I Am Zlatan Part 6

"I'm not even gonna touch that one!"

"Do the opposing side's fans boo and jeer at you?"

"h.e.l.l yeah, they do."

"Okay. You're pretty wicked then," he replied, and I've never forgotten that. Anybody who's any good is on the receiving end of boos and trash talk. That's how it works.

The end of July saw the launch of the Amsterdam Tournament. The Amsterdam Tournament is a cla.s.sic top-level pre-season tournament in the Netherlands, and that year, Milan, Valencia and Liverpool would be taking part, which of course was fantastic.

This was my chance to introduce myself to Europe, and I immediately noticed, good grief, this was nothing like the Allsvenskan League. In Malm I used to have all the time in the world with the ball. Now they were on me straight away. Everything just went so much faster.

We were up against Milan in the first match. Milan was going through a rough patch at the time, but the club had dominated European football in the '90s, and I tried hard not to care about the fact that they had defenders like Maldini. I really put some effort into it and got a few free kicks and some applause, and I made some nice moves. But it was tough and we lost 10.

In the second match we played Liverpool. Liverpool had won the cup treble that year, and they had possibly the strongest defensive partners.h.i.+p in the Premier League with Sami Hyypi, a Finn, and Stephane Henchoz from Switzerland. Henchoz hadn't just been on top of his game that year. He had done something that was the talk of the football world. In the FA Cup final, he'd blocked a shot on the goal line with his hand, and that nasty bit of work that the referee never saw had helped Liverpool to win.

Both he and Hyypi were on me like leeches. A little way into the match, I fought my way to the ball down by the corner flag and went into the penalty area, and there stood Henchoz. He was blocking me on the goal side, and of course I had several choices. I was in a tight spot, but I could make a cross or play it back or try to go in towards the goal.

I tried doing a feint with one foot, a cool thing Ronaldo and Romrio did a lot, which was one of the moves I'd watched on the computer when I was a junior and had practised for hours and hours until I could do them in my sleep and didn't even need to think in order to pull them out of the bag. It just came naturally. This one was called the Snake, because if you do it well it's like a snake slithering alongside your feet. But it's not all that easy to do. You need to have your outer side behind the ball and quickly nudge it to the right and then suddenly angle it with the tip of your boot to the left, and get past, like, boom, boom, quick as a flash, having total control with the ball glued to your foot, like an ice hockey player cradling the puck.

I'd used that move many times at Malm and in the Superettan League, but never against a world-cla.s.s defender like Henchoz. It was just, like, I'd already felt it against Milan, the whole atmosphere got me going. It was more fun to dribble towards a guy like him, and now things got even more intense. Swish, swish, it went, and Stephane Henchoz flew towards the right. He didn't keep up at all and I whizzed past, and the entire Milan squad sitting along the sideline stood up and screamed. The entire Amsterdam Arena screamed.

This was definitely showtime, and afterwards when I was surrounded by journalists, I came out with that line, and I promise you, I never plan what I'm going to say. It just happens, and it happened a lot in those days before I got more cautious around the media. "First I went left," I said, "and he did too. Then I went right, and he did too. Then I headed left, and he went out to buy a hot dog," and that got repeated all over the place, it became a famous quote. Somebody even made a commercial with it, and people were saying that Milan were interested in me. I was called the new van Basten and all sorts of stuff, and I felt like, wow, I'm awesome. I'm the Brazilian from Rosengrd, and truly, that should have been the start of a brilliant season.

Still, there were tough times ahead, and in hindsight the warning signs had been there from the start partly down to me, I didn't have my s.h.i.+t together. I went home too often and started losing weight and looking spindly, but it was also the coach, Co Adriaanse. He criticised me publicly, not so seriously at first. It got worse later on, after he got the sack. Then he said I was wrong in the head. Now, early on, it was just the usual stuff, that I played too much for myself, and I started to realise that even something like my moves against Henchoz wasn't necessarily appreciated at Ajax unless it led up to something concrete.

