Accidentally I came across two interesting things. I'll start with the least interesting one, then the more interesting thing (@PDG1978 will be interested I think) First something on win percentages, although couldn't find this for Ibrahimovic, related to the number of championships won above. Kante has a 68.5% win percentage in the Premier League but he's still behind Robben in the all-time listRead more: https://t.co/hwzmYxcCgB pic.twitter.com/1Fs5y1Z9OJ— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) December 19, 2016 76.8% - @ArjenRobben, who turns 34 today, has the highest win percentage in Bundesliga history of all players with more than 100 games. Celebrate. pic.twitter.com/jPyMwJRpHu— OptaJohan (@OptaJohan) January 23, 2018 80% - Highest win percentage in @eredivisie games of players with 100+ games: Johan Cruijff (80%). Salvador. pic.twitter.com/aMgyFW9YIT— OptaJohan (@OptaJohan) September 2, 2016 Can't find for Ibrahimovic on twitter (it returns no results), but I assume he'll be fine. Second thing; Here is a nice article - to be specific: an essay. It was a link to a Facebook page, which then further linked to the article. It is long yes, but provides some good things (to think about or consider). Something about Laudrup and Zlatan, children of the welfare state and the ghetto respectively, the one perhaps comparable to the ivory tower-elevated Flaubert, weaving his romanticist threads and sublime patterns uncontaminated by the filthiness of the prosaic everyday, the other more like the sewer-fighting Zola, handling out deadly, but elegant punches on his way to victory and truth. https://www.facebook.com/standingontheshouldersofgiantsmanchesterunited/ Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler Laudrup or Ibrahimović: who is the best Scandinavian soccer player of all time? The essay does not provide a final answer to the question of its subtitle, but it juxtaposes the profiles of Michael Laudrup and Zlatan Ibrahimović in terms of soccer abilities, career statistics and social backgrounds. While arguing that comparisons between soccer players are in principle meaningless, the essay nevertheless employs comparison heuristically in order to outline each player’s uniqueness through differences and similarities. If Laudrup and Ibrahimović are considered to be the best ever soccer players of Scandinavia, sharing traits of technical brilliance and postmodern nomadism, they are also conspicuously contrasting characters and players, partly as a result of their different backgrounds. Common for both of them, though, is their symbolic value in the contexts of their social and national backgrounds. Introduction It would be wrong to say that there is a rivalry going on between Michael Laudrup and Zlatan Ibrahimović about who is the best Scandinavian soccer player of all time. If you asked Zlatan he would probably tell you in no indirect way that there is not even a competition going on here since he is by far the best footballer that has ever set foot on this planet. If you happened to look him in the eyes while he talks you would almost certainly see a twinkle. And if you asked Laudrup it is likely that he would just shrug and walk away since he never really engages in such discussions. If their reactions would be very different, one assertive, one timid, they nevertheless spring from the same source, a conviction they both share: I am what I am. If you ask Scandinavian soccer fans the matter looks a little different, though. Admittedly, it is not a ubiquitous debate among present-day fans. But as is the case all over the world, determining who is the best ever soccer player – Di Stéfano, Puskás, Best, Pelé, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Maradona, Platini, Zidane, Messi, Ronaldo – is both a relevant quest and a continuous concern among fans. So too in Scandinavia. That the quest – in the global as well as in the Scandinavian context – then seems to never produce a final answer is not the point. What matters are the intense discussions among fans, the resourceful descriptions of each player’s attributes, the faithful characterizations of his skills, strengths and weaknesses, and the celebration of the values he stands for. It is not that we are unable to hierarchize among soccer players. After all, most of us would probably agree that Marco van Basten was a better centre forward than Jamie Vardy is and that Fabio Cannavaro was a better central defender than Robert Huth is, although both Vardy and Huth are more than capable players. But when you talk about the best of the best things become more complicated. They do so for several reasons: these players often play different positions; each player is truly unique; they belong to different epochs, which ultimately makes them incomparable; they are generally very close in terms of level and quality. In principle then, comparisons do not really make sense, but in our everyday fan lives we cannot stop making them. And if we must accept an open ending to our plot, a ‘no final solution’ to the question of who is the best, we nonetheless get closer to pinpointing each player’s identity and individual profile more accurately by comparing. This is the purpose of this essay. In the history of soccer there is only one Scandinavian (i.e. a Danish, Swedish or Norwegian) winner of the Ballon d’Or. His name is neither Michael Laudrup nor Zlatan Ibrahimović, but Allan Simonsen. The diminutive, but incredibly elegant Dane won the prize in 1977 (and the fact that Simonsen came third in 1983 bears witness to his prominent epochal role). Still, no matter how great a player Simonsen was for Borussia Mönchengladbach, FC Barcelona and Denmark, he is not considered as great as Laudrup and Ibrahimović. The same is true of Preben Elkjær who came third on the Ballon d’Or list in 1984 and second in 1985, and who formed what was considered the world’s deadliest strike partnership with Laudrup during the mid-80s. And this is the case even though neither Laudrup nor Ibrahimović has been close to ever winning the prize, or even feature among the three best in any given year.1 Why is that? Besides their indisputable individual qualities and highly symbolic profiles, which I will continuously return to throughout this essay, Laudrup’s and Ibrahimović’s status has a lot to do with their success at club level. Laudrup did have some memorable years with the Danish national team, not least during the 1984 European Championship in France and, even more so, the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. And his swan song in Red and White during the 1998 World Cup in France turned out to be a personal triumph for him with highly regarded individual performances in the 4-1 victory against Nigeria and the 2-3 quarter final defeat to Brazil, performances that lead to his inclusion in the tournament’s All-star team (together with his brother Brian who also impressed during the tournament). But Laudrup’s career with the Danish national team was also marked by a voluntary three-year exile due to irreconcilable differences of opinion with Richard Møller Nielsen, the coach of Denmark, during which time Denmark