I Am Zlatan Part 2

"Take it easy, Dad, wait."

But he just kept on going. He had that macho style, and sometimes he would turn up in his whole cowboy look at parents' night at school. Everybody would wonder, who's that? People noticed him. He got respect, and the teachers didn't dare to complain about me as much as they had been planning to do. It was like, we'd better be careful with that guy!

People have asked me what I would have done if I hadn't become a footballer. I have no idea. Maybe I would have become a criminal. There was a lot of crime in those days. Not that we went out thieving. But a lot of stuff just happened, and not just bikes. We'd be in and out of department stores as well, and sometimes I got a buzz just from doing it. I got a kick out of nicking stuff, and I've got to be happy that Dad never found out. Dad drank, sure, but there were a lot of rules as well. You've got to do the right thing, and that. Definitely no stealing, no way. All h.e.l.l would have broken loose.

The time we got caught at Wessels department store in our puffa coats, I was lucky. We'd nicked stuff worth 1,400 kronor. It was more than just the usual sweets. But my friend's dad had to come and collect us, and when the letter arrived at home, saying Zlatan Ibrahimovic has been caught shoplifting, blah blah blah, I managed to tear it up before Dad saw it. I was caught up in it and carried on stealing, so yeah, things could have turned out badly.

But one thing I can say for certain is that there were no drugs. I was totally against them. I didn't just pour out Dad's beer. I chucked out my mum's cigarettes. I hated all drugs and poisons, and I was 17 or 18 before I got drunk the first time, and puked in the stairway like any other teenager. Since then I haven't been drunk too many times, just one episode where I pa.s.sed out in the bathtub after the first Scudetto with Juventus. That was Trezeguet, that snake, who egged me on to drink shots.

Sanela and I were also strict with Keki. He wasn't allowed to smoke or drink, or else we'd go after him. That was a special thing, with my little bro.

We looked after him. For more delicate things, he'd go to Sanela. With tougher stuff, he'd come to me. I stood up for him. I took responsibility. But otherwise I wasn't exactly a saint, and I wasn't always that nice to my friends and teammates. I did aggressive stuff, the kind of thing that would make me go spare today if anybody did the same to Maxi and Vincent. But it's true. Let's not forget that. I had two sides even then.

I was both disciplined and wild, and I came up with entire philosophies about that. My thing was that I had to both talk the talk and walk the walk. So not just be like, I'm awesome, who are you? Of course not there's nothing quite as naff but I also didn't want to just perform and say mealy-mouthed stuff like the Swedish stars did. I wanted to be great and give it some swagger as well. Not that I believed I would turn out to be some kind of superstar, exactly. Jesus Christ, I was from Rosengrd! But maybe I turned out a bit differently because of that.

I was rowdy. I was mental. But I had character as well. I didn't always get to school on time. I had a hard time getting up in the mornings still do but I did my homework, at least some of the time. Maths was dead easy. Just bam, bam and I could see the answer. It was a bit like on the football pitch. Images and solutions came to me in a flash. But I was bad at showing my workings, and the teachers thought I was cheating. I wasn't exactly a pupil they expected to get good exam results. I was more the kid who got kicked out of lessons. But I did actually study. I would cram before exams and then forget everything the day after. I wasn't exactly a bad kid. I just had a hard time sitting still, and I would chuck erasers and that kind of thing. I had ants in my pants.

Those were difficult years. We moved house constantly; I don't exactly know why. But we rarely lived at any one place for more than a year, and the teachers took advantage of that. You have to transfer to the school in the area where you live, they said, not because they were sticklers for the rules, but because they saw an opportunity to get rid of me. I changed schools often and had a hard time making friends. Dad had his on-call s.h.i.+fts and his war and his drinking, and really bad tinnitus in his ears. It was like a ringing noise inside him, and I was looking after myself more and more and trying not to worry about the chaos in our family. There was always something. People from the Balkans are a hard lot. My sister with the drugs had broken off contact with Mum and the rest of us, and I suppose it wasn't entirely unexpected after all the rows about drugs and the treatment centres. But even my other half-sister was cut off from the family. Mum just kind of erased her, and I don't even know what it was about. There was some to-do about a boyfriend, a bloke from Yugoslavia. He and my sister had had a row and for some reason Mum took the bloke's side, and so my sister flipped out and she and Mum had a terrible slanging match, and that wasn't good. But still, it shouldn't have been such a big deal.