Instead it could be seen as an attempt to stand out and show off to the spectators rather than playing for the team. At Ajax they played with three men up front instead of two, like I was used to. I was in the centre. Not flitting out towards the edges and doing loads of individual stuff. I was supposed to be more of a target player, one who got up in there and took pa.s.ses and, above all, scored goals. To be honest, I started to wonder if that stuff about Dutch football being fun and technical was true any more. It was as if they'd decided to become more like the rest of Europe, but it wasn't easy to interpret the signals.

There was a lot that was new, and I didn't understand the language or the culture, and the coach didn't talk to me. He didn't talk to anybody. He was completely stony-faced. It felt wrong just to, like, look him in the eye, and I lost my flow. I stopped scoring goals, and then my excellent pre-season didn't really benefit me any more more the opposite, in fact. All the headlines and comparisons with van Basten were just turned against me, and I started to be seen as a disappointment, a bad purchase. I was replaced in the front line by Nikos Machlas, a Greek who I'd hung out with quite a lot, and in those situations when I get dropped and lose my form, my head starts buzzing, like: what am I doing wrong? How am I going to break out of this?

That's the kind of person I am.

I'm really not one to go round all satisfied, like, wow, I'm Zlatan! Not at all: it's like there's a film constantly playing in my head and I ask myself over and over, should I have done this or that differently? I watch other people: what can I learn from them? What am I missing? I go over my mistakes all the time along with the good stuff. What can I improve? I always, always take something with me from matches and training sessions, and of course that's tough sometimes. I'm never really satisfied, not even when I have reason to be, but it helps me improve. It's just that at Ajax I got bogged down in those thoughts, and I didn't have anybody to talk to, not really.

I talked to the walls at home. I thought people were idiots, and of course I'd phone home and have a moan. There was a cloud hanging over me. Still, I really shouldn't put the blame on anybody else. Everything just felt sluggish, and I wasn't doing well at all. It was like life in the Netherlands just didn't agree with me, and I went up to Beenhakker and asked him, "What's the coach saying about me? Is he happy, or what's going on?" And Beenhakker, he's a different sort of bloke to Co Adriaanse, he doesn't just want to have obedient footsoldiers.

"It's all right. It's going fine. We're being patient with you," he replied.

But I was homesick, and I didn't feel appreciated, not by the coach, not by the press, and certainly not by the fans. Those Ajax supporters are not to be treated lightly. They're used to winning they're like, what the h.e.l.l, you only won 30?

When we only managed a draw against Roda they threw rocks, sections of pipe and gla.s.s bottles at us, and I had to stay in the arena and seek shelter. There was a constant stream of s.h.i.+t, and instead of all that 'Zlatan, Zlatan' I'd heard early on, even at Ajax, I was now getting boos and jeers, and not from the opposing fans. That would have been completely normal, but no, this was from our own fans, and it was tough. It was like: what the h.e.l.l is this?

But still, you just have to lump it in this sport, and in a way I could understand them. I was the club's most expensive acquisition. I really shouldn't be a reserve. I was supposed to be the new van Basten and score one goal after another, and I made every effort I could. I made too much of an effort, to be honest.

A football season is long, and you can't put everything on show in a single match. But that's what I tried to do. As soon as I arrived I wanted to do my whole repertoire all at once, and that's why I got stuck, I think. I wanted too much, and that's why it wasn't enough, and I guess I hadn't learnt to handle the pressure yet, in spite of everything. Those eighty-five million kronor were starting to weigh me down like a d.a.m.n rucksack, and I spent a lot of time sitting around in my terraced house in Diemen.

I have no idea what the press thought of me in those days. I'm sure many of them imagined me and Mido were out on the town, partying. In fact, I stayed home and played video games, day and night, and if we had a Monday off, I'd fly home on Sunday evening and come back on the six a.m. flight Tuesday morning and head straight to the training session. There were no night clubs, none of that stuff, but even so, I wasn't being professional.

