I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic

"I’ve very pointedly, in my notes for this interview, written “Zlatan Ibrahimovic with David Lagercrantz.” Lagercrantz has been writing the follow-ups to those Stieg Larsson thrillers since Larsson’s death. I find that interesting in itself: an author taking up someone else’s project. Lagercrantz has also ghost-written this autobiography of the Swedish international footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Ibrahimovic is one of the greatest players in the world. He won the league title, I think, eight years in a row with different teams in different countries: Holland, Italy, Spain, France. There are two schools of thought on Ibrahimovic, one is that he’s this overrated, insufferable egomaniac, who endlessly goes missing in big games, and isn’t a team player. I get that. Then there’s another school of thought that says he’s this avant-garde genius, who does things with a football that no-one else would even think of, he’s an artist. I’m in the second camp. Him and Zinedine Zidane—the subject of that great film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, again portraying him as this brooding outsider in a way people who play team sports aren’t supposed to be—I love them both. I have a guilty pleasure for football memoirs. There are a few that are written about those sorts of journeyman careers that are done really well, they display a lot of insight into the trials, tribulations, even humiliations of being a mid-rank, jobbing footballer. Actually I find the ones that lack that self-awareness much more entertaining. The Ibrahimovic one documents a great player but also it’s the best football memoir I’ve read. It’s forthright, it’s full of assertive opinions on key personalities, and it’s also hilarious. There’s a brilliant bit after he started at Malmö as a teenager and has moved to Ajax in Holland, but he’s not getting picked. So he goes to his agent, who he already thinks is useless, and says, “Can you get me a move to a club where I’m going to play?” Nothing happens for about a month, so he goes back and says, “Did you do anything?” And the agent says, “Yes, Southampton are interested.” And Ibrahimovic’s response is to say, “Southampton? Fucking Southampton?” and fires him. And there’s a bit about six years later when he’s just won another league title and says, “This is much better than that time I nearly had to join Southampton.” “You do have to edit reality.” The opening of the book is magnificent. He’s just become the most expensive footballer in the world, Barcelona—the champions of Europe—have just paid 45 million Euros for him, and given his old club Samuel Eto’o, a truly brilliant striker. The deal is worth about 80 million Euros. The opening paragraph starts with him driving up to The Nou Camp, Barcelona’s stadium, in this new car. He explains how he grew up in the slums in Malmö, the son of Yugoslav immigrants and the way to get ahead was to have the best car, the best watch, the best girlfriend, all the finest and flashiest things. As a reward for winning the title with Juventus, they bought him this Ferrari Enzo—there were only 80 ever made. So you’ve got this famously individualistic egomaniac joining a Barcelona team who are famous—even as they have several of the best players in the world—for not really having stars. This is a team that’s built very much on a collective way of playing. So, he drives up to the stadium and there’s a row of cars outside. He’s going to park and Pep Guardiola, the Barcelona manager, comes outside and says, “Zlatan, this isn’t that kind of club, even Xavi, Iniesta and Messi [the three best players] all drive the Audis the club gave to them.” So that paragraph concludes with the words, “Zlatan was no longer Zlatan.” Which is magnificent. Then this summer, at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, David Lagercrantz was talking about this book. He said he met Ibrahimovic and talked to him, and wasn’t really taken with the material he got. Saying that he wanted to find the literary Zlatan, he took what he thought was his general personality and ethos and translated it into these brilliant quotes. When he gave it to Ibrahimovic, he just said, “What the fuck is this? I never said that.” And Lagercrantz explained to him what he was trying to do and in the end Ibrahimovic agreed, and loved it, and Lagercrantz says that Zlatan now thinks it’s his story. The thing with Ibrahimovic is he’s so ludicrous and larger-than-life anyway that it sort of doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. I found that really fascinating. The scandal isn’t like James Frey’s Million Little Pieces , that drugs and incarceration memoir that the Smoking Gun website looked at and concluded that lots was fabricated, as Frey later admitted to a very angry Oprah Winfrey. It doesn’t feel the same because there are different contracts between the reader and the writer, and between the reader and the ghost writer. I don’t know what the nature of those contracts are, but if the subject and ghost writer both agree on the text, then is it acceptable? It raises an interesting ethical question. I don’t know, because they’re supposed to be a distraction, right? I think it goes back to what Nathalie Sarraute was saying, that people just don’t believe it anymore. It’s not just that they crave real life, but the demystification of the twentieth century has worked too well, and now the purely fictional narratives have been unmasked. I’m not sure they can ever recover. In the same way the charts feel completely meaningless in the wake of X-Factor and all that stuff that just makes the levels of manipulation so overt. Simon Reynolds writes about this in his book about post-punk. He says the trouble with demystification is there’s nowhere to go afterwards. And he’s right. So maybe the only places for the novel to be now are where autofiction is taking it."