That wasn't exactly the first time we had a row in our family. But Mum had her pride, and I'm sure both she and my sister got into some sort of deadlock. I recognise that. I don't forget things either. I'll remember a nasty tackle for years. I remember s.h.i.+t that people have done to me, and I can bear incredible grudges. But this time it went too far.

There had been five of us kids at Mum's, and now suddenly there were only three: me, Sanela and Aleksandar, and there was no going back. It was like it was carved in stone. Our half-sister was no longer one of us, and the years pa.s.sed. She was gone. But fifteen years later, her son phoned my mum. My half-sister had had a son a grandson for my Mum, in other words.

"Hi, Grandma," he said, but Mum didn't want any part of it.

"Sorry," she said, and simply hung up.

I couldn't believe it when I heard. I got a pain in my stomach. I can't describe the feeling. I wanted to sink into the floor. You shouldn't do that! Never, ever! But there's so much pride in my family that messes things up for us, and I'm just glad I had football.

3.

IN ROSENGRD, we had different council estate neighbourhoods, and no estate was worse than any other well, the one we called the Gypsy estate was looked down upon. But it wasn't like all the Albanians or Turks stayed together in one spot. It was your estate that counted, not the country your parents had come from. You stuck with your estate, and the neighbourhood where Mum lived was called Trnrosen, which means Briar Rose. There were swings, a playground, a flagpole and a football pitch where we played every day. Sometimes I didn't get to join in. I was too small. Then I'd blow up in an instant.

I hated being left out. I hated losing. Even so, winning wasn't the most important thing. Most important were the feints and the nice moves. There was a lot of: "Hey, wow! Check that out!" You were supposed to impress the lads with tricks and moves, and you had to practise and practise until you were the best at them. Often, mothers would shout from the windows.

"It's late. Dinner's ready. Time to come in."

"In a minute," we'd say and carry on playing, and it could get late and start raining and all h.e.l.l could break loose, but we just carried on playing.

We were completely inexhaustible, and the pitch was small. You had to be quick with your head and your feet, especially with me being little and puny and easily getting tackled, and I learned wicked new stuff all the time. I had to. Otherwise I didn't get any 'wows', n.o.body would get me going. Often I'd sleep with my football and think of the tricks I was going to do the next day. It was like a film that was rolling constantly.

My first club was called MBI, Malm Ball and Sporting a.s.sociation. I was just six years old when I started. We played on a gravel pitch behind some green shacks, and I would ride to training sessions on stolen bikes and probably wasn't all that well-behaved. The coaches sent me home a couple of times, and I would shout and swear back at them. I constantly heard, "Pa.s.s the ball, Zlatan!" That annoyed me, and I felt like a fish out of water. At MBI there were immigrant kids as well as Swedes, and many of the parents would grumble about my tricks from the estate. I told them to go to h.e.l.l and changed clubs many times before I ended up at the FBK Balkan club. That was something else!

At MBI, the Swedish dads would stand around and call out, "Come on, lads. Good work!"

At Balkan it was more like: "I'll do your mum up the a.r.s.e." They were mental Yugoslavians who smoked like chimneys and flung their boots about, and I thought, "Great, just like at home. I love it here!" The coach was a Bosnian. He'd played at a pretty high level down in Yugoslavia, and he became a sort of father figure to us. Sometimes he'd drive us home, and he'd give me a few kronor for an ice cream or something to take care of my hunger.

I stood in goal for a while. I don't know why. Maybe I had flown into a rage at the old goalkeeper and said something like, "You're useless, I could do it better myself." I'm sure it was something like that. But there was one match where I let in a load of goals, and I went mental. I roared that everyone was s.h.i.+t. That football was s.h.i.+t. That the whole world was useless, and I was going to take up ice hockey instead: "Hockey is way better, you a.r.s.eholes! I'm gonna be a hockey pro! Get bent!"

That was it. I looked into all that stuff about ice hockey and thought, s.h.i.+t! All the kit you needed! A proper protective suit! It cost a bomb. So the only thing to do was knuckle down and carry on with that c.r.a.p, football. But I stopped being the goalkeeper and came up into the forward line, and I got to be pretty awesome.