I was totally irresponsible, to be honest I didn't sleep or eat properly and got up to all sorts of stupid stuff in Malm. I went round with airbombs and stuff illegal fireworks that we'd chuck into people's gardens. We did all kinds of crazy stuff to get our adrenaline going. There'd be smoke and clumps of gra.s.s and c.r.a.p flying all over the place. There was loads of racing round in cars, because that's how I function. If nothing's going on with football, I've got to get my kicks somewhere else. I need action, I need speed, and I wasn't looking after myself.

I continued shedding weight, and as a centre forward at Ajax I was supposed to be st.u.r.dy and able to drive myself forwards. But I was down to 75 kilograms or even less. I got really thin, and I was probably worn out. I hadn't had a holiday. I'd done two pre-seasons in the s.p.a.ce of six months, and as for food, well, what do you think? I ate junk. I could still only, like, make toast and boil pasta, and that whole flood of favourable newspaper coverage had dried up. There was no 'Another triumph for Zlatan'. It was 'Zlatan booed off', 'He's out of balance'. He's this, that and the other, and people were talking about my elbows.

There was a h.e.l.l of a lot of talk about my elbows.

It started in a match against Groningen, where I elbowed a defender in the back of the neck. The referee didn't see anything, but the defender dropped to the ground and was stretchered off, and people claimed he got a concussion. When the bloke came back in after a while he was still groggy, but worst of all, the football a.s.sociation took it upon themselves to study the TV footage and decided to give me a five-match suspension.

That was definitely not what I needed. It was s.h.i.+t, and things didn't exactly get off to a good start when I returned after my suspension. I elbowed another guy in the back of the neck, and of course, he was stretchered off as well. It was like I'd got a stupid new habit, and even though I avoided a suspension that time I didn't get to play much afterwards, and it was hard, and the fans weren't exactly delighted, and so I phoned Ha.s.se Borg. It was idiotic, but that's the sort of thing you do when you're in a desperate situation.

"s.h.i.+t, Ha.s.se, can't you buy me back?"

"Buy you back? Are you serious?"

"Get me out of here. I can't take it."

"Come on, Zlatan, there's no money for that, you must realise that. You've got to be patient."

But I was tired of being patient, I wanted to play more, and I was so homesick it was unreal. I felt totally lost, and I started phoning Mia again, not that I knew whether it was her or something else I was missing. I was lonely and I wanted my old life back. But what did I get? I got another kick in the teeth.

It started when I discovered that I was being paid less than everybody else in the team. I'd suspected as much for a while, and finally it was clear. I was the most expensive transfer, but I got paid the least. I'd been purchased to be the new van Basten. And still I earned peanuts, and I mean, what was that down to? It wasn't hard to figure out.

Remember what Ha.s.se Borg said: "Agents are crooks", and all that, and like a bolt from the blue I understood: he'd screwed me over. He'd pretended to be on my side, but in reality he was working only for Malm FF. The more I thought about it, the more furious I got. Right from the beginning Ha.s.se Borg had made sure n.o.body came between us, n.o.body who could represent my interests. That's why I'd had to stand there like a fool at the St Jrgen Hotel in my tracksuit and let the guys in suits with their finance diplomas shaft me, and it felt like a punch in the guts. Let's get this straight: money has never been the main thing for me, but to be tricked and exploited, to be seen as some stupid falafel boy you can cheat and make money out of, that made me furious, and I wasted no time. I rang Ha.s.se Borg.

"What the h.e.l.l is this? I've got the worst contract in the entire club."

"What do you mean?"

He was playing dumb.

"And where's my ten per cent?"

"We invested it in an insurance policy in England."

In an insurance policy? What the h.e.l.l was that? It meant nothing to me, and I said, okay, it could be anything, an insurance policy, a carrier bag full of banknotes, a bucket in the wilderness, didn't make a difference: "I want my money now."