sensationally won the European Championship in 1992, in Sweden. As for Zlatan, he may have had a brilliant career with the Swedish national team, but despite the Blågula’s tradition of always being a competitive team, and despite Zlatan’s personal records and success (e.g. out-of-the-world goals like the scissors kick against England in 2012) in yellow and blue, they never really managed to light up the world during Zlatan’s international career. So, on the global scene his fame is mostly a consequence of his club history. Laudrup, a child of the Danish welfare state In a way Zlatan is everything that Laudrup is not – and vice versa. I already mentioned that one is assertive and direct, the other timid and reserved. We could also state the fact that Laudrup never received a red card in his almost 600 matches, while Zlatan has been shown the red card nine times in a little more than 600 matches. And while Laudrup was shown the yellow card less than 10 times, Zlatan has so far received it more than a 100 times.2 The latter is the bully, the former the gentleman. But being such a gentleman does not bring you all the way to the very top if one asks some of Laudrup’s critics. One of the fiercest of those critics, but arguably also one of the most influential in a positive sense on Laudrup’s development as a player, was Johan Cruyff. In the aftermath of a truly historical El Clásico on 7 January 1995, the FC Barcelona manager said about his former player Michael Laudrup (who had just helped his new team Real Madrid thump his former team 5-0): ‘When Michael plays like a dream, a magic illusion, determined to show his new team his extreme abilities, no one in the world comes anywhere near his level.’ 3 However, the words spoken by Cruyff on this January evening had a somewhat regretful tone about them. The reason for this was not only that Laudrup – who was baptized ‘The 10-0 Man’ in the Spanish media as a result of his two consecutive 5-0 El Clásico victories, the first with Barcelona, the second with Real Madrid – was decisive in the molestation of his old team, but also, and more significantly, that Cruyff had just witnessed Laudrup play in a manner that Cruyff hardly, if ever, got to see at Camp Nou when he managed the Dane: ‘When Michael gives 80% he is still better than anyone else. But with me there is nobody that gives less than 100%. I must demand this.’ 4 These words were spoken in connection with Laudrup signing a new contract with FC Barcelona shortly before Christmas in 1991. And after the 1998 World Cup in France, where Laudrup had played phenomenally in his last two caps, Cruyff not only lamented the general state of the game, but also found time to comment on what he saw as a lack in his former player’s mentality: ‘Had Michael been born in a poor ghetto in Brazil or Argentina with the ball being the only way out of misery he would today be recognised as the greatest ever genius of the game. He had all the abilities to reach this, but just lacked this vile ghetto-instinct, which could have pushed him the rest of the way.’ 5 Five years prior to Cruyff’s ghetto comments and to Laudrup’s career stop, Laudrup himself addressed this same topic in Jørgen Leth’s 1993 movie Michael Laudrup – en fodboldspiller (Michael Laudrup – a soccer player): On the field I have become more temperamental in the last few years. The funny thing is that when I was a kid, and this also applies to Brian, we were both a bit hysterical. If we lost we shouted at the referee, at our teammates, and at everybody else. But at some point we were told that we could not do such a thing, that it was not okay, and that in Denmark no one is allowed to behave that way. Then I changed, and Brian changed, and we became completely quiet, and no matter what happened we have both always handled things very calmly. That cost me a lot in Italy, because people said that I had no temperament. But with age I have become more temperamental.6 Laudrup’s remark is interesting for two reasons. First, he does not seem to agree completely with Cruyff’s assessment of him as someone who is without a temper. Second, Laudrup’s reference to Danish mentality actually anticipates what Cruyff also talks about immediately after the 1998 World Cup: ‘Europe will probably never ever in history foster a soccer genius! The lifestyle has become too soft, the welfare state make no demands – life-and-death challenges do not exist at all in our part of the world. Take Michael Laudrup, the closest to a soccer genius I have known in my life. But then again not. He never really hit the peaks, he never quite managed to fulfil the expectations that came with his rich talent.’ 7 For someone who followed Laudrup’s career closely from his early days in Brøndby and Lazio, to his time of apprenticeship in Juventus and his zenith years in FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, and also his uneven career with the Danish national team, I cannot help thinking there is a grain of truth in Cruyff’s characterization. But on the other hand, it is always unfair to the individual player when someone wants to transform him into something, which he is not. Is it, for example, reasonable to blame Einstein that he did not discover the Higgs boson? Or to blame Shakespeare for not writing Ulysses? In soccer, though, such comparisons and demands are done all the time. On the right side of Manchester United’s midfield, David Beckham was continuously compared to the more prototypical winger Ryan Giggs, who played on the left, and the comparison always came out in favour of Giggs, because Beckham couldn’t do what Giggs (and a traditional winger) could do. That is, he couldn’t dribble, go past several opponents with lightning speed, and cross the ball from the end line. But Beckham could do things no one else could. He could bend free kicks in a way that made people believe that he had almost created a whole new spatial dimension all by himself. And Beckham had things no one else had when he crossed the ball. He had ‘timing (‘early on and unexpectedly’), sense of spacing (‘halfway’) and the fusion of Euclid and Einstein (‘curled crosses with extreme precision’).’ 8 In a way the same can be said of Laudrup. Perhaps, he didn’t score as many goals as Stoichkov and Romário in Cruyff’s famous El Dream Team, but he created them instead, and he did so in ways that were genuinely his ways: dribbles with the ball pushed quickly from right foot to left foot and then sliding past the opponent, the centre of gravity always lying low; razor sharp vertical passes in between two defenders and into the path of a running teammate; and vertically directed lops over the opposing team’s line of defence and into the path of a teammate, often while his own direction of running was horizontal. Perhaps he wasn’t as great a leader as Platini, but he still did things the French conductor never did and could never do, for example, dribble with explosive pace past three, four or five opponents. As Frank de Boer says in Football’s Greatest: Michael Laudrup: ‘Nobody really has his style. It was typical Laudrup style. […] He was like a snake, it was like slalom skiing.’ 