One day, we had a match, and I wasn't there. Everybody was shouting, where's Zlatan? Where's Zlatan? It was just a few minutes before kick-off, and I bet the coach and my teammates wanted to strangle me. "Where is he? How the h.e.l.l can he not turn up for such an important match?" Then they caught sight of a character who was pedalling like mad on a stolen bike, heading straight for the coach. Was that nutter going to crash into him? No, I skidded to a stop in the gravel right in front of the coach and ran straight onto the pitch. I gather the coach was absolutely furious.

He got gravel in his eyes. He got completely splattered. But he let me play, and I a.s.sume we won. We were a good gang. One time I got pulled up for some other c.r.a.p, and I was put on the bench for the first half. Our team was down, 40, against a bunch of sn.o.bs from Vellinge, it was the brown kids versus the posh kids, and there was loads of aggression in the air. I was so mad I was about to explode. How could that idiot put me on the bench?

"Are you stupid?" I asked the coach.

"Calm down. You'll come back on soon."

I came on in the second half and scored eight goals. We won 85 and taunted the rich kids, and sure, I was good. I was technical and could see chances all the time. On the pitch at Mum's I had become a little master at coming up with unexpected moves in tight s.p.a.ces. Even so, I'm sick of all the people who go round quacking, "I saw straight away that Zlatan would turn into something special, blah blah blah. I practically taught him everything he knows. He was my best mate." That's bulls.h.i.+t.

n.o.body said anything. Not as much as they said afterwards, anyway. No big clubs came knocking on the door. I was a snot-nosed kid. There was no, "Oh, we've got to be nice to this little talent." It was more like, "Who let the brown kid in?" and even then I was really inconsistent. I could score eight goals in one match and then fail to come up with anything in the next.

I hung out a lot with a guy called Tony Flygare. We had the same teacher for our community language lessons. His mum and dad are from the Balkans too, and he was something of a tough guy as well. He didn't live in Rosengrd, but nearby in a street called Vitemllegatan. We were both born in the same year, but his birthday is in January and mine is in October, and that did make a difference. He was bigger and stronger, and he was seen as a bigger footballing talent than me. There was a lot of attention on Tony: "Check him out, what a player!" and I ended up being overshadowed by him a bit. Maybe that was a good thing, I dunno. I had to grit my teeth and fight as the underdog. But like I said, in those days I was no big name.

I was a wild kid, a terror, and I really had no control over my temper. I carried on blowing my stack at players and referees, and I kept changing clubs the whole time. I played for Balkan. I came back to MBI and then to Balkan again and then to the BK Flagg club. It was all a mess, and n.o.body exactly gave me a lift to training sessions, and sometimes I'd look over at the parents on the sidelines.

My dad was never there, either among the Yugos or the Swedes, and I don't really know how that made me feel. That's just how it was. I looked after myself. I'd got used to it. But maybe it did hurt. I can't really tell. You just get used to the circ.u.mstances in your life, and I didn't think too much about that. Dad was the way he was. He was hopeless. He was amazing. He was up and down. I didn't count on him, not the way other people count on their parents. But sure, I did hope sometimes. Like, b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, imagine if he'd seen that wicked move, that awesome Brazilian piece? I mean, Dad had periods when he was totally committed. He wanted me to become a lawyer.

I can't claim I thought very much of that idea. In my circles, people didn't exactly go on to become lawyers. We did crazy stuff and dreamt of becoming tough guys, and we didn't exactly get much parental support there was no, "Shall I explain the history of Sweden to you?" There were beer cans and Yugo music and empty fridges and the Balkan War. But sometimes, you know, he'd take the time and chat about football with me, and I was over the moon every time. I mean, he was my dad, and one day he came up to me I'll never forget this, there was something formal in the air: "Zlatan, it's time you started playing for a big club."

"What do you mean, a big club? What's a big club?"

"A good team, Zlatan. A top squad, like Malm FF!"

I don't think I really understood.