"That's not possible," he said.

They were tied up, they were invested in something I didn't have a clue about, and I decided to get to the bottom of it. I got myself an agent, because this much I'd realised: agents aren't crooks. Without an agent, you haven't got a chance. Without help, you'll just stand there and get screwed by the blokes in suits again. Through a friend I got hold of a guy called Anders Carlsson who worked at IMG in Stockholm.

He was all right, wasn't exactly going to set the world on fire. He was the sort of guy who'd never spit out his chewing gum in the street or cross over the line, but who still wants to seem a little tough, though it doesn't really suit him. But still, Anders helped me out a lot in the beginning. He got hold of the insurance doc.u.ments, and that's when I got my next shock. It didn't say ten per cent of the transfer fee. It said eight per cent, so I asked: "What's this?"

I found out they'd paid something called advance tax on my wages, and I thought: what kind of s.h.i.+t is that? Advance taxes on somebody's wages? I'd never heard of it, and straight away I said: this isn't right. This is a new trick. And what do you think happened? Anders Carlsson got on the case, and that was all it took for me to get those two per cent back. Suddenly there was no more advance tax on my wages, and then it was all over, I was finished with Ha.s.se Borg. It was a lesson I'll never forget. It scarred me, to tell the truth, and don't think for a second that I'm not fully on top of everything when it comes to my money and contracts these days.

When Mino rang me up recently he asked: "What'd you get from Bonniers for your book?"

"I don't really know."

"Bulls.h.i.+t! You know exactly how much," and of course he was right.

I'm in complete control. I refuse to be cheated and taken advantage of again, and I always try to be one step ahead in negotiations. What are they thinking? What do they want, and what are their secret tactics? And then I remember. Things get etched in, and sure, Helena often says I shouldn't dwell on things so much, like, "I'm tired of hating Ha.s.se Borg."

But no, I won't forgive him. No chance. You don't do something like that to a young guy from a council estate who doesn't know anything about that stuff. You don't pretend to be like a second dad to him while you're looking for every possible loophole to screw him over. I'd been the guy in the youth squad they didn't believe in, I was the one they least expected to get called up into the first team. But then... when I was sold for big money, their att.i.tudes changed. They wanted to milk every drop out of me. One minute I barely existed, and the next I was there to be exploited. I won't forget that, and I often wonder: would Ha.s.se Borg have done the same thing if I'd been a nice lad with a lawyer for a father?

I don't think so, and even back then at Ajax I made my feelings known. I basically said, he'd better watch out. But I guess he didn't really get it, and later in his book he wrote that he was my mentor, he was the bloke who'd taken care of me. The thing is, I think he got the idea later on. We b.u.mped into each other in a lift a few years ago. This was in Hungary.

I was there with the Swedish national side. I got into the lift, and we stopped on the fourth floor, and then out of nowhere he got in. He was in town on some junket. He was busy tying his tie and then he caught sight of me. Ha.s.se is always going, "Alright there, how's it going?" that sort of thing, and he said something along those lines and put out his hand.

I didn't move a muscle, nothing at all. All he got was an ice-cold, black stare, and he got really nervous, that's for sure. He just stood there, psyched out, and I didn't say a word. I stared him down, and down in the lobby I strode out and left him behind. That was our only encounter since all that business, so no, I won't forget. Ha.s.se Borg is someone with two sides to him, and I was really hurting from all that at Ajax. I'd been cheated and insulted, I was being paid less than everybody else, and the club's own fans were booing me. There was one thing after another. There were my elbows. There was c.r.a.p everywhere, the lists of my mistakes, the thing with the police in Industrigatan for the 98th time, and people saying I was out of balance. People missed the old Zlatan. There was talk about me day in, day out, and my thoughts kept going round and round in my head.

