Part 5 (2/2)

”So you're going to see me off in here?” I said, looking around.

We were in Ha.s.se's stupid, boring office, just the three of us in there.

”So you're not going to do it in front of the fans?”

”Well,” said Bengt Madsen, ”people say it's bad luck to do it before a match.”

I just looked at him. It's bad luck?

”You said goodbye to Niclas Kindvall in front of 30,000 people, and that still went all right.”

”Yes, but ...”

”Whaddaya mean, but?”

”We'd like to give you this gift.”

”What the h.e.l.l is this?”

It was a ball, an ornament made out of crystal.

”This is a memento.”

”So this is how you're thanking me for the 85 million kronor?”

What were they thinking? That I would take it along to Amsterdam and, like, weep when I looked at it?

”We'd like to express our grat.i.tude.”

”I don't want it. You can keep it.”

”You can't just ...”

Yes, I could. I put the crystal thing on the table. Then I got out of there. That was my farewell from the club no more, no less and sure, I wasn't happy about it. Nevertheless, I shook it off. I mean, I was on my way out of there, and really, what was Malm FF anyway? My real life was about to start now, and the more I thought about it, the bigger it got.

I wouldn't just go to Ajax. I was the club's most expensive player, and while Ajax might not be Real Madrid or Manchester United, it was definitely a big club. Only five years earlier, Ajax had played in the Champions League final. Six years ago they'd won the whole tournament, and Ajax had had blokes like Cruyff, Rijkaard, Kluivert, Bergkamp and van Basten especially van Basten, he'd been absolutely brilliant, and I was going to be wearing his number. It was mental, really. I was going to score goals and make a difference, and sure, that was awesome, but it was also beginning to dawn on me that it meant incredible pressure.

n.o.body spends 85 million kronor without expecting something in return, and it had been three years since Ajax had won their league. For a club like Ajax, this was a minor scandal. Ajax are the finest team in the Netherlands, and their supporters expect the team to win big. You had to deliver the goods, not go round all c.o.c.ky and do things your own way from the start, definitely not start off by going, ”I'm Zlatan, who the h.e.l.l are you?” I would fit in and learn the culture. The only thing is, stuff continued to happen around me.

On the way home from Gteborg, in a little place called Bottnaryd near Jnkping, I got stopped by the police. I'd been going 110 kilometres an hour in a 70 zone, not exactly flooring it when you consider what I would get up to later on. But I lost my licence for a while, and the press didn't just print ma.s.sive headlines. They made sure they dredged up the business from Industrigatan as well.

They compiled entire lists of all my scandals and all the times I'd been sent off, and of course it all made its way to the Netherlands. Even though the club's management was already aware of most of it, now the journalists in Amsterdam got in on it as well. No matter how much I wanted to be a good lad, I was labelled a bad boy even before I started. There was me and one other new guy, an Egyptian called Mido who'd been a success with KAA Ghent in Belgium. We both got reputations as being out of control, and to cap it all I was hearing more and more about the coach I'd met in Spain, Co Adriaanse.

He was supposed to be like a b.l.o.o.d.y Gestapo officer who knew everything about his players, and there were some crazy stories about the punishments he dished out, including one about a goalkeeper who happened to answer his mobile during a tactics session. He had to spend a whole day on the club's switchboard, even though he couldn't speak a word of Dutch. It was like, ”h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo, don't understand” all day long, and then there was one about three guys in the youth squad who'd been out partying. They had to lie on the pitch while the others walked on top of them in their studded boots. There were quite a few of those stories, not that they worried me.

There's always a load of talk about the coaches, and in fact I've always liked blokes with discipline. I get on well with blokes who keep their distance from their players and don't get too close. That's how I'd grown up. n.o.body went like, ”Poor little Zlatan, of course you'll get to play.” I didn't have a dad who came to training sessions and sucked up to everyone and insisted that people should be nice to me, no way. I've had to look out for myself, and I'd much rather get a b.o.l.l.o.c.king and be on bad terms with a coach and get to play because I'm good, rather than get on with him and be allowed to play because he likes me.

I don't want to be mollycoddled. That just messes me up. I want to play football, nothing else. But sure, I was still nervous as I packed my bags and headed off. Ajax and Amsterdam were something completely new. I didn't know a thing about the city, and I remember the flight and landing and the woman from the club who came to meet me.

Her name was Priscilla Janssen. She was a gofer at Ajax, and I really made an effort to be nice, and I greeted the guy she had with her. He was around my age and seemed shy, but he spoke really good English.

He said he was from Brazil. He'd played for Cruzerio, a famous team I knew that because Ronaldo had played there. Just like me, he was new at Ajax, and he had a long name I didn't really catch. But apparently I could call him Maxwell, and we exchanged phone numbers and then Priscilla drove me in her Saab convertible out to the little terraced house the club had arranged for me in Diemen, a small town far away from the city. There I sat with a posh brand-name bed and a 60-inch TV and nothing else, playing on my PlayStation and wondering what was going to happen.