9 No player in the history of soccer has been perfect. This is the lesson we need to learn. Perfection only exists temporarily: as epiphanies of form involving several players and the ball converging into a beautiful pattern or as momentary actions by individual players doing unbelievable things with the ball. Laudrup has been responsible for his share of such epiphanies and actions. To Andrès Iniesta, Laudrup is simply the best player ever: ‘The best player in history? Laudrup,’ Iniesta replies without hesitation.10 Pep Guardiola and Javier Clemente have expressed a similar standing. To both Raúl and Romário, Laudrup ranks as the best player they have ever played with. And to round off this potpourri of notable soccer people assessing Laudrup, Beckenbauer once said: ‘In the 60s Pelé was the best footballer. In the 70s it was Cruyff. In the 80 then, it was Maradona. And in the 90s it was Laudrup.’ 11 Cruyff in fact often praised his Danish goal-assisting play-maker, and it was a common belief that he saw in Laudrup the image of himself as a soccer player. In Leth’s movie the Dutch manager describes his Danish ace as someone who sees what his teammates and opponents don’t see; or if they see it he sees it before they do. But what, more specifically, is it Laudrup sees? He not only envisions spaces on the field that to others are blind spots, he not only imagines situations that to others are unimaginable, he also creates them, he also designs them. Laudrup’s soccer vision is extraordinary because he is gifted with a visionary prescience, being in some sense able to predict the future by opening up spaces and scenarios that no one else can see – that is, he both sees them in their virtual condition before anyone else sees them and creates them, actualizes them, simultaneously. As a play-maker, Laudrup is comparable to a weaver on the soccer field. His dribbles and slalom runs are threads in a magic carpet, and his visionary passes make up the carpet’s epiphanic patterns and, ultimately, its artistic motif. But if Cruyff also hit the nail on its head concerning Laudrup with his ghetto comment, then it becomes more than plausible that Zlatan is gifted with precisely what the Dane was missing in his formative years. Laudrup was born on 15 June 1964, and he grew up in the comfy and relatively carefree Social Democratic welfare state of Denmark, first in a two-room apartment in Vanløse, Copenhagen, then in a newly commissioned suburban development of one-family detached houses in Brøndbyvester, Copenhagen. In general, the 1960s and 1970s was an innocent time before mass immigration and globalization began to challenge the Danish comfort zone idea of societal cohesion and equality. In addition, soccer was running in the family, since his father Finn was a soccer player with 20 internationals, and from 1968 to 70 Laudrup lived with his parents in Vienna where Finn played professionally for Wiener-Sportklub. His younger brother Brian also had a remarkable career with the national team and clubs such as Glasgow Rangers, Milan, Ajax and Bayern Munich. In soccer terms, Denmark was only on the verge of becoming professional at the beginning of Michael’s career with his own club Brøndby leading that process. When the pioneering Sepp Piontek, the German coach who took over the Danish national team in 1979 and transformed it into one of the most memorable teams ever, his most difficult task was to transform the players’ mentality and behaviour. Most of them were professionals playing abroad, but they had been used to associate national team gatherings with relaxation, beer drinking and bar visits. Finn Laudrup had personally experienced the professional soccer scene abroad, and he maintained an ambivalent attitude to the scene. So did his wife Lone. This meant that the parents never pushed their sons into soccer. Instead they tried to shield them as much as possible, and the family as a whole has always upheld a very strict balance, perhaps even a separation, between life in general and soccer as such. ‘It’s only soccer’ could be the motto for the Laudrup family. Because of their background, because soccer in the Danish welfare state is never a matter of ‘life-and-death challenges,’ they could always withdraw into a more private family circle and protect themselves from public scrutiny. Partly, at least. Michael, for example, insisted on obtaining his high school diploma and even withdrew from an international match of some importance because he had an exam. Education was something to fall back upon. An alternative option. A backdoor. Finn, Michael and Brian have always been a bit uncomfortable with all the fuzz. But they also, Michael arguably the most, accepted their ‘destiny,’ acknowledged that they were born to do something, that they were gifted with a special talent. But the escape route was always right there. It was there when Michael and his brother decided to exile themselves from the national team. It was there when Michael took the decision to end his career in Japan (a decision he reverted when he signed for Ajax after one year with Vissel Kobe and ended his career with the Dutch team instead). It was there when Brian asked Chelsea to cancel their mutual contract in order for him to return to Denmark. And it was there again when Brian got out of his next contract with FC Copenhagen – and also ended up in Ajax. It was also there when he decided to end his career with the national team in 1998 at the age of only 29. Michael Laudrup is a child of the Danish welfare society. Tellingly, the family name was initially Laudrup-Jensen. Until very recently (1 January 2016), Jensen was ever-present on the list of family names as the most common Danish surname. In general, the obsession with individualism and personal uniqueness during the past decades has led to a gradual demise of the ‘sen’ (son) suffix in Denmark.12 Some would say that Laudrup’s mentality is soft. Soft as Jensen. Soft as the solidarity and equality tyranny of the social democratic welfare state. He is a Michael Jensen, an ordinary guy from Brøndbyvester. He is anybody. But he is also Laudrup, the football genius that sticks out and who also coped with the ruthless world of professional soccer in Lazio, Juventus, Barcelona and Real Madrid. The guy gifted with Brazilian skills and abilities. Not born in the favela, though. But no matter how one sees him, he is what he is. The emphatic elements of skill and technique in Laudrup also converge well with how Danes see themselves. In soccer terms, they regard themselves as the Brazilians of Europe. They have always, at least before and during Laudrup’s time, had a tradition for individualism and anarchism. Michael’s father Finn was a part of this self-understanding. It was he that somewhat symbolically shed Jensen in the family name. And just ask Sepp Piontek, who managed to strike a fruitful balance between his own inbred German discipline and the Danish hygge mentality with mandatory elbowroom for individualists like Elkjær, Arnesen, Lerby, Mølby and Laudrup. In that sense, Laudrup is a genuine symbol of his nation: Jensen and Laudrup, egalitarianism and exceptionalism.
