscorer, Ronaldo learned to play on the streets when his parents had separated at the age of 11 and he would play to have fun on the pitch. He would play to take the p*ss out of the opposition and taking the ball off Ronaldo’s feet when was in full flow was an arduous task for even the best. It was the purest and the most unfiltered representation of street football that the game has ever witnessed.

Ronaldo’s stature was much more diminutive compared to Ibrahimovic’s and that generally makes players much more nifty. Ibrahimovic is known to have been particularly smaller as a child - something which would have suited him as a youngster. But Ibra retained a large part of his older traits as he grew taller and he still retains that despite the pangs of time forcing him to do otherwise. Stereotypes around taller players today have blinded many from the fact that Ibrahimovic wasn’t just a typical target man and he still isn’t. He still shows a keen tendency to drop deeper in possession, allow the wider players to run into spaces and set them up with lobbed passes over the top. His off-the-ball work has now reduced, but Ibrahimovic was a willing presser during his stint at Manchester United. He would lead zonal presses from the front, urging those around him to do the same and any space warranted to him in-behind remains a deadly channel for him to run into.

While these traits are highly valued in 2022 (look at the likes of Gianluca Scamacca, Victor Osimhen, Harry Kane, Karim Benzema or Alexander Isak) and many aspire to be like Zlatan, without many ever knowing what the Swede ever truly stood for in his heydays.

Back in 2005, the game looked different. Arguably, it was much less mechanised than how it is today. The Premier League was witnessing a period in time which was being dominated by the pragmatism of Rafael Benitez and Jose Mourinho and a game involving Liverpool and Chelsea at Anfield was famously described by Jorge Valdano as a ‘sh*t hanging by a stick’.

The World Cup winner further stated in his Marca column: ‘Put a sh*t hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a sh*t hanging from a stick.’

The irony lay in the fact that both Mourinho and Benitez had drawn their footballing lessons in Spain and had a very stark congruence in their backgrounds - opposition analysis. While acting as Bryan Robson’s translator, Mourinho was often tasked with opposition analysis at Sporting and a case can be made of the fact that his vision of the game has remained very opposition-oriented. The same can be said for Benitez, who began his career while doing opposition analysis tasks as a youngster well before he became a manager.

Their approaches were built on identifying the weaknesses of the opposition, exploiting the spaces in between or behind the defences and scoring goals, while not allowing any space to the opposition. And it wasn’t something England had seen before. Upfront, Mourinho used someone like Didier Drogba, who wasn’t just a goalscorer entering his prime but someone who was a hard worker despite not being great on the ball. He knew how to use movements to create spaces for others and run into them to find the back of the net. These values made him the perfect fit for a manager like Mourinho, who values exploiting space that the opposition leave behind when they attack.

Then there was Thierry Henry at Arsenal and he, in many ways, was one of the most complete forwards the world has ever seen and his completeness often drew comparisons to the one-dimensionality of Manchester United’s Ruud van Nistelrooy. He could do what Drogba could, but had the panache and acceleration to beat defenders. He could create space for himself, albeit while playing under a manager (Arsene Wenger) who relied on staying in control of possession, creating openings and carving defences open. Those are the same values that allowed Henry to thrive under Pep Guardiola, who sought to revolutionise the modern game through juego de posicion and combine the idea of creating space and exploiting the space that is already present on the field.

Serie A, which was largely the most tactically advanced league in the 1990s, hadn’t witnessed these advancements even before Calciopoli. While Arrigo Sacchi’s intense, high pressing style had brought about a revolution against Catenaccio, managers that emerged even from his essence of the game had toned down. Someone like Carlo Ancelotti had gone from being a stubborn, pressing-oriented manager at Parma to becoming a very accomodating, man-management first boss at Milan following his failure at Juventus. Balance or equilibrium (which Ancelotti is still a massive fan of) had become a vital demand - something Fabio Capello was quite famous for throughout his club career (let us not allow international management to tarnish his greatness).

Capello was known for his flexibility and for adapting his style on the basis of the style of players at hand. Roma’s Scudetto winning team of 2001 can attribute their triumph to Capello’s tendency to create a system which could provide for the best players, as he backed away from playing a back four and used a back-three that had worked very well at Real Madrid. When Ibrahimovic arrived at Juventus from Ajax, it was Capello who was in charge at the Bianconeri. The Swede had enjoyed operating in a much more expansive style of play at Ajax, where he had turned into a much more mature version of a street footballer who was willing to make sacrifices for the team while also scoring goals himself. He could create space using his ability to go past defenders and due to the organised footballing education at Ajax, he could also carve up space for others.

Ibrahimovic, under the more pragmatic Capello, won the Serie A Foreign Footballer of the Year award in his first season and scored 16 times and even assisted eight times in the absence of the injured David Trezeguet. He got nine assists in the next season, becoming more of a creator in a different system. While the goals did dry up, Ibrahimovic matured further as a footballer within those two campaigns, a far cry from the times when parents at youth academies had ‘conspired’ against him for being too individualistic.

His street football stubbornness and the organised football education that he had acquired across Europe had made Ibrahimovic a very well-rounded footballer - something which was true for Ronaldo and Henry, but the physiques of each of the players meant that they were simply incomparable. Combine that with the fact that Zlatan thrived on being villanised for his quick fire responses to arbitrary questions, he was the fearless warrior from the streets who never lost touch with his past. Shaped by having been opposed throughout his upbringing, Ibrahimovic went out to impose himself and he had all the tools in his arsenal to do just that. Perhaps, the challenges of the ever-evolving game had made him adapt and remain in a phase where he was constantly improving in a variety of aspects.

The game, as it is in 2022, has evolved to a point where being multifaceted carries optimum value, which explains why a lot of strikers want to be like Zlatan was. Individualism has been harnessed to a point where it comes across as collectivism - something Ibrahimovic achieved despite all the sacrifices he had to make around his own self-expression.

In many ways, that still keeps Ibrahimovic going - that single-minded ghetto-esque mentality of constantly proving naysayers wrong and using criticism as a way to beat the opposition. After all, Ibra himself has said that ‘you can take the kid away from the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto away from the kid’.

It was almost as if he was made for those times when Sweden was increasingly becoming a hub for immigrants, a lot of whom saw street football as an escape from the fearsome realities. They saw their miniature pitch as a means to prove their worth in at least one societal gradient. He was a footballer who stood for a very specific socio-cultural change in society and that, in itself, is an extremely rare occurrence in a game which never stops - almost like society itself. He is a reminder of a time in history where things were a certain way in a particular country and those circumstances will never be repeated again.

It is because of these things that Ibrahimovic will always and should always have a special place in football storytelling. He wasn’t just ahead of time on the pitch, he was an accurate prototype of a certain time in infinity and a constant reminder of an era that existed once upon a time. And in my humble opinion - when football becomes an accurate illustration of the world, nothing is more beautiful.

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To read more of my rambles and musings, folllow me on Twitter at Kaus_Pandey17