8.

IT WAS NO BIG DEAL to be on my own. If there was one thing I'd learnt growing up, it was to look after myself, and I was still feeling like the coolest bloke in Europe.

I'd turned pro and been sold for crazy amounts of money. But my terraced house was bare inside. It felt very remote, and I didn't even have any furniture or anything else that made it feel like a home, and to be honest, the fridge started to get bare pretty soon, too. Not that I was gripped by panic and relived my childhood or anything. It was okay. I'd had an empty fridge in my flat in Lorensborg as well. I could cope with anything. But then again, in Malm I'd never had to go hungry not least of all because I would stuff myself at Kulan, the restaurant at Malm FF, and I'd often sneak out a little something extra hidden in my tracksuit, a yoghurt or something to keep me going in the evenings, but also because I'd had Mum over in Cronmans Vg and my mates.

In Malm I usually didn't need to cook or worry about empty fridges. But now in Diemen I was back at square one. It was ridiculous. I was supposed to be a professional guy. But I didn't even have a packet of cornflakes at home, and I hardly had any cash, and I sat there in my terraced house on my fancy bed and rang round to pretty much everyone I knew: my mates, Dad, Mum, my sister and my little brother. I even rang Mia, even though we'd broken up. Like, can you come here? I was lonely, restless and hungry, and finally I got hold of Ha.s.se Borg.

I thought he could cut a deal with Ajax, like, he'd lend me a little money and make sure Ajax reimbursed him later. I knew Mido had done something similar with his previous club. But it didn't work. ”I can't do that,” Ha.s.se Borg said. ”You'll have to look after yourself.” That made me go spare.

He'd sold me. Couldn't he help me in a situation like this?

”Why not?”

”I can't do that.”

”And where's my ten per cent?”

I got no answer and got angry all right, I admit I had only myself to blame. I hadn't realised it takes a month before you get your wages, and then I'd had a problem with my car. It was my Merc convertible. It had Swedish number plates. I couldn't drive it in the Netherlands. I'd only just got it, and the whole idea had been to cruise round Amsterdam in it, but now I'd had to sell it and order another Mercedes an SL 55 and that hadn't exactly helped my finances.

So there I sat in Diemen, skint and hungry, and got an earful from my dad about how I was an idiot who'd bought a car like that when I didn't have any money, and of course that was true. But it didn't help. I still didn't have any cornflakes at home, and I still hated empty fridges.

That's when I happened to think of the Brazilian guy from the airport. There were a few of us new players that season. There was me, there was Mido, and then there was him, Maxwell. I'd hung out a bit with both of them, not only because we were all new. I felt most comfortable among the black guys and the South Americans. It was more fun, I thought: more relaxed and not so much jealousy. The Dutch guys wanted nothing more than to get out of there and end up in Italy or England, so they were constantly eyeing each other up like, who's got the best prospects whereas the Africans and the Brazilians were mostly glad to be there. It was like, wow, we get to play for Ajax? I felt more at home with them, and I liked their sense of humour and their att.i.tude. Maxwell was certainly nothing like the other Brazilians I'd meet later. He was no party animal, not a guy who needed to go nuts on a regular basis not at all, he was really sensitive, close to his family and was constantly phoning home. But he was a nice guy through and through, and if I have anything bad to say about him, it's that he's too nice.

”Maxwell, I'm in a crisis here,” I said over the phone. ”I haven't even got any cornflakes at home. Can I come and stay at your place?”

”Sure,” he said. ”Come right over.”

Maxwell lived in Ouderkerk, a small town with a population of only seven or eight thousand, and I moved in with him and slept on a mattress on the floor for three weeks until I got my first pay packet, and it wasn't a bad time. We cooked together and chatted about our training sessions, the other players and our old lives in Brazil and Sweden. Maxwell spoke good English. He'd tell me about his family and his two brothers who he was very close to I remember that in particular, because one of those brothers died in a car crash not long after. That was terribly sad. I really liked Maxwell.

I got myself sorted out a bit while I was at his place, and things started to loosen up a little. I got back that feeling that this was something really brilliant, and I got off to a good start in the pre-season. I landed goals against the amateur teams we played, and I did a load of tricks, just like I thought I would. Ajax was known for playing fun, technical football, and the newspapers wrote stuff like, well well well, looks like he's worth those eighty-five million kronor, and, sure, I noticed that Co Adriaanse, the manager, was tough on me. But I thought that was just his style. I'd heard so much about him.

After every match he'd give us marks out of ten, and one time when I'd scored a bunch of goals he said, ”You made five goals, but you made two bad pa.s.ses as well. That's a five.” I was like, okay, I get it, the standards here are tough. But I kept at it, and in fact, I didn't think anything could stop me now. For one thing, I remember meeting a guy who had no idea who I was.

”So, are you any good?” he asked.

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