I was looking for solutions every hour, every minute, because I wasn't going to give up, no way. I didn't have it easy growing up, people forget that. I'm no talent who just waltzed out into Europe. I've fought against the odds. I've had parents and managers against me right from the start, and a lot of what I've learnt I've picked up in spite of what others have said. Zlatan just dribbles, they've complained. He's this, he's that, he's wrong. But I carried on, I listened, I didn't listen, and now at Ajax I was really trying to figure out the culture and learn how they thought and played.

I thought about what I needed to improve. I trained hard and tried to learn from the others. But at the same time, I didn't give up my style. n.o.body was going to get rid of what made my game my own, not that I was pig-headed or a troublemaker, I just kept fighting, and when I'm working on the pitch, I can seem aggressive. That's just a part of my character. I demand as much from others as I demand from myself. But clearly, Co Adriaanse was annoyed with me. I was difficult, he said later, I was full of myself: I went my own way, and blah blah blah, and of course, he's free to come out with whatever he wants to say, I'm not going to have a go at him. I accept the situation. The manager is the boss. I can only say that I really made an effort to fit in.

But things didn't improve. Nothing happened, other than we heard Co Adriaanse was going to get the sack, and that was good news, after all. We'd been thrashed by Henrik Larsson and Celtic in the Champions League qualifier and by FC Copenhagen in the UEFA Cup, but I don't think it was the scores that brought him down. We were doing well in the league.

He had to go because he couldn't communicate with us players. None of us had any contact with him. We were living in a vacuum. It's true that I like tough guys, and Co Adriaanse was really hard. But he crossed the line, there was nothing funny about his dictatorial style no sense of humour, nothing and of course we were all curious: who was going to replace him?

There was talk of Rijkaard for a while, and that did sound good, not because a good player necessarily makes a good coach, but still, Rijkaard had been legendary with van Basten and Gullit in Milan. But it ended up being Ronald Koeman. I knew him as well, he'd been a brilliant free kicker at Barcelona. He brought Ruud Krol with him who's another great player, and straight away I noticed they understood me better, and I started to hope that things would take a turn for the better.

They got worse. I was benched five matches in a row, and Koeman sent me home from one training session. "You're not into it," he yelled. "You're not giving it your all. You can go home." Sure, I got out of there, my mind was on other things. It was no big thing, but of course, there were big headlines. Even Lars Lagerbck was in the papers, saying he was worried about me, and there was talk that I might lose my place in the national squad, and that was no fun not at all.

The World Cup was coming up in j.a.pan that summer, and that was something I'd been looking forward to for a long time. I was also worried that my s.h.i.+rt, number 9 at Ajax, would be taken away from me, not that I really cared. I don't give a d.a.m.n what it says on my back. But it would be a sign that they didn't believe in me any more. At Ajax people talked about numbers constantly.

Number 10 should be like this. Number 11 like that, and there was none better than 9, van Basten's old number. It was a special honour to wear that one, and if you didn't make the grade you lost it. That was how it worked, and now people kept saying that I wasn't bringing enough to the team, and unfortunately, there was some truth in that.

I'd only scored five goals in the league. That made six in total, and for the most part I'd sat on the bench and got more and more boos from our own fans. While I warmed up and got ready to go in, they'd roar, 'Nikos, Nikos, Machlas, Machlas.' It didn't matter how bad he was, they didn't want me in there. They wanted to keep him, and I thought, s.h.i.+t, I haven't even started playing, but they're already against me. If I made a bad pa.s.s there'd be a ma.s.sive racket up there, boos or the same c.r.a.p again: 'Nikos, Nikos, Machlas, Machlas.' It wasn't bad enough that I wasn't playing well. I had that stuff to tackle as well, and sure, it looked as if we were going to win the league t.i.tle.

But I couldn't bring myself to be happy about it. I hadn't been a serious part of it, and I couldn't close my eyes to that any longer. There were too many of us in my position in the club. Somebody would have to leave and it looked like it was going to be me, I could feel it in my gut, and people were saying that I was just the number three centre forward, after Machlas and Mido. Even Leo Beenhakker, my friend, was quoted in the Dutch media saying: "Zlatan is often the player who launches our attack. But he doesn't follow through at the goal," and then he added, "If we sell him, we'll certainly make sure it's to a good club."

