t was High Chaparral, like I use to say. It was a full circus, and I said all kinds of stupid stuff, like for example that the national team would have won EC 2000 with me! It was maybe cocky and fun back then, but I don’t know, it did feel so smart when I really got picked for the NT. That was also in April. I recently had scored that goal against Djurgården, and the newspapers were all crazy. They had me on the news bill’s all the time, and I guess that the people who were reading didn’t exactly see me as the humble guy and I got anxiety because of that. Would the heavy guys, like Patrik Andersson and Stefan Schwarz, thing that I was some cocky shit?

It was one thing to be a star in Malmö FF. But come one, the national team was something else! There you had lads who had won a bronze medal in WC, and believe it or not, I knew that in Sweden you weren’t supposed to show yourself too much, especially not when you’re the new guy in a gang. Oh my God, I had my rough patches in the junior team, I wanted to be liked.

I wanted to get into the gang, but it didn’t start off to well. We went to a training camp in Switzerland and the journalists where all over me all the time. It was almost embarrassing. Fuck, I wanted to say, Henke Larsson is over there, go to him instead, but still, I couldn’t resist. On a press conference I Geneva they asked me if I reminded of any other big player in the world.

“No”, I answered. “There’s only one Zlatan”, and how humble was that on a scale, and I felt right away, I have to make this right.

I tried to stay on the down low after that, and honestly, I didn’t need to strain myself. I felt so shy before all the heavy names, and except from Marcus Allbäck, who was my roommate, I didn’t talk to a lot of people. I stood on the side lines. “He’s an odd person. He wants to be alone!” the newspapers wrote and sure, that sounded exciting. Like, the very interesting artist Zlatan.

But in reality I was only insecure, and I didn’t want to piss off more people, especially not Henke Larsson, who was like a God to me! He was a pro in Celtic back then and that year, 2001, he got the Golden Shoe as the best goal scorer in Europe. Henke was really awesome, and it felt big when I heard that I was going to start with him in attack against Switzerland.

It was another one of those unreal things, before the game several newspapers made long reports about me. They wanted to really present me to people before my international debut, and in one of those articles some principal from Sorgenfri, you know that school where they wanted to give me an extra teacher, said that I was the messiest student she had in thirty-three years or something like that: I was the hooligan at Sorgenfri. A one man show. It was bla bla, but there were some other things as well, a lot of hopes that I would make a grand success in the national team. The wanted me as a hooligan and a star at the same time, and I felt the pressure.

But there was no success. I got substituted in the second half, and they didn’t pick me for the important WC-qualifying games that year, against Slovakia and Moldavia. Lagerbäck and Söderberg went for Henke and Allbäck in attack instead, and that should have made me a bit more anonymous. I was even a starter in the team. But nothing worked like it should for me. I remember the first time I played with the NT in Stockholm. We were facing Azerbaijan in Råsunda (ed not: Sweden’s national stadium), and I wasn’t really in the gang yet. Stockholm was like another world for me. It was like New York. I was lost and insecure, and there were a lot of hot girls in that town. I just like looked around all the time.

I was going to start as a substitute, and Råsunda was packed, or almost packed. Thirty three thousand people were there, and all the big boys seemed confident and used to the whole thing, and I sat on the bench and felt like a little boy. But fifteen minutes in something happened. The crowd started shouting. They roared my name, and I can’t explain, I got so pumped. I got goose bumps. All the heavy guys were out there. It was Henke, It was Olof Mellberg, it was Stefan Schwarz and Patrik Andersson. But they weren’t screaming their names. They screamed mine, and I wasn’t even playing. It was almost too much, and I didn’t get it. What had I done, really?

Maybe only a couple of games in Allsvenskan! But I was still more popular than guys who had played in big championships and had bronze medals. It was crazy, and everyone in the team was looking at me. But I had no clue if they were happy for me or not. I just knew that they didn’t get it either. This was something totally new. It hadn’t happened before, and after a while the crowd started yelling “come on Sweden, come on”, the regular cheers, and just then I started tying my shoes, just because I didn’t have anything else to do or because I was nervous. It felt like a electric shock.

The crowd thought that I was going to warm up, and roared “Zlatan, Zlatan” again, all crazy now, and of course, I took my hands away from my shoe. I mean, I sat on the bench and to take over the show in that moment, would have been an overstep and I tried to make myself invisible. But I was enjoying it in secret. I felt a shiver. The adrenalin started pumping, and when Lars Lagerbäck actually asked me to warm up I rushed into the pitch, all happy, seriously. I was flying, it was “Zlatan, Zlatan” from the stands, and we were up two-zero and I made a lob with the back of my heel, one of those wonderful things from the block, and I got the ball back and scored, and all of Råsunda and the night shined up, and even Stockholm felt like my city.

It was just that: I took Rosengård with me. One time that year I was in Stockholm with the NT. We went to Undici, Tomas Brolin’s nightclub, and we sat there all quiet. Then one of my friends from the ghetto started to nag me.

“Zlatan, Zlatan, can I get the key to you hotel room?”

“Why?”

“Just give it to me!”