Second part: Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler Zlatan, a child of the ghetto As we can read in the fascinating and fascinatingly honest I am Zlatan Ibrahimović (2011), Zlatan’s formation, on the other hand, began in Rosengård in the 1980s. Rosengård is a suburb in Malmö, Sweden, and one of the most notorious immigrant ghettos in Scandinavia. It is with reference to Rosengård that Zlatan and David Lagercrantz, the book’s co-author, coin the motto: ‘You can take the boy out of the ghetto, but you can never take the ghetto out of the boy.’ 13 Does the same apply to Laudrup? ‘You can take the boy out of the newly developed suburban residential area of welfare state Denmark, but you can never take the newly developed suburban residential area of welfare state Denmark out of the boy.’ Apart from its sonic clumsiness, the motto seems to express what Cruyff and others think about Laudrup. Zlatan’s father was not a famous soccer player like Finn Laudrup, he was a proud Bosnian in Sweden turned alcoholic in his nostalgic longing for a past and a homeland irrevocably lost. His mother was a Croatian Catholic who coped better with migration, although she only spoke Swedish very badly and occasionally would use kitchen utensils to slap her son with when he was being too disobedient. Zlatan’s parents were divorced, and one of his half-sisters was a drug addict. He first lived with his mother, but she lost custody over him, and he had to move to his dad’s home. For Zlatan, and unlike Laudrup, soccer was not running in the family. It was more of a coincidence, but when he realized that it could be his way out of the ghetto, he committed himself to it with an underlying fury. ‘It’s only soccer’ never was Zlatan’s motto. Perhaps a more fitting one would be ‘Soccer player or criminal,’ if one takes into consideration his track record of stealing bikes and stuff from the grocery store. As his former headmistress said: ‘I’ve been at this school 33 years, and Zlatan is easily in the top five of the most unruly pupils we have ever had. He was the number one bad boy, a one-man show, a prototype of the kind of child that ends up in serious trouble.’ 14 On 12 January 2016, a young boy of 16 was shot dead in Rosengård. It doesn’t take much imagining realizing that it could have been Zlatan if he hadn’t managed to escape. Though Sweden is, historically speaking, also a social democratic welfare state, it had absorbed a lot more immigrants than Denmark, not only Gastarbeiters from Turkey and Poland during the economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s, but also immigrants from Balkan, the Middle East and Asia during the 1980s and 1990s when globalized mass migration became a new everyday reality in many Western countries. In that sense, Zlatan – living on his parallel planet in Rosengård, watching his first Swedish television very late in his teens – came from exactly those circumstances that Cruyff wished Laudrup would have come from. And as Cruyff remarked, we don’t see those soccer players in Western Europe anymore. Arguably, the young Wayne Rooney was the last player from Western Europe with whom one got associations to a bygone era of innocence, pure joy, and a burning this-is-aboutlife-and-death desire. Today, we associate such qualities – qualities linked to a genuine working-class background and the coalminers of Europe’s past – only with immigrants, second-generation immigrants, or with players from developing countries and very poor conditions. Too many players in Western Europe have grown up under too favourable conditions in order to become real warriors on the pitch. Whereas the Danish national team is still more or less ‘core Danish’ (and has been pretty ‘faceless’ for the last couple of years), the German Nationalmannschaft, for example, is indeed multikulti with players such as Mesut Özil and Sami Khedira. In fact, therein lies their strength and one of the main reasons why Joachim Löw has managed to transform their style into something we unavoidably think of as nonGerman: speed, flair and goals galore. In Sweden, the symbol of this new order of national heterogeneity is a one-person army, and the name of this army is Zlatan Ibrahimović. Not only is he a symbol of the new hybrid Sweden (still a social democratic welfare state, but now also a multicultural society with internal clashes of civilizations, hooliganism and, recently, terrorism), he is by far and without any comparison Sweden’s best soccer player and athlete in general. In contrast to the Danish national team that has had a reputation for a style of soccer based on technical skill and individualists, especially with Piontek’s Danish Dynamite team in the 80s, Sweden’s national team has always prioritized collectivity and solidarity. Another important difference is Sweden’s English-inspired historical propensity for the 4-4-2 formation, a legacy of Bob Houghton’s and, especially, Roy Hodgson’s coaching careers in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s,15 while Denmark has been influenced more by the Dutch philosophy. Piontek’s team was seen as the true inheritors of Jack Reynolds’s and Rinus Michel’s Totaalvoetbal, 16 and Morten Olsen’s 16-year reign as national coach was also characterized by his own 4-3-3 Ajax heritage with emphasis on wingers and passing. In that sense, it would be easy to think that Zlatan is a more Danish than Swedish player. Would he have fitted better into Olsen’s 4-3-3 and style of play (a system and style that consistently lacked classy individualists)? Of course, the question is meaningless, but the Swedish system and philosophy is no doubt one reason why Zlatan has reached saintly or even godly status and why his farewell to the national team in July 2016 made people cry (see, for example, the post-match interview with Marcus Allbäck, former co-striker and then assistant to Erik Hamrén, Sweden’s coach). Zlatan truly stood out, and he symbolizes the old fairy tale story of ‘The Ugly Duckling’ in a modernized version of today’s migratory world: ‘The Nasty Immigrant turned Beautiful.’ As such he reminds the Swedish fans of an alternative way to their rigid 4-4-2 of hard-working team players. On the one hand, the Swedish welfare society of consensus and harmony (and, some would add, political correctness) has made Zlatan one of them; it has even made him possible. Zlatan is evidence that the Swedish welfare state with its tolerance of differences and embrace of the wretched of the earth works. On the other, he stands apart from all that. He is what he is: his own. ‘The background makes all the difference, I think,’ says Teddy Landen, a TV presenter from Malmö, in the documentary Who is Zlatan?17 The Swedish welfare state is both egalitarian and spacious enough for unorthodox uniqueness to flourish; in fact, the former is a precondition for the latter. Asked this question by a TV3 Denmark reporter: ‘Is your playing style Swedish or Yugoslavian?,’ Zlatan’s response simply was: ‘It’s Zlatanstyle.’ 18 In another context, Zlatan commented on the relationship between himself and the Swedish national team: ‘Everyone has his own style of play, everyone can not be the same, but precisely in Sweden it is eleven men and everyone must be the same. This is not who I am.’ 19 Who is he then, Zlatan? Well, his trademarks are many. Back heels, overhead kicks, long-range volleys just to mention a few on-field characteristics. Another is to win championships wherever he goes. And Zlatan does go. Laudrup was a postmodern nomad: KB, Brøndby, Lazio, Juventus, FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, Vissel Kobe, Ajax. Zlatan too. He has maintained an immigrant mentality of being on the move, and has thus played for Malmö, Ajax, Juventus, Inter, Barcelona, Milan, PSG and Manchester United. Zlatan is not a one-club man like Paolo Maldini or Ryan Giggs; he is postmodern in that he, harshly put, isn’t loyal to anyone but himself (and perhaps a few family members and his agent). But he has continuously gained respect among his teammates for his winning mentality, his ability to transform a team into champions, and his decisive presence and goals. Coming to Ajax in 2001 and winning the Dutch championship may not be a spectacular achievement, and the same could be said when he moved to Capello’s Juventus in 2004. What should be remembered, though, is that he won the championship twice with Ajax and twice with Juventus. However, it was after Juventus’ forced relegation (because of the Calciopoli) that Zlatan perhaps showed what he is really made of. Both AC Milan and Internazionale wanted to sign him in 2006. The easy choice would have been Milan, but Zlatan chose Inter, a club that hadn’t won the Scudetto in 17 years. With Zlatan, Inter won it three years in a row, and in his final year at Inter he even became capocannonieri, top scorer of Serie A. After Inter (and one year with Mourinho, one of his favourite managers together with Capello), Zlatan’s restlessness and dream made him and his agent Mino Raiola work towards a transfer to Spain. Zlatan ended up in FC Barcelona. There he also won a championship medal in his only year there, not surprisingly though, since FC Barcelona was considered the best team in the world at the time. After some big controversies with their manager, Pep Guardiola (or, ‘The Philosopher’ as Zlatan pejoratively calls him), Zlatan moved back to Italy and helped AC Milan win their first Scudetto in seven years. Subsequently, he played for Paris Saint Germain for four years, his longest ever connection with a club, and won the French championship four times. Currently, he has been reunited with Mourinho at Manchester United. In terms of league titles Zlatan’s 13, thus, surpass Laudrup who won one championship with Juventus, four with FC Barcelona, one with Real Madrid and one with Ajax. But of course this doesn’t ultimately decide who is the best Scandinavian soccer player ever. Laudrup also won one Champions League medal, a trophy that has continued to evade Zlatan. There is a leitmotif in I am Zlatan Ibrahimović, which I think summarizes what Zlatan is all about: ‘I listened; I didn’t listen.’ 20 Zlatan is only the phenomenal player he is today because he has absorbed from teammates (e.g. Patrick Vieira, Henke Larsson, Xavi), learned from managers (e.g. Roland Andersson, Fabio Capello, José Mourinho, Erik Hamrén) and listened to people he respected (e.g. Marco van Basten, Leo Beenhakker, Mino Raiola). This is important to understand: Zlatan has been willing to learn and improve, and no one gets to be one of best players in the world without having that ability to listen. This relativizes the solidity of ‘I am what I am.’ However, Zlatan is also only the player he is today because there is a side of him that refuses to listen, that refuses to blend in, that refuses to follow the rules. Zlatan is true to himself, he sticks to what he believes is right and doesn’t allow himself to change. Once he tried that, to change, he became a lesser player, someone else, restricted. This happened under Guardiola at FC Barcelona. ‘We keep our feet on the ground here,’ he was constantly told. ‘We are fabricantes. We work here. We’re regular guys.’ 21 But by his very nature Zlatan sticks out. He is not afraid of putting in a shift, but he always, also, go for the spectacular. As he and Lagercrantz describe it in I am Zlatan, we almost get the feeling that FC Barcelona was a Communist or Social Democratic equality hell. The players ‘were like schoolboys,’ 22 brought up together, indoctrinated with the same egalitarian principles. Nobody was allowed to be different. No one was allowed to be mad and furious. For Zlatan, this equals no fuel. He is driven by rage. You see the best of Zlatan when he is furious – the spectacular goals, the fascinating in-fights, the unforgettable facial expressions. But, of course, you also see the worst – the head-buttings, the outrageous tackles, the red cards. The same was true of players such as Roy Keane and Eric Cantona. Some of the greatest players in the history of soccer were only so great because they had made a pact with the devil. And not all managers can handle such players – or the devil for that matter. According to Zlatan, Guardiola was such a manager. ‘If Mourinho lights up a room, Guardiola draws the curtains,’ it says in one of the book’s many memorable one-liners.23 Another one regarding Guardiola, actually spoken out by a teammate of Zlatan’s at Barcelona, but re-told by the Swede, goes like this: ‘Zlatan, it’s as if Barça had bought a Ferrari and was driving it like a Fiat.’ 24 Zlatan, like Laudrup, needs freedom, special treatment, in order to perform and do what he does best: create epiphanic moments of unforgettable beauty. The listening part of Zlatan entails an ability to cope with critique in a productive way. When Capello builds up Zlatan only to tear him down again in his brutally dictatorial manner (remember, this is a manager of whom Rooney once said that if you happen to pass Capello in a hallway, it’s as if death walked by), Zlatan