What was so special about Malm FF? I didn't know anything about that kind of thing, about what was worthwhile and what wasn't. But I knew of the club. I'd played against them with Balkan so I thought, why not? If Dad says so. But I had no idea where the football stadium was, or anything else in the city for that matter. Malm might not have been far away. But it was another world. I would turn seventeen before I went into the city centre, and I knew nothing of life there. But I learned the way into the training sessions, and I rode there in, like, 30 minutes with my kit in a supermarket carrier bag, and of course I was nervous. At Malm FF it was serious. No more of the usual, come on and play, lads! Here you had to go through tryouts and qualify, and I noticed straight away that I wasn't like the rest of them. I got ready to pack up my stuff and head home. But already on the second day, I heard these words from a coach called Nils: "Welcome to the team."

"Are you serious?" I was 13 then, and there were a couple of other foreigners there already, including Tony. Otherwise it was just regular Swedes, including the kind from the posh suburbs. I felt like I was from Mars. Not just because my dad didn't have a big, fancy house and never turned up at matches. I talked differently. I dribbled the ball. I would go off like a bomb, and I took a beating on the pitch. Once I got a yellow card because I bawled out my teammates.

"You can't do that!" the referee said.

"You can go to h.e.l.l, too," I roared and cleared off.

Things started smouldering among the Swedes. Their parents wanted me out of there, and I thought for the thousandth time, I don't give a d.a.m.n about them. I'll change to another team again. Or I'll start doing taekwondo instead. That's cooler. Football is s.h.i.+t. Some idiot father of somebody in the team went round with a pet.i.tion. "Zlatan must leave the club," it said, and all kinds of people signed that thing. They smuggled it round, saying "Zlatan doesn't belong here. He's got to be chucked out! Sign here, blah blah blah."

It was mental. Okay, I'd been in a fight with that dad's son. I'd taken a load of nasty tackles, and I went off on one. I'd headb.u.t.ted him, if I'm honest. But I was filled with regret afterwards. I cycled over to the hospital and begged for forgiveness. It was a stupid thing to do, really, but a pet.i.tion! Give me a break. The manager, ke Kallenberg, just stared at the paper and went, "What kind of ridiculous c.r.a.p is this?!"

He tore it into pieces. He was a good bloke, ke. Well, up to a point! He put me on the bench for almost a whole year in the junior squad, and like everybody else he thought I dribbled too much and yelled at my teammates too much and had a bad att.i.tude and the wrong mindset and all the rest. I learned one important thing in those years. If a guy like me was going to get respect, he had to be five times better than Leffe Persson and whatever their names were. He had to train ten times harder. Otherwise he didn't have a chance. Not on this earth! Especially not if he's a bike thief.

Of course I should have shaped up after that business. I definitely wanted to. I wasn't completely hopeless. But it was a long way to the training pitch over four miles and I often had to walk the whole way. But sometimes the temptation was too great, especially if I saw a cool bike. One time I caught sight of a yellow bike with a load of ma.s.sive carriers on it and I thought, why not? I hopped on and rode off nice smooth ride. But after a while I started to wonder. There was something peculiar about those carriers, and it suddenly dawned on me: it was a postman's bike. I was pedalling around with the neighbourhood's post, so I hopped off and left the bike a little distance away. Didn't want to nick people's post as well.

Another time the most recent bike I had nicked got pinched, and I was left standing there outside the stadium. It was a long way home and I was hungry and impatient, and so I pinched another bike from outside the locker room. I popped the lock as usual, and I remember liking it. It was a nice bike, and I was careful to park it a little way away so the former owner wouldn't happen across it. But three days later, the team was summoned into a meeting. I already had an issue with stuff like that. Meetings usually meant ha.s.sle and getting a talking to, and I started coming up with some clever explanations. Things like, "It wasn't me. It was my brother, innit." I was right to do that, because the meeting concerned the a.s.sistant coach's bicycle.

"Has anybody seen it?"

n.o.body had seen it. Me neither! I mean, in that sort of situation, you don't say anything. That's how it works. You play dumb: "Oh, that's a shame, poor you, I had a bike stolen once, too."

But even so, I got worried. What had I done? And what bad luck! The a.s.sistant coach's bike! You're supposed to respect the trainers. That's what I reckoned. Or more accurately, I mean you're supposed to listen to them and learn their stuff, zone game, tactics, all that stuff. But at the same time, don't listen. Like, carry on with dribbling the ball and the tricks. Listen, don't listen! That was my att.i.tude. But nicking their bikes? I didn't really think that was part of the picture. I got nervous and went up to the a.s.sistant coach.