It was hanging in the air, and there were more and more of those statements. Koeman himself said: "In purely qualitative terms, Zlatan is our best striker, but it takes other qualities as well to succeed in the number 9 s.h.i.+rt at Ajax. I doubt whether he can achieve them," and then came the wartime headlines: 'Decision tonight', said one. 'Zlatan on the transfer list!' It was impossible to tell what was true and what wasn't, but the fact was that I'd been purchased for a huge sum of money and turned out to be a disappointment, and believe me, I felt it. It was as if I was about to be revealed as the over-hyped diva after all.

I hadn't lived up to expectations. This was my first major setback. But I refused to give up. I'd show them. That thought kept going round in my head, day and night, and to be honest, I had no other choice, whether I was going to be sold or not. I had to show I was good, whatever happened. The only thing was, how was I supposed to do that when I didn't get to play? It was a catch-22. It was hopeless, and I sat there on the bench, fuming: Are they stupid, or what? It was like being back in Malm FF's youth squad.

That spring, we qualified for the final in the Holland Cup. We were going to face Utrecht at De Kuip in Rotterdam, the same stadium where the UEFA Cup final had been played two years earlier, and the crowd was electric. It was the 12th of May 2002. There were flares and stuff and brawls in the stands. Ajax are Utrecht's arch-rivals. No other team is more important to beat, and the fans were burning with hatred and hungry for revenge after our league victory. You could almost smell it, and for us it was a chance to take home the double and show that we really were back after a few lean years. But obviously, I'd hardly get a chance to be a part of it.

I spent the entire first half and a good chunk of the second sitting on the bench and saw Utrecht make 21 on penalties and believe me, we felt it. The wind went out of our sails completely, the Utrecht supporters were going mad, and not far away from me, Koeman sat moping in his suit and his red tie. He seemed to have completely given up. Put me in there, I thought, and in the 78th minute I actually got to play. Something had to happen and of course, I was impatient. I was up for it and wanted everything all at once as usual that year, and we kept up the pressure, but the minutes ticked away and things seemed hopeless. We didn't get it in, and I remember I made one shot that I really thought would go in, but it hit the crossbar.

It was no use, and then it was full time and a few minutes of stoppage time, but it was still hopeless. There would be no cup celebration, and the Utrecht fans were cheering in the stands. Their red banners were waving around the entire stadium, and you could hear their songs and chants and you could see their flares, and there were 30, then 20 seconds left. That's when a long pa.s.s came into the penalty area past several Utrecht defenders and reached Wamberto, one of the Brazilians in our team, and he was probably offside, but the linesmen didn't see it, and Wamberto put his foot on the ball and shot a goal, and it was mental. We were saved in the final seconds of stoppage time, and the Utrecht fans clutched their heads in desperation. But it wasn't over yet.

We went into extra time, and in those days many cup matches were decided by a golden goal like sudden death in ice hockey and that's what would happen now. The team that scored a goal would immediately win the match, and just five minutes into extra time a new pa.s.s came, this time from the left, and I jumped up and headed it, and got the ball back soon after.

I took it down on my chest. I was boxed in really tight, but I turned and kicked it with my left foot, not a brilliant shot by any means. The ball bounced on the gra.s.s. But my G.o.d, it was well placed and went into the goal. I tore off my s.h.i.+rt and rushed out to the left, completely delirious with joy and as thin as a rake. You could see my ribcage. It had been a tough year. There had been a load of c.r.a.p in the press and my game had been seized up for long periods. But now I was back. I'd done it. I'd shown them all, and the entire stadium went mad. It was absolutely pulsating with joy and disappointment, and the main thing I remember is Koeman, who ran over to me and shouted into my ear: "Thank you very much! Thank you very much!"