listens, absorbs, learns. He becomes a better player. Capello eradicated the softer Ajax mentality in Zlatan, the ‘beauty is more significant than winning and dribbles are more important than goals’ mentality, and made him into a beast, a goal getter and a winner. Zlatan sees soccer (and life) as a battle in which individual warriors fight a deadly struggle to get the upper hand. Unlike Laudrup, whose strengths are best exploited when avoiding physical contact with opponents, Zlatan’s game is physical. He thrives on tough defenders trying to bring him down. He retaliates. Zlatan’s world is an-eye-for-an-eye world. On top of this beastly dimension, there is a layer of technical brilliance and athletic grace only matched today by the likes of Messi and Ronaldo (in their own inimitable ways). Conclusion Hristo Stoichkov once said about Laudrup: ‘His only problem is his character. He is emotional and terribly reserved. This affects him a lot, because he takes everything personally – no matter if someone tells him something or a decision that he does not agree. His relations with Cruyff were delicate because he couldn’t take the critics. I listen to him but I don’t care that much. For Michael this was fatal. He couldn’t take it anymore so he left without a word.’ 25 Laudrup is a different player than Zlatan and Stoichkov (who both listened and didn’t listen). With Laudrup we get pure ideal beauty, that is, beauty uncontaminated by physicality and combat, and we get a softer and more sensitive, yet also, and paradoxically, a more stubborn mental constitution. Zlatan was used to the scolding, the yelling and the critique, he knew it from the ghetto with its knife assaults and bike thefts as well as from his divorce-, alcohol- and drug-ridden family. In welfare state Denmark, in Brøndbyvester and Vanløse, in the 1970s and early 1980s there was no yelling, and people said stuff like ‘Would you pass me the butter, please?’ If Laudrup is a weaver, someone who creates the threads and patterns and occasionally completes those patterns by scoring a goal, Zlatan is more of a foot soldier, a one-man army. He does share the extraordinary vision with Laudrup: ‘I see pictures of what could happen in two or three steps ahead and I choose one. It is the way I play.’ 26 But if Laudrup uses this vision to weave, Zlatan uses it to score goals, often without there even being a chance in the first place. He creates these goals by impossible dribbles, from acrobatic postures, through tiny holes, and through powerful shots. An important element of his game is his intimidation of opponents. He makes defenders and goalkeepers scared, not only by his body language, but also by actions of brutality. He gets under the skin of the opponent. Zlatan’s dirtiness is three-dimensional: he isn’t afraid of getting his knees dirty in mud, he talks dirty and he acts dirty. He is the Émile Zola of soccer. Laudrup, then, must be Gustave Flaubert. The latter elevated in his ivory tower from which he can weave his romanticist threads and sublime patterns uncontaminated by the filthiness of the prosaic everyday, the former fighting the battles of the sewers and handing out deadly, but elegant punches on his way to victory and truth. Reading I am Zlatan Ibrahimović one realizes how much we need soccer players that stick out. While kids generally identify with players, grownups largely root for clubs. Arguably, this is because a player is more concrete and tangible than a club, which in turn represents something much more diffuse for a kid. A club has a long and often very intricate history: it is political intrigue and power struggles behind the scenes, big business and opaque financial transactions, and it is also a brand and a series of symbolic values. A kid could not care less about all this. He (or she) just wants to watch soccer and have an idol, someone with whom he can identify and someone he can copy. As one gets older, the player’s direct ‘usability’ and relatively simple identity are replaced by the club’s more all encompassing ‘metaphysical’ potential. If the player was a god to the kid, the club becomes a religion to the adult. It offers an entire metaphysics: deities in terms of players, a Manichaean worldview with a clear distinction between good and evil, a myth of origin that fascinates because of equal parts clarity and obscurity, and, finally, a basic cosmology consisting of a number of symbolic core values communicated through storytelling and marketing. When reading I am Zlatan Ibrahimović one becomes a boy again and gets sucked into a biographical universe seen from one person’s perspective, the protagonist. It is like reading a Bildungsroman, but a modern one in which the hero can only be an immigrant from the ghetto. The Bildungsroman emerged in the 1790s as a formal answer to the increasing tension between the forces of societal necessity and the individuals’ aspirations to freedom. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) the protagonist finds rest in a compromise between the demands of society and his personal desires. In Laudrup’s case there wasn’t really any tension, at least not ‘life-and-death challenges.’ With the Danish welfare society in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps we were close to reaching what Francis Fukuyama has called ‘the end of history,’ a practically tensionless society. Admittedly, there were economic crisis, terrorism and the scare of atomic war, but overall Laudrup was born into a compromise condition of a temperate kind. Zlatan, on the other hand, was born into tension – seemingly unsurpassable barriers between the Rosengård ghetto and ‘normal Sweden’ – and he has constantly negotiated between the necessities and facticities of history (the ghetto, his family, his managers) and his personal desire for freedom. Between listening and not listening. The negotiations and struggles will continue. Zlatan hasn’t arrived at any stable position of compromise, but the way that his Bildung has unfolded so far, I am Zlatan Ibrahimović is not only a novel of formation, it is also a fairy tale. With the reunion with José Mourinho, this time not at San Siro but at Old Trafford, it may even be a story of homecoming, a seldom event of repetition and return on this nomad’s hitherto linear itinerary. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
It's amazing a player of his quality emerged in a small country like Sweden. And even more Amazing that his performances for club and country improved as he got older, specifically over the age of 30.