“Alright, alright.”

I gave it to him and didn’t think more of it. But when I came home that night my friend was there and he had locked the door to the closet and looked all excited. “What do you have in there?” I asked.

“Nothing special. And don’t touch it”, he answered.

“What?”

“We can make money from it, Zlatan!”

Do you know what it was? It was sick. It was a gang of Canada Goose jackets he had stolen from Undici. So honestly, I didn’t always have the most serious company, and in Malmö FF things were up and down. It was a strange thing, to stay in a club when you’re already sold to another, and I wasn’t always the most harmonic guy. Sometimes I just flipped out. I exploded. Obviously I had always done that, but that’s because the situation around me, and the bad boy thing got stuck to me now. When we faced Häcken I had been cautioned, and there was some anxiety in the air. Would that crazy Zlatan do something again?

Häcken had Torbjörn Nilsson as coach, the old superstar, and Kim Källström played in that team and I knew him from the National U21-team and the play was really dirty from the beginning, some time into the game I fouled Kim Källström from behind. I elbowed another guy and got a red card and then the real outbreak came. Towards the dressing rooms I kicked down a speaker and a microphone, and like, the sound technician who had put them up didn’t really like that initiative. He called me an idiot, then I stopped and went towards him: Like who’s the idiont?

But one of our guys came between us and there was a circus afterwards and lines in the newspapers and something like seven million advices from everyone: I have to change my ways, blab la. Or else things can go bad in Ajax... bullshit, bullshit! Expressen even interview a psychologist who meant that I should seek help, and I reacted immediately of course: Who the fuck is he? What does he know?

I didn’t need a psychologist. I just needed peace and quiet. But it’s true, it’s wasn’t fun sitting in the stands and watching IFK Göteborg humiliate us with six-zero when I was suspended. Our good run from the season opening disappeared and also our coach got some criticism, Micke Andersson. I really didn’t have anything against him, and we really didn’t have any close relationship. If I had any problem, I went to Hasse Borg.

But it was one thing that started irritating me. I believed Micke had too much respect for the elders in the team. He was afraid really, and he wasn’t happy with me when I got another red card against Örebro. There was some tension and we were playing a game in training. It was summer then. Micke Andersson were the referee, and there was some confrontation with Jonnie Fedel, the goalkeeper, who was one of the oldest players in the team and of couse, Micke went with him, and I got a black out, and stepped up to Micke.

“You’re afraid for the older players in the team, you’re fucking afraid of ghosts as well”, I shouted. There was a lot of balls on the pitch, and I started kicking them, buff, buff, buff. They flew away like projectiles and landed on the cars outside so that the alarms started going, and they really sounded and everything just stopped, and I stood there wild and ghetto cocky whilst the team mates were looking at me. Micke Andersson tried to calm me down, and I shouted to him: “Are you my mother or what?”

I was furious and went to the dressing room and emptied my locker and took down my name and explained that I was never going to come back. It was enough! Bye bye MFF, thank you and good bye you idiots and I drove away in my Toyota Celica and didn’t come to the trainings no more, just sat home and played Playstation and hanged around with my mates instead. It was like I was staying home from school, and of course Hasse Borg called and sounded hysteric. “Where are you? Where are you? You must come back!”

And sure, I wasn’t impossible. After four days I came back and was a good and charming boy again, and honestly, I didn’t think my outbreak was all that really. These things happen in football, it belongs, and there’s a lot of adrenalin in the sport. Besides I didn’t have much time in the team left, I was on my way to

Holland, and I didn’t think of any ridiculous penalties. I rather thought about how they would thank me. A couple of months ago there was a crisis in MFF. The needed ten million in the coffer, and they really didn’t have any money to buy top players.

But now they were the richest club in Sweden, I had given them a big capital, and even Bengt Madsen, MFF president, had explained in the newspapers: “Only one player like Zlatan is born every fifty years!” So no, it wasn’t all that strange that I thought they had planned some nice way to thank me good bye, or at least a “Thanks for the eighty five millions”, especially not when they a week ago had celebrated Niclas Kindvall in front of thirty thousand spectators in the game against Helsingborg. But of course, I felt that they were all a bit afraid of me. I was the only one who could mess the deal with Ajax up by doing something even crazier, and in those days my last game in Allsvenskan was going to be played.

It was against Halmstad away and I wanted to give a nice good bye show to the crowd. It wasn’t a big thing for me, trust me. I was done with Malmö. I my mind I was already in Amsterdam. But still, a time in my life passed by, and I remember that I looked at the list on the wall which had the line ups. Then I looked again.

My name wasn’t there. I wasn’t even going to sit on the bench, and of course, I understood. It was my punishment. It was Micke’s way to show who the boss was, and alright, I accepted that, what else could I do? I didn’t even get mad when he explained to the journalists that I was “under pressure and unbalanced” and “needed a rest”, as if he had given me a rest just because he was such a good guy, and as a matter of fact, I was naive enough to think that the management still were planning something, maybe something with the supporters.

