PHOTO: Bildbyrån
He is one of Swedish football’s biggest icons ever.
But now comes new and unexpected criticism against Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
“Nobody can deny that about Zlatan Ibrahimovic,” writes author Mikael Löfgren in a column.
In 2023, a long and successful era in Swedish football came to an end. The big star Zlatan Ibrahimovic chose to end his career for good after playing until the age of 41, which is unique in world football.
Zlatan’s success
“Ibra” can look back on a truly incomparable career where he has reaped great success in Europe with some of the biggest clubs and collected titles in a heap. While in Sweden he made history as the most goalscorer ever on the men’s side and was awarded the Guldbollen a whopping 12(!) times over the years.
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But despite all the success on the football field, he has often had to receive a lot of criticism and for a long time the debate was about him being too un-Swedish.
“No one can deny that Zlatan Ibrahimovic is great. He measures 1.95 in stocking, weighs 95 kilos and has a shoe size of 47. He is the country’s all-time greatest soccer player. In his career, which ended earlier this year, he played in seven countries and won the league title twelve times for five different clubs. For four decades (1990s to 2020s) he scored goals in European first leagues,” writes the author and cultural journalist Mikael Löfgren in a new column on the site Liberal Debatt.
“Zlatan Ibrahimovic is thus in many ways a great man. But is he a great Swede? If there are divided opinions, which in turn depends on everything that happened with Zlatan and Sweden during the 2000s”.
The criticism against Ibra
Zlatan has long been a symbol of multicultural Sweden and a great role model for children and teenagers growing up in the suburbs. But when he pulled on the blue and yellow national team jersey, many critics raised their voices.
“Zlatan did not quite fit into the ideal of the orphanage. Before the international matches, he did not sing along to the national anthem and sometimes he ignored the rules and times of the national team management. In addition, he stole a penalty from Kim Källström right in front of stunned teammates and the crowd. For some, Zlatan became a symbol of the adverse sides of multicultural society: he is not a real Swede but a “mercenary”, claimed Jimmie Åkesson. For others, Zlatan’s cockiness became a long-awaited middle finger against all the besserwissers of the majority society,” writes the critic Löfgren in his text.
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Zlatan’s popularity then took a completely new turn when a statue of him was unveiled in Malmö in 2017 and aroused extremely strong emotions in the coming months. It also caught people’s eyes in the way “Ibra” chose the statue to look.
“No initiate would deny that Zlatan was an artist on the football field. There he had control over his means of expression. But what about the art of sculpture? Zlatan did not want a sculpture of one of his works of art, the bicycle kick against England in the opening match at the national arena. Instead, he wanted a heroizing statue of himself in supernatural size, with a domineering aim, bulging abs and a ruler’s frame. Rather than an image of his artistry, he wanted to convey cockiness, that is, an overcompensated expression of his alienation. Zlatan did not want to enter his artistry into any consensus about what is beautiful. He kept his football skills to himself. With the world, the public, he could only imagine sharing the consequence of exceptional artistry: idolatry; worship me!”, writes the author in his criticism.
“The fact that some of MFF’s supporters took such a dislike to Zlatan’s Hammarby investment that they saw to it that the statue was finally taken down and shipped away, was not something that the main character wanted or anticipated. He cockily overestimated the local allure of his global brand in relation to the tribalistic community that in the name of club feeling holds supporters together, regardless of the brilliance of the team’s former stars”.
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READ MORE: Nice revelation about Zlatan Ibrahimovic – which really says it all about the former football star: “Nice to see”
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