I wouldn't say he improved. His numbers got better with age because he went to a weaker league (Ligue 1). Not only a weaker league but a one-team league and he was playing on that one team. I'd say his best season was still 2008-2009. Also for Sweden wasn't his best tournament Euro 2004? Though he certainly hasn't declined at the regular speed that most others do.
He scored more goals after the qualifying for 2010 ended in failure. He had a more commanding role on the team. It's true that he did join a weaker league in 2012, but even in 2010 he played at Milan where he was a commanding figure at the club for 2 years.
On the thing in bold (and only that thing): I think he took a lot of that criticism away when he moved to Manchester United and became the oldest player to score 15+ league goals. It could have been more, if not for injury. The injury made him miss the final eight games of the league, to further boost the 17 goals tally (17 goals, including 2 penalties). He was also the fourth fastest to reach that 15 goals mark for United behind RvN, Dwight Yorke and RvP. He's one of the oldest Premier League player of the month recipients. In other words: imagine a slightly better Manchester United (with him still as focal point?), imagine a slightly younger Ibrahimovic, imagine a full season. Is then 30+ goals out of reach? Main questions marks are: 1) team needs to be built around him (although at rare occassions he played a subordinate role) and 2) is that consistency also possible in the Premier League. That competition is historically difficult for gaining a streak of seasons (and needs some 'luck'), as also Cristiano Ronaldo found out and commented upon. I'd say Ibra his peak as an individual force as 'Ibracadabra' was around 2007 and 2008, but yes 2008-09 is a good blend between goalscoring and individual dribbling/creation.
Zlatan scored a goal against the eventual winner and legendary Spain team at the 2008 Euro. He also scored against a really good Italy team at Euro 2004. He hasn't been a great big game player but any means especially in the CL but his struggles are a bit overblown. There is no way a dude like Eto'o was better than him. Consistency matters.
The prime of ibrahimovic, the most technically accomplished European striker since Marco Van Basten Racking up goals in ligue was an ego booster for him but I don’t think did much in terms of his increasing his all time ranking (at least not for him) The best of ibrahimovic was in 08/09 before he moved to Barcelona
He was envolved in 50% of all goals in the PSG (projection of 61% if he had played all games)! (Ligue 1, 2015-2016) ... quite amazing this season, outlier in his PSG carrer. https://footystats.org/players/sweden/zlatan-ibrahimovic xG of 28.37 Actual Goals: 38.. phenomenal! World-Class striker at age 34. https://understat.com/player/1741 Whoscored of 8.29 https://www.whoscored.com/Players/3281/History/Zlatan-Ibrahimovic
I'd agree that his peak was during his time at Inter. Though at PSG he put up insane stats (despite being quite older). During his time at AC, he became a true enforcer. He was the driving force. Truly capable of anything. Of the 21st century so far he's easily a top 5 striker IMO.
Ibrahimovic was statistically more involved did not mean he was a better overall player(also in France enjoyed he advantages he simply did not have in Italy) With regards to ibrahimovics natural footballing ability he ranks very highly(the most technical striker of his era no contest) This could be a bit controversial but I don’t necessarily think he was less gifted on the ball than Marco Van Basten The main difference between the two is mentality.mvb was able to project his talent on the biggest stages while ibrahimovic could not I do think Van Basten was a superior finisher aswell (in serie a during his era games were so tight you would only get a handful of goalscoring opportunities,so I think MVB scoring 25 in a single season is arguably worth at least 40 league goals today-from what I’ve seen he also did not look like a particularly wasteful shooter either at least when compared to elite scorers today) In terms of technique (close control dribbling,first touch control,passing,and shooting technique (the ability to finish in a variety of ways)prime ibrahimovic was not inferior to Marco Van Basten Players like Henry and Suarez who arguably had more dominant peaks than Ibra weren’t as technically accomplished(Henry was really a speed merchant at arsenal with just above average close control and limited ball skills Suarez just has a ugly style (you can be considered a “fighter/warrior” for the team and still play with some panache Hristo Stoichkov being an immediate example I could think of)
I don't believe it's right to judge whether Ibra or Marco is better," Ariggo Sacchi wrote in his column. "I would be less objective having coached Marco and benefited from his extraordinary ability. However I must recognise that ibrahimovic is not worth any less Marco was perhaps more elegant and until this year more capable [than Ibra] of linking with the team. Ibra hadn't always showed continuity and the ability to move himself with and for the team across the entire pitch until this season. "The Swede has returned [to Italy] after being a partial failure at Barcelona with the desire to redeem himself which has increased his openness [to work for the team] and today he has completely exploded. "He collaborates in defence, and in attack he doesn't just exploit his technical and physical potential, but moves in the time that the team wishes. "If he keeps going this way, Ibra will equal Van Basten in international victories and individual achievements. "Marco won three Ballon d'Or awards. Ibra has matured and has transformed from a soloist into a complete footballer." https://www.football-italia.net/node/1339 Note It is true Van Basten won 3 ballon dors (European player of the year awards) But Van Basten was not competing awards against a prime platini or a prime ineligible maradona Ibrahimovic competed against ronaldo and Messi( and also Xavi )3 players who were clearly a whole tier above any of Van bastens European competitors between 87-92 Saachi is arguably the most qualified person to judge Van Basten having coached him in his absolute prime (rinus michels died before he saw prime ibrahimovic ) Of course players who played pre 95 are automatically held in higher regard than today’s players Personally I think ibrahimovic did not live up to his talent (even with 10+ league titles) I think he could’ve been even more We are talking about arguably the most naturally gifted European striker since the days of Eusebio and Puskás(I have no doubt about this)
This is what Bergomi said recently https://sport.sky.it/calcio/serie-a/2018/10/18/inter-milan-derby-bergomi-costacurta.html https://www.calciomercato24.com/201...l-piu-difficile-da-marcare-lanciava-la-terra/ I do think though Ibrahimovic is one of the best league strikers ever (some will say he never convinced in a top three league, but look at what he did for ManUnited after his prime), but his European record is vastly sub-par next to pretty much all other 21st century strikers. From Eto'o to RVP, from Villa to Benzema.