That was a happiness I can't even describe, and I just ran around there with the whole team and felt everything let loose.

9.

I WAS A TYPICAL b.l.o.o.d.y YUGO, she thought, with a gold watch and a flash car and I played my music too loud. I was definitely not her type. But I didn't know any of that.

I thought I was pretty awesome, and I was sitting there in my Merc SL outside the Forex bureau de change at Malm Central railway station while Keki, my little brother, was exchanging some money inside. The season was over in the Netherlands, and this might have been either before or after the World Cup in j.a.pan I don't remember, but it doesn't matter anyway, there I was and this girl burst out of a taxi. She was angry about something.

Who the h.e.l.l is that? I wondered.

I'd never seen her before, and in those days I still felt pretty much at home in Malm. I'd been going back there whenever I got a chance, and I thought I knew what there was to know. But this girl... where had she been hiding? She wasn't just pretty. She had a wicked att.i.tude, like, don't try anything on with me, and she was a bit older, which was exciting. I asked around: Who is she? Who is that girl? I found out through an acquaintance that her name was Helena. Okay, Helena, I thought. Helena. I couldn't get her out of my head.

But nothing more came of it. There was so much going on around me, and I was restless and carried on, nothing really stuck. But one day I went to Stockholm again with the national squad, and I mean, that city where do all the fit girls come from? It's crazy they're everywhere. Me and some mates went to the Cafe Opera, and of course, it caused a bit of a stir, and as usual I sized up the situation with that look I'd grown up with: any problems coming up? Is there somebody going to give us s.h.i.+t? There's always something.

But things were better then. This was before everybody took my picture with their mobiles, and a lot of them don't even ask. They just snap a picture right in my face, and sometimes I go off on one. But this time, I was just having a look round and suddenly I caught sight of her, like, wow, it's the girl from Forex, and I went over and started chatting to her: Alright, are you from Malm as well, and she started going on about how she worked at such-and-such a place, and I didn't have a clue. That career stuff was totally beyond me in those days, and I was probably pretty arrogant. That's how I rolled back then.

I didn't want to let anybody get too close. But afterwards I regretted it, I should have been nicer, and I was happy when I saw her in Malm again. I started seeing her around all the time. She had a black Mercedes SLK which was often parked by Lilla Torg square, and I would often cruise by there. In those days I didn't have my Merc SL any longer, I'd changed it for a red Ferrari 360.

Everybody in town knew that was my car. There was a lot of, "Check it out, there goes Zlatan," and it's true, if I wanted to keep a low profile, that car wasn't a bright idea. But the guys who'd sold me the Mercedes had promised me: you'll be the only one in the country with that one! That was just sales talk. It was bulls.h.i.+t. I saw another one just like it in town that summer and thought straight away, they can go to h.e.l.l. I don't want this car any more, and then I phoned some people who sold Ferraris and asked, have you got any in stock? Sure, they said, and so I went there and picked one out and traded in my SL as part payment. It was a stupid thing to do I lost money on the deal, and my finances weren't in great shape in those days. But I didn't care.

I took pride in my cars it was a matter of principle, so that's why I cruised round in a Ferrari and felt well cool. Sometimes I'd see her in her black Merc, the girl called Helena, and I'd think: gotta do something about that, I can't just look, so I got her mobile number off an acquaintance and spent some time thinking it over. Should I ring her up?

I sent her a text, something like, "Alright, how's it going? Think you've seen me around," and then I finished with: "The guy in the red one" the guy in the red Ferrari, that is and got a reply: "The girl in the black one" she wrote, and I thought: this could be the start of something, who knows?

I phoned her and we met up, nothing special at first, just lunch a few times and I went along out to her country house, and I checked out her interior design stuff, the wallpaper and traditional ceramic-tiled wood stoves and all that, and honestly, I was impressed. It was something completely new to me. I'd never met a single girl who lived like that, and I don't think I still really grasped what it was she did. She had something to do with marketing for Swedish Match, a tobacco company, but I understood she was pretty high up in her line of work, and I liked that.