"Erm, here's the thing," I said. "I borrowed your bike for a little while. It was, like, an emergency. A one-time thing! You'll get it back tomorrow."

I gave him my best sheepish grin, and I think it sort of worked. My smile helped me a lot in those years, and I could come up with a joke when I was in a tight spot. But it wasn't easy. I wasn't just the black sheep. If any tracksuits went missing, everybody blamed me. With good reason, as it happened. I was flat broke as well. While the others had always had the latest football boots from Adidas and Puma in kangaroo leather, I'd bought my first ones at the discount supermarket for 59.90 kronor they were stocked alongside the tomatoes and vegetables, and that's how it carried on. I never had anything to parade around in like that.

When the team went abroad, a lot of the others had two grand with them for spending money. I had, like, 20 kronor, and that was even when Dad didn't pay the rent one month in order to send me off. He would rather get evicted than make me stay at home. That was well nice of him. But I still couldn't keep up with the others.

"Come with us, Zlatan, we'll get a pizza, a burger, we'll go and buy this and that," the lads would say.

"Nah, later. I'm not hungry! I'll just chill out instead."

I tried to be evasive and still remain cool. It wasn't much fun. It wasn't a big deal. But it was something new, and I was entering into a period where I wasn't confident. Not that I wanted to be like the others. Well, maybe a bit! I wanted to learn their things, like etiquette and stuff like that. But most of the time I did my own thing. That was my weapon, you could say. I saw the blokes from the council estates in the suburbs like mine who would try to pretend to be posh. It never worked, no matter how hard they tried, and I thought, I'll do the opposite, I'll do my own thing that much more. Instead of saying, "I've only got 20 kronor," I'd say, "I haven't got any cash, not a penny." That was cooler. More 'out there'. I was a tough kid from Rosengrd. I was different. That became my ident.i.ty, and I enjoyed it more and more and didn't care that I didn't have a clue about the Swedish guys' idols.

Sometimes we were the ball boys for the first team's matches. One time Malm FF was playing against IFK Gteborg, a really big match in other words, and my teammates went nuts and wanted to get autographs from the stars, particularly one called Thomas Ravelli, who clearly was the greatest hero after some penalty kicks in the World Cup. I'd never heard of the bloke not that I admitted it. I didn't want to make a fool of myself. Sure, I'd seen the World Cup as well. But, I mean, I was from Rosengrd. I didn't give a d.a.m.n about the Swedes. I'd been following the Brazilians, like Romrio and Bebeto and that lot, and the only thing about that Ravelli that interested me was his shorts. I wondered where I could nick a pair like that for myself.

We were supposed to sell BingoLotto game cards to earn money for the club. I had no idea what BingoLotto was. Had never heard of guys like Loket, the bloke who presented the lottery programme on TV. But I went round knocking on doors in our neighbourhood, like: "Hi there, my name's Zlatan. Sorry to bother you. Would you like to buy a lottery ticket?"

I was useless at that, to be honest. I sold approximately one ticket, and even fewer of the Advent calendars we were landed with. That is to say, basically zero, and in the end Dad had to buy the whole lot. That wasn't fair. We couldn't afford it, and we didn't really need more rubbish at home. It didn't exactly make me overjoyed to be able to open every door in every calendar in November already. It was ridiculous, and I don't understand how people can send kids out like that, basically to beg.

We played football, and we were an awesome year group, the ones at Malm born in '80 and '81. There was Tony Flygare, Gudmunder Mete, Matias Concha, Jimmy Tamandi, Markus Rosenberg. There was me. There were all kinds of sharp guys, and I kept on improving, but the grumbling continued. It was mostly the parents. They just wouldn't give in. "Here he goes," they'd say. "Now he's dribbling again!" "He's not right for the team!" It made me go spare. Who the h.e.l.l were they to stand there and judge me? People have said things like I was considering quitting football around that time. That's not true. But I was really serious about going to a different club for a while. I didn't have a father nearby to defend me or buy me expensive clothes. I had to look after myself, and those Swedish dads with their sn.o.bby sons were everywhere, explaining why I was wrong. Of course I felt rotten! And I was restless. I wanted action, more action. I needed something new.

