King Without Titles, Zlatan Ibrahimović retires at age 41
World football said goodbye to one of the brightest and most extraordinary players of recent decades. At the age of 41, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a Swedish striker who scored almost six hundred goals, some in such unusual and beautiful ways that, it seems, no one else is capable of, and, despite his bad character, managed to fall in love with tens, maybe hundreds of millions of fans.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic announced his retirement after the final match in the Italian championship of Milan, the club for which he played for the last three and a half years. The Milanese beat Verona in it – 3: 1, and Ibrahimovic, who was not included in the squad, appeared on the field of the San Siro stadium only to, dressed in black, as if in mourning, pass to the applause of the stands through the living “corridor of honor” arranged for him by the partners, and then talk about his decision at a press conference. On it, he appeared perfectly familiar to all Zlatan Ibrakhimovich, who, not at all embarrassed, says that when he woke up in the morning, he saw rain pouring outside the window like a bucket and thought: “Even God is sad.” He was all in this phrase – an athlete with an excessively inflated ego, which he not only never wanted to hide, but which he openly enjoyed, knowing that exceptional natural charisma, including exceptional natural talent, would compensate for everything, fix it.
The talent was, of course, of a special nature. Usually, the greatness of a player is measured by the titles won. For a long professional career, which started in the last century, Zlatan Ibrahimovic has accumulated a lot of them - 34.
But among them there are no main ones – titles obtained in top tournaments for national teams or in the Champions League. And this despite the fact that Ibrahimovic played for Ajax, Juventus, Inter, Milan, Barcelona, PSG, Manchester United. And among them there is not a single “Golden Ball”, that is, formal recognition as the first football player in the world, although Ibrahimovic was included in the expanded list of contenders for the award 11 times. He came closest to it in 2013, when he took fourth place in the voting. But if the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) suddenly decided to hold a vote and determine the strongest of those who never got the Ballon d’Or, only David Beckham would compete with Ibrahimovic, at least if you do not go beyond the past quarter of a century. As, by the way, in the ranking of the most adored football players by fans.
The thing is that Zlatan Ibrahimovic is not really a story about titles.
And not even about statistics, although Ibrahimovic is all right with it: in his professional career, he scored 573 goals, and 62 in the jersey of the Swedish national team – by the way, its record. It’s about something else. About brightness and eccentricity. About the refusal to conform to the patterns and the incredible charm born of it. And about beauty, of course.
The singularity, uniqueness of the son of a Bosnian émigré blinded many, even when he, a recent junior, moved from Malmo to Ajax, which was already accustomed to upgrading young prodigies for the sake of selling them to big clubs. The height is under two meters, but the functionality, the set of qualities do not correspond to the dimensions at all. From such tall guys, ramming forwards are sculpted, and Ibrahimovic took not power, but technique, as well as flexibility and subtlety, acquired, apparently, during taekwondo classes, sometimes turning from a “nine” into a “ten” without any problems – more of a playmaker than a striker.
The mature Zlatan Ibrahimovic was sold by Ajax to Juventus, in which he immediately earned the prize for the best player of the Italian championship, which was then in no way inferior in terms of opportunities to English and Spanish, and soon received informal recognition as an unprecedented phenomenon.
Ibrahimovic often scored and often helped his teammates score. But much more important is how he scored and helped to score.
These tricks of his – cunning “scoops” flying around the opponents who reliably blocked all approaches to the goalkeeper, goals with “scissors” from such intricate positions that at first glance you can’t get to the ball, the ball sent to the Bologna goal with the heel from the summer after a flank cross – became video hits and were put on stream. And he performed them with the same regularity that in Juventus, that in Inter, who signed him after the Turin team in 2006 in the wake of a grandiose corruption scandal was thrown out of the top division and deprived of titles in those famous clubs in which he found himself later.
The selection of Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s maddening performance and complexity of goals is a whole short film, the portfolio is so voluminous that it can be the envy of all modern players, including Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. And it is impossible to choose the most spectacular and complex. It is customary to allocate a blow through oneself from 25 meters, with which Ibrahimovic struck the England national team on the spot in 2013, but in fact there are a lot of options.
And most importantly, his magic goals, passes and feints were extremely organic, or something.
Despite the fact that Zlatan Ibrahimovic did not try to hide his leadership ambitions, the desire to always be at the forefront, he always managed to be a team player, whose inevitable, given the specifics of style and character, pulling the collective blanket over himself does not harm the team.
The only short period in his biography when Ibrahimovic’s pride and selfishness let him down was the period of his stay at Barcelona with Pep Guardiola, who in 2009 suddenly decided that his company of celebrities would not interfere with another one. Strictly speaking, Ibrahimovic’s Catalan season was not terrible in terms of performance (the Swede even got into the symbolic team of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)), but he still looked like a team whose strength was based on generosity and which already had its leader in the person of Lionel Messi, a slightly alien element and lost its former gloss. And soon, from the autobiography published by the striker, everyone learned about how he disliked Messi, who allegedly ousted him from the center of the attack to an uncomfortable position, and the Argentine Guardiola, who allegedly indulged the whims of the Argentine. The conflict with the coach eventually resulted in leaving Barcelona.
But then his career returned to his previous course. The leaders of Milan, PSG, Manchester United did not hesitate to pay serious money to intercept Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and, acquiring thanks to him an extra portion of the interest of the public and new fans, they did not regret them at all, nor about the haplessness in the Champions League, nor about the constant incidents involving those who did not like to restrain themselves on the field, ran into disqualifications, breaking the foreheads and noses of the opponents who annoyed him, and indulging in statements that carry misogyny or even racism a mile away, the attacker. The Milanese believed in Ibrahimovic’s magic so much that they risked re-signing a contract with him at the end of the previous decade, after his pre-retirement trip to the American league, to the Los Angeles Galaxy. But the return to the elite on the threshold of the fifth decade turned out to be good. Ibrahimovic, confirming the status of a paradoxical man, made his way into the basis of Milan and again earned an invitation to the national team. And he was on the bench only last season, at the end of it deciding that it was necessary to say goodbye to football, let heaven cry about it.