It's hard to think of an athlete in any sport in the world who divides opinion as sharply as Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The Republic of Ireland manager Martin O'Neill once called him the most overrated football player in the world, while Jose Mourinho, in 2014, described him as one of the world's top three. Laurent Blanc, his current coach at Paris Saint-Germain, has hailed him as one of the team's leaders, yet his career has been littered with spats and fights with team-mates and managers.Zlatan has won 12 league titles with six different clubs, yet some maintain he merely dominates weaker opponents and falls short at the very highest level. He is Sweden's captain and one of his nation's instantly recognisable national icons, yet there are still people in Sweden who would argue he isn't really Swedish. It seems that even after 15 years in the spotlight, the world still doesn't quite know what to make of Zlatan. To understand this most complex and contradictory of characters, you have to start at the beginning.
Rune Smith cuts a dapper figure in the lobby of a hotel in central Malmo. Now retired, Smith was the first journalist who saw Ibrahimovic causing havoc on the training ground of Malmo FF, the city's hugely popular local team.
"Hasse Borg called me and said I had to come down to training because he had never seen anything like it. It was magical," he told Bleacher Report.
Borg was the club's sporting director at the time, and he was dumbstruck by what the lanky teenager was doing against seasoned professionals in training. For Smith, it was a special moment. Most local journalists will cover their patch for a lifetime without ever seeing the kind of raw talent that the teenaged Ibrahimovic was displaying.
"He was fantastic," Smith remembers. "He dominated training sessions. All the older players were furious because they couldn't get the ball off him. I used to call him The Hulk. But even though he was 1.92 (metres tall, being 6'3"), he also had technique. Such quick feet and such technique, and with that size...It shouldn't be possible."
This is an absolutely wonderful article about the incomparable Zlatan Ibrahimovic, written by Lars Sivertsen for the Bleacher Report. To read the rest, please click here.