Johnny Gyllensj, the youth team coach, got wind of this and took it up with the club. "Come on," he said. "Not everybody can turn up with their hair all slicked down. We're about to lose a major talent!" They drew up a youth contract for me, which Dad signed. I got 1,500 kronor a month, and that was a buzz, of course, and I made more and more of an effort. I wasn't completely impossible, like I said. It wasn't all, don't listen to them! It was also, listen.

I practised hard at taking the ball down with as few touches as possible. But I still didn't really s.h.i.+ne, I have to say. It was still all about Tony, and I soaked up knowledge in order to get at least as good as him. My whole generation at Malm was into Brazilian stuff and tricks. We spurred each other on there. It was a bit like Mum's estate again, and when we got access to computers we'd download all kinds of feints, stuff that Ronaldo and Romrio were doing, and then we'd practise until the trick took hold. There was lots of rewinding and fast-forwarding. How do they actually do that? How do they do that little thing?

We were all used to touching the ball. But the Brazilians would, like, nudge it with their foot, and we'd practise over and over again until the thing took hold, and finally we'd try it out in matches. There were a lot of us who did that. But I took it a step further. I went deeper into it. I was more precise in the details. I became completely obsessed, to be honest.

Those tricks had always been my way of getting noticed, and I carried on dribbling, no matter how much the dads and coaches grumbled. No, I didn't adapt. Or more accurately, I did and I didn't. I wanted to be different. I wanted to do the coaches' stuff too, and it kept getting better. But sometimes it wasn't that easy. Sometimes it hurt, and I'm sure the situation with Mum and Dad affected me. There was a lot of s.h.i.+t that needed to come out.

At school they hired special teachers just for my sake. I got really angry. Sure, I was rowdy. Maybe the worst one. But a special teacher! Give me a break! I got an A in art, and Bs in English, chemistry and physics. I wasn't exactly a druggie. I'd hardly even taken a puff on a cigarette. I was just restless and did a load of stupid stuff. But people were talking about putting me in a special school. They wanted to set me apart, and I felt like I was from Mars. It was like a time bomb started ticking inside me. Do I need to mention that I was good at PE? I might have been a bit unfocused in the cla.s.sroom and had a hard time sitting still with a book. But I could concentrate too, if we're talking about moving a ball or an egg around.

One day we were playing floorball. That special teacher came and stared. Every little thing I did, she was there, like a barnacle. I was really fuming. I lined up a world-cla.s.s shot and hit her square in the head. She was completely stunned, and just stared at me. Afterwards they rang Dad and wanted to talk about psychiatric help and a special school and that kind of s.h.i.+t, and you know that was not the right stuff to talk to my dad about. n.o.body says bad things about his kids, especially teachers who are persecuting them. He went spare and charged into the school with his whole cowboy att.i.tude: "Who the h.e.l.l are you? Coming and talking about psychiatric help? You're the ones who ought to be in the nuthouse, the whole lot of you. But there's nothing wrong with my son, he's a fine lad, you can all go to h.e.l.l!"

He was a crazy Yugo and completely in his element. Not long after that, the teacher quit. No wonder, really, and things did get a bit better. I got my self-confidence back. But even so, the whole idea! A special teacher, just for me! It makes me furious. Sure, maybe I wasn't an angel. But you can't single out kids like that! You just can't!

If anybody ever treated Maxi or Vincent like they were different, I would flip out. I promise you. I'd be worse than Dad. That special treatment is still with me. I didn't feel good about it. Okay, in the long run maybe it made me stronger. I dunno. I became even more of a fighter. But in the short term it really ruined me. One day, I was supposed to go on a date with a girl, and I wasn't particularly confident around girls in those days. The kid with the special teacher following him around, how cool does that sound? Just asking for her phone number made me break into a sweat! There was a fit girl standing in front of me, and I barely managed to stammer out: "D'you want to meet up sometime after school?"

"Sure," she said.

"How about Gustav, on such-and-such day?"

Gustav is Gustav Adolf Square, which is between the Triangeln shopping centre and Stortorget Square in central Malm, and she seemed to like the idea. But when I got there, she wasn't there. I got really nervous. It wasn't exactly my home turf, and I felt awkward. Why wasn't she there? Didn't she like me any more? A minute pa.s.sed, two, three, ten minutes, and finally I couldn't stick it out any longer. It was the ultimate humiliation.