A short time afterwards I was called up to Hasse Borg’s office, and you know, I don’t like that. I always think that I’m going to be preached to. But back then so many things happened that I just went there without expecting anything, and in the office, Hasse Borg and Bengt Madsen stood there full of themselves, and I wondered, what happening now, is it a funeral?

“Zlatan, our time together is coming to an end.”

“Don’t tell me that you...”

“We want to tell...”

“So you’re going to thank me goodbye in here?” I said and looked around. We were in Hasse’s boring fucking office, and there were three of us in there. “So you’re not doing it in front of the fans?”

“You know”, Bengt Madsen said. “It’s said that it brings bad luck to do it before a game.” I just looked at him. It brings bad luck?

“You thanked Niclas Kindvall in front of thirty thousand people, and that went well.”

“Yeah, but...”

“But what?”

“We want to give you this gift.”

“What the fuck is this?”

It was a ball, a ball out of cut glass.

“It’s a memory.”

“So this is your way of thanking me for the eighty five millions?”

What did they think? That I would have it in Amsterdam, and like cry when I saw it?

“We want to express our gratitude.”

“I don’t want it. You can keep it.”

“You can’t...”

I could. I put the ball on the table. And then I left. That was my goodbye from the club, nothing less or nothing more, and sure, I wasn’t happy about it. But still, I shook it off. I mean, I was on my way out of there, and honestly, what was Malmö FF really? My real life was going to start now, and the more I thought of it, the bigger it became.

I wasn’t just going to Ajax. I was their most expensive player, and Ajax may not have been Real Madrid or Manchester United, but it was definitely a big club. Just five years ago Ajax had played in a Champions League final. Six years ago they had won the whole tournament and Ajax has had guy’s life Cruyff, Rijkaard, Kluivert, Bergkamp and van Basten, especially him, he had been really awesome, and I was

going to carry his shirt number. It wasn’t real. I was going to score the goals and be decisive, and of course, it was awesome, but also, I got that more and more, there was one hell of a pressure.

No one puts out eighty five millions without wanting something back, and it was three years ago Ajax had won the league. For a club like Ajax that was a little scandal. Ajax is the nicest team in Holland and the supporter’s demands big wins. You had to deliver and don’t play around with some cocky style and punish yourself right away, definitely not start with “I am Zlatan, who are you?”. I was going to try and float in and learn the culture, but it was just that: things still happened around me.

On my way home from Gothenburg, in Bottnaryd outside Jönköping, I was pulled over by the cops. I had flown past in one hundred ninety (ed note: km/h) on a seventy road apparently, not much of a speeding compared to what I was going to do later on. But they took my license and the newspapers didn’t just put big headlines. They took the chance to bring up that Industrigatan incident again as well.

They made lists with my scandals and red cards and all that spread itself to Holland of course and even though the management probably knew about most of it already, the journalists in Amsterdam got started as well. Didn’t matter how much I wanted to be a good boy, I became a bad boy before I even had begun. It was me and one other new guy, an Egyptian called Mido who recently made success in Belgian KAA Gent. Right away both of us got an reputation of being crazy heads, and if that wasn’t enough I heard more and more about that coach I had met in Spain, Co Adriaanse.

He was supposed to be the biggest Gestapo who knew everything about his players, and there was some sick stories about his punishments; among them a story about a goal keeper who happened to answer his cell phone during a tactics meeting. His punishment was to be the operator of the club’s telephone line during a whole day, without him being able to speak Dutch. It was like “Hello, hello, don’t understand” all day, and then there was this thing with three guys from the junior team who had been out partying. They had to lie on the pitch while the other players walked over them with the studs on. It was a lot of that stuff, not that it bothered me.

There’s always a lot of talk about the coach, and I had always liked guys with discipline. I get on well with guys who keep a distance to their players and don’t come to close. That’s how I’ve been raised. No one had been all: “Poor you little Zlatan, of course you’re going to play.” No dad had come to the trainings and kissed the coach’s ass and demanded that they would be nice to me, not a chance. I had been on my own and I rather get yelled at and become enemy with the coach and get to play because I’m good, rather than being friends with him and get to play because he likes me.

I don’t want any cutiecutie (ed note: Gulligull is the Swedish “word”. It means being too nice). That makes me confused. I want to play football, nothing else. But of course... I was still nervous when I packed my bags and went there. Ajax and Amsterdam was something totally new. I didn’t know squat about the city and I remember the flight and the landing and the woman from the club that came to meet me.

Her name was Priscilla Janssen. She was a factotum in Ajax and I really made my best to be pleasant, and I greeted the guy she had with him. It was a kid in my age that seemed shy, but talked English pretty good.

He was from Brazil, he said. He had played for Cruzeiro, a famous team, I knew that because Ronaldo had played there. Just like me he was new completely new in Ajax, and he had a long name that I didn’t really get. But apparently I could call him Maxwell and we exchanged phone numbers and then Priscilla drove me in her Saab cabriolet to the little terrace house the club had arranged for me in Diemen, a little society far away from City, and there I sat with a bed from Hästens (ed note: a Swedish bed manufacturer. A famous one. Hästen means horse) and a sixty inch television and nothing else and played Playstation and wondered what was going to happen.