I agree with most of the points made by Bergomi 1.)Van Basten posed a significant aerial threat than the midget maradona and also when compared to ibrahimovic who was equally tall but relatively useless in headers van basten had the best shooting technique by any striker in his era but the same can be said of ibrahimovic(it isn’t entirely true he only scores great goals against mediocre teams His back heel goal in euro 04 was scored against the backline of nesta ,cannavaro,pannuci and The very much underrated zambrotta There’s the freekick he scored against Real Madrid in 2009/10 against casilias who was very arguably the best GK in the world at the time We know who ended up having the greater career(it was MVB and by a clear margin) The argument I’m making is ibrahimovic arguably didn’t reach the heights he should’ve with his skillset which imo was a tier above Henry,shevchenco,eto’o etc who can compete for bronze for 3rd most technically gifted striker since prime R9 Note: In the performance by you posted vs Atlanta he seems to be involved more than a typical striker My personal favourite is his performance vs locomotive Leipzig in 86/87 cup winners cup final (One of the best dribbling performances by any striker INCLUDING R9 imo) For me he was a more complete player in Ajax or maybe I’ll stretch it to euro 1988 after which I think he became noticeably less Mobile and more of a CF in the pure sense of the word ,unlike a striker who could drop into midfield and/or on either wing. Maybe his loss of mobility has a lot to do with his ankle injury and he was trying to prolong his career, which wouldve been shortned even less if he kept running directly at Serie a defenders,dribbling etc The Van Basten of 1986/87 is the best European number 9 since Eusebio (in talent+application of talent) Many of the goals he scored were laced with the type of genius that had not been seen perhaps in any other striker The solo goal where he picked up the ball in his own half against Feyenoord and dribbled past a couple players ,the bicycle kick vs den Bosch,the 30 yard pile driver vs Manchester United,the headers,the close range finishes,the few penalties that he took most that he earned through dribbling The Van Basten of Milan is more famous only because of the nature of the league he played in at the time and what they achieved together was historical Not because he became a markedly improved player
http://backpagefootball.com/the-enigma-of-ibra/4852/ Some Food for thought: Ibrahimovic has got really great technique for a bad player and really bad technique for a great player. Johan Cruyff
Some serious disrespect for Ibra who is I think 3rd among active players in career goals scored. And a guy who went from team to team and produced everywhere he went. And like I've said a million times he did underperform in CL but he didn't really choke. It's not like PSG with Ibra was supposed to win the CL... Looking at his league form, he's definitely an all time great. There is no denying it. I could maybe come up with 15 players in history who were better #9's than him. Maybe...
Ibrahimovic never outscored Edison cavani in Italy Not even once Bearing in mind this was his physical peak Bearing mind Napoli had no right competing for a league title (like both Milans and juventus And every other team that he played for) Bearing in mind cavani broke his record in France despite being his donkey at PSG the whole time Ibra was there Ibrahimovic became overrated at PSG post 30 scored more than before Name me one elite striker elite in Europe who became more prolific after 30 years old Forget about all time From this generation alone aguero,Di natale,Higuaín,Suarez are all comparable In big games Ibra couldn’t shine drogbas boots(and even Eto’o for that matter) Ibrahimovic looked like the greats against anderlecht but became like Higuaín In big matches To put this into some perspective Right now a 20 year old mbappe is challenging him for KO goals
Sometimes KO goals lie. Ibra in his prime was definitely a better player than someone like Eto'o or Drogba. Showing up in big games matters but showing up in all games matters more.
Which source claimed he was better than Eto’o(drogba maybe who only had 2 really strong seasons) Eto’o was an integral member of 2 treble winning teams in two different leagues ok The influence of Eto’o was comparable to prime Ronaldinho gaucho(certainly in la liga 2005/06) In talent I agree But in terms of influence at all levels Eto’o was comparable(especially in the NT and champions league) Ps: Ko stage goals do not “lie”
It's amazing how much weight you give to a handful of matches in professional careers that span 500+ matches. And you ignore all context which when you're talking about sample sizes these small can literally make all the difference. Eto'o has 10 KO stage goals in the CL (6 R16, 2 QF, 0 SF, 2 Final). Zlatan also has 10 KO stage goals in the CL (6 R16, 4 QF, 0 SF, 0 Final). It must be the two goals Eto'o scored in the finals? And you're taking him over Ibra based on that and ignoring the whole rest of their career i.e. hundreds of games played? GTFO... Zlatan has more overall CL goals and assists, way more league goals and assists, is a better overall player, has better technical ability... I mean for real. I don't want to use personal attacks but you have some wack opinions man.