I've been stood up, I thought to myself. Who would want to go on a date with me? And so I left. Who cares about her? I'm going to be a football star, anyway. But that was the stupidest thing. The girl's bus had just been a bit late. The driver had been on a f.a.g break or something, and she got there just after I'd left and was just as upset as I was.

4.

I STARTED secondary school at Borgarskolan, doing the social sciences curriculum with a special focus on football, and I was hoping for great things. Everything would be different now! Now I'd be really cool. But the whole thing was a shock. Okay, I'd had some preparation.

There were some lads from the posh suburb of Limhamn in the team. But now there were girls as well, and other sorts of guys, stand-offish types in trendy clothes who stood around in the corners, smoking. I rolled up in my trainers and jogging suits covered in Adidas or Nike logos. That was the coolest thing, I thought, and I went round like that all the time. What I didn't realise was it all just screamed Rosengrd! It was like a billboard. As if that special teacher was still clinging on to me.

At Borgarskolan kids had Ralph Lauren sweaters, Timberland boots and s.h.i.+rts with collars! Imagine! I'd hardly ever seen a bloke wearing a b.u.t.ton-front s.h.i.+rt with a collar before, and I realised immediately that I needed to take drastic action. There were loads of fit girls in the school. It wouldn't do to go and chat them up while looking like a guy from a council estate. I talked it over with my dad, and we had an argument. We got a study grant from the government in those days. It was 795 kronor a month, and it was obvious to my dad that he would take care of that, because he was responsible for the cost of my upkeep, as he put it. I put it a different way: "I can't be the biggest prat in the school!"

Somehow, he swallowed it. I got the study grant and a bank account and a bank card with a picture of a tree on it. My grant came through on the twentieth of each month, and a lot of my mates would stand there by the cash machine at 11:59 p.m. the night before, just waiting, completely mental. Is it almost midnight? Ten, nine eight ... I was a little cooler, but the next morning I had certainly taken out quite a bit and gone and bought a pair of Davis jeans.

They were the cheapest. They cost 299 kronor, and then I picked out some polo s.h.i.+rts, three for 99. I tried out a few styles. Nothing worked. My appearance still screamed Rosengrd. I didn't fit in. That's how I felt. I'd been small all my life. But that summer I'd grown a ma.s.sive amount, five inches in just a few months, and I guess I must have looked really lanky. I needed to sort myself out, plain and simple, and for the first time in my life I started hanging out in the city centre, at Burger King, in the shopping malls, in the Lilla Torg square.

I carried on with some worse things too, not just for the buzz. I needed some wicked stuff. Otherwise I'd have no chance in the schoolyard. So I pinched one guy's music player, a wicked Minidisc. We had lockers outside the cla.s.sroom. They had combination locks, and I found out one of the kids' secret combination from a mate. When he wasn't around, I went over and went like, right five, left three, and then rode off with that Minidisc player, digging his tunes and feeling well cool. But of course it wasn't enough.

I still didn't have a lot to bring to the table. I was still the bloke from the council estate. My mate was smarter. He got himself a girlfriend from a posh family and talked his way in with her brother, and started borrowing his clothes. That's a good trick, for sure, even if it only worked up to a point. Those of us from the council estates never really fit in. We were different. But still, this mate of mine started turning up with wicked brands, and he had a cool girl and was as c.o.c.ky as anything. As for me, I felt worse than nothing. I carried on with my football.

But that wasn't going so well either. I had made it into the junior team and was playing with guys who were a year older, and that was an achievement in itself. We were a brilliant gang, one of the better teams in the country in our age group. But I was on the bench. That was ke Kallenberg's decision. Of course, a coach can put whoever he wants on the bench. But I don't think it was just about football. When I was subst.i.tuted in, I scored goals pretty often. I wasn't bad. But I was wrong in other ways, they thought.