She wasn't at all like the younger girls I'd met. There was none of the hysteria, not at all she was cool. She liked cars. She'd left home when she was 17 and worked her way up, and I wasn't exactly a superstar to her. Or as she put it: "Come on, Zlatan, you weren't exactly Elvis who'd beamed in." I was just a crazy bloke to her, who wore hideous clothes and was totally immature, and sometimes she'd tease me a bit.

"Evil super b.i.t.c.h deluxe", I'd reply, or Evilsuperb.i.t.c.hdeluxe as all one word, in a single breath, because she'd go round in wicked stiletto heels and tight jeans and fur coats and stuff. She was like Tony Montana in Scarface, only a girl, whereas I was s...o...b..ng around in tracksuits again. The whole thing between us was so wrong it somehow felt right, and we had a good time together. "Zlatan, you're an absolute idiot. You're so much fun," she said, and I really hoped she meant it. I enjoyed being with her.

But she came from a respectable nuclear family in a small town called Lindesberg the kind of family where they say, "Darling, could you please pa.s.s me the milk," whereas in my family we'd generally threaten to kill each other over the dinner table, like I said, and there were many times when she didn't even understand what I was saying. I didn't understand anything about her world, and she knew nothing about mine. I was 11 years younger and lived in the Netherlands and was a nutter with dodgy friends. It wasn't exactly an ideal situation.

That summer, some mates and I went down to gatecrash a party she'd organised for loads of celebs and big shots in the resort town of Bstad during the annual tennis tournament there. The people on the door didn't want to let us in, at any rate they weren't going to let my mates in, and it turned into a big song and dance. There was always something.

Like the time I played in an international match in Riga and flew into Stockholm in the evening, I took a taxi with Olof Mellberg and Lars Lagerbck to the Scandic Park Hotel. Our game hadn't been much to write home about. We'd only managed to draw 00 against Latvia in the World Cup qualifier. I always have a hard time getting to sleep after matches, especially when I've played badly. My mistakes whirl around in my head, so some mates and I decided to go and check out a club, Spy Bar, in the city centre. It was late, and I was walking up a flight of stairs.

But I hadn't been standing there very long before a girl came up and was coming on really strong, and of course, I had some mates nearby. If you see me out and about, you can be sure I'll have some homeboys around somewhere. Not just because of all the to-do around me. It's something about my personality. I easily end up with the bad guys. We gravitate towards each other, and it doesn't bother me a bit. They're as nice as all the rest. But sure, things can kick off, and this girl, she came up close and said something silly, she just wanted to get a reaction, and suddenly her brother turned up and grabbed me, and, well, he shouldn't have done that.

You don't mess around with my mates. One of them took the brother and another took hold of her, and I realised straight away, nope, I don't want to be a part of this. I wanted out, but you see, that was the first time I'd been to Spy Bar and it was late and packed with people and I couldn't find the way out.

I ended up in the toilets instead, and over where I had been standing there was already a big commotion, and I started to get stressed out. I'd played in an international match.

This would make the headlines, I thought, there'll be a scandal, and then a new security guy turned up and it was no more Mr Nice Guy.

"The owner wants you to leave the premises."

"Tell that swine there's nothing I'd rather do," I hissed, and so he and a few others followed me out, and I got out of there.

It was half past three in the morning I know that because I was caught on one of the security cameras, and what do you think happened? Did they bother with any confidentiality stuff? Not quite. It ended up in the Aftonbladet tabloid and in all the headlines, and you have no idea it was as if I'd murdered seven people. The papers were screaming all kinds of stuff and they claimed I'd been reported for s.e.xual a.s.sault. s.e.xual a.s.sault? Can you imagine? That's just sick, and as usual, anyone who'd happened to touch me that night went to the papers and milked it for all it was worth.