People were saying that I didn't contribute enough to the team. "Your dribbling doesn't drive the play forward!" I heard that kind of thing hundreds of times, and I sensed the vibes like, that Zlatan! Isn't he too unbalanced? There weren't any more pet.i.tions, but it wasn't far off that, and it's true, I did have a go at my teammates. I shouted and talked too much on the pitch. I could get into arguments with spectators. Nothing too serious. But I had my temper and my playing style. I was a different type of player, and I would fly into a rage. I didn't really belong at Malm FF. That's the view many people took. I remember the Swedish junior champions.h.i.+p. We made it into the final, and of course that was a huge deal.

But ke Kallenberg didn't put me in the team. I wasn't even going to sit on the bench. "Zlatan is injured," he told everyone, and I leapt up. What do you mean, injured? What was he talking about? I said to him: "What are you talking about? How can you say something like that?"

"You're injured," he repeated, and I couldn't believe it. Why was he coming out with that kind of c.r.a.p when we were going to be in the final?

"You're just saying that because you don't want to deal with me."

But no, he perceived me as injured, and it drove me mad. There was something strange in the air. n.o.body was saying what it was. n.o.body was man enough. That year Malm FF won the Swedish junior champions.h.i.+p t.i.tle without me, and that didn't exactly reinforce my self-confidence. Sure, of course, I'd said a load of c.o.c.ky stuff. Like when my Italian teacher kicked me out of the lesson and I said, "I don't give a d.a.m.n about you. I'll learn it when I become a pro in Italy," that might be a bit of fun when you know how it turned out. Back then it was just big talk. I didn't believe it. How could I, when I wasn't even a regular in the junior team?

Their first team was having problems in those days. Malm FF's first team are, like, the best in the country. When my dad came to Sweden in the '70s, they totally dominated the league. They even made it to the final in the Champions League, or the European Cup as it was called in those days, and hardly anybody from the junior squad got taken up. The management recruited players from other teams instead. But that year, the team had changed. Although n.o.body really understood why, things were going really badly for the club. Malm FF, which had always been at the top of the Allsvenskan league, was in danger of being relegated. They were playing miserably. Their finances were in the toilet. They couldn't afford to buy any players, so a lot of young players got a chance instead, and you can imagine how we talked about it in the junior squad! Who are they going to call up? Will it be him, or him?

So it was Tony Flygare of course, as well as Gudmunder Mete and Jimmy Tamandi. But I wasn't even considered. I was the last one in the team who would get picked up. That's what I thought. That's what most people thought. So to be honest, there was nothing to hope for. Even the junior coach was putting me on the bench. Why would the first team take me on? That wasn't even on the map. Even so, I was no worse than Tony, Mete or Jimmy. I'd shown that in my subst.i.tutions. What was the problem? What were they up to? All these thoughts were buzzing round my head, and I became more and more convinced that there was a load of politics involved.

As a lad, it might have been cool to be different and a little c.o.c.kier than the others, but in the long run it was just a disadvantage. When it really comes down to it, they didn't want any brown kids or hotheads who do showy Brazilian moves all the time. Malm FF was a refined, proud club. In its glory days, all the players had been blonde and well-behaved, with names like Bosse Larsson, who said nice, refined things, and since then they hadn't taken on many players with immigrant backgrounds. Okay, Yksel Osmanovski had been there, his parents were Macedonian.

He was from Rosengrd as well. He was a pro with Bari then. But he was better-behaved. No, there wouldn't be any first-team games for me. I'd got my youth team contract. I would have to be satisfied with that and the Under-20s. The Under-20s squad was a thing they had set up together with the football academy at Borgarskolan, since the junior team was for kids up to eighteen. There weren't all that many of us who got picked up there, not enough to make a team yet. But the idea was to prevent us from leaving the club, and we would often play with lads from the second team against Division 3 sides and stuff. It was nothing great, but I had an opportunity to get myself noticed.

Sometimes we would train with the first team, and I refused to fit in. Normally in those situations, a junior doesn't go in for wicked dribbling. He doesn't make big tackles at close quarters or start screaming, "f.u.c.king sweep it!" He behaves. But I thought, why not? I've got nothing to lose. I gave it everything I had. I just went for it, and of course, I noticed they were talking about me. "Who does he think he is?" and stuff, and I would mutter, "Go to h.e.l.l!" and just carry on. I kept at my tricks. I played the tough guy, and sometimes Roland Andersson, the first team coach, was watching.