Part 17 (1/2)

”How much are we talking about?”

I didn't know. I had no idea and I could tell he had his doubts. He thought I was too expensive, and that made me unsure. Could it really be true? But soon Mino rang me again, and the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Moratti had been surprisingly cooperative.

He'd had just one condition though it wasn't just any condition, that's for sure. He wanted to give AC Milan one in the eye and sell me for more than Real Madrid had paid for Kak, and that was no small potatoes: it would mean the second most expensive transfer in history, and Joan Laporta clearly had no problem with that. He and Moratti had reached an agreement quickly, and it took a while to sink in when I heard the sums involved. My old 85 million kronor in the Ajax deal what was that? Small change by comparison. Now we were talking more like 700 million Swedish kronor.

Inter were getting 46 million euro for me, and along with that they'd receive Samuel Eto'o as part payment, and Samuel Eto'o was not just anybody. He'd scored 30 goals the previous season. He was one of the top goal-scorers in Barcelona's history and was valued at 20 million euro. That amounted to 66 million euro in all, a million more than what AC Milan had sold Kak for, and you can just imagine. There was a huge uproar when it came out. I'd never experienced anything like it.

It was 40C. It was as if the air was boiling. Everybody was after me, and it felt... honestly, I don't know. It was impossible to think straight. We were playing a training match against a Mexican team, and I had that number 10 s.h.i.+rt at Inter for the first time and the last, for that matter. My years with the club were over. It was starting to sink in. When I arrived, Inter hadn't won a league t.i.tle in 17 years. Now we'd triumphed three years in a row, and I'd won the Capocannoniere goal-scoring t.i.tle. It was mental, and I looked at Mourinho, the guy I'd finally got to react to a goal, and of course I noticed he was furious and upset.

He didn't want to lose me, and he put me on the bench for that training match, and I was feeling it too: no matter how happy I was to be going to Bara, it was sad to leave Mourinho. That guy is special. The following year he left Inter for Real Madrid, and at the same time he and Materazzi parted ways. Materazzi is, like, the world's toughest defender. But as he hugged Mourinho he began to cry, and I can understand him in a way. Mourinho arouses feelings in people, and I remember when we b.u.mped into each other the next day at the hotel. He came up to me.

”You can't leave!”

”Sorry, I've got to take this opportunity.”

”But if you leave, I will too.”

My G.o.d, what can you say to that? That really hit me. If you leave, I will too.

”Thanks,” I said. ”You've taught me a lot.”

”Thank you,” he said.

We chatted for a bit, it was nice. But that guy, he's like me. He's proud and he wanted to win at any price, and of course, he couldn't help himself. He had a little dig at me as well: ”Hey, Ibra!”

”Yeah?”

”You're going to Bara to win the Champions, huh?”

”Yeah, maybe.”

”But we're the ones who're gonna bring it home don't forget. It's gonna be us!”

Then we said goodbye.

I flew to Copenhagen and got back home to our house in Limhamnsvgen and saw Helena and the kids. I'd really been looking forward to having a chance to tell them about everything and get a bit grounded. But our home was practically under siege. There were journalists and fans sleeping outside our house. They were ringing our doorbell. People were yelling and singing out there. They waved Barcelona flags. It was completely crazy and my whole family got stressed out Mum, Dad, Sanela, Keki, n.o.body dared to go out. People were after them as well, and I was rus.h.i.+ng round, and sure, I noticed that my hand was hurting, but I didn't pay much attention to it.

Things were happening all the time details in my contract being ironed out, Eto'o being difficult and wanting more money, Helena and I discussing where we were going to live, all that stuff. There was no way I'd be able to get grounded or think things through properly, so after just two days I headed off to Barcelona. In those days I was used to flying on private planes. It might sound snooty, but it's not easy for me on regular commercial flights. Everybody's after me. It's chaos, both in the airport and on board.

But this time I did take an ordinary flight. I'd spoken to the Bara gang on the phone, and as you know, Barcelona and Real Madrid are at war with each other. They're arch-rivals, and a lot of it is to do with politics, Catalonia against the central power in Spain, all that stuff, but the clubs also have different philosophies. ”At Barcelona we've got our feet on the ground. We're not like Real. We travel on regular planes,” they told me, and sure, that sounded reasonable. I flew with Spanair and landed in Barcelona at a quarter past five in the afternoon, and if I hadn't understood how big a deal this was before, I did now.

It was chaos. Hundreds of fans and journalists were waiting for me, and the papers wrote pages and pages about it. People were talking about 'Ibramania'. It was mental. I wasn't just Barcelona's most expensive purchase ever. No new player had attracted this level of attention. I was going to be introduced at the Camp Nou stadium that evening. It's a tradition at the club. When Ronaldinho arrived in 2003 there were 30,000 people there. Just as many had welcomed Thierry Henry. But now ... there were at least twice that many waiting for me, and it gave me chills, honestly, and I was taken out through the rear exit of the airport and driven to the stadium in a security vehicle.

We were holding a press conference first. Several hundred journalists were crammed into the room. It was jam-packed and people were restless: why isn't he coming? But we still couldn't go in. Eto'o kept making things difficult for Inter Milan right down to the wire, and Barcelona were waiting for a final confirmation of the deal, and time was ticking and the voices in the room kept getting more agitated and worried; there was a riot brewing. We could hear it just as clearly as if we'd been in the middle of it. Me, Mino, Laporta and the other bigwigs sat behind the scenes and waited, wondering: what's going on? How long are we going to have to keep sitting here?

”I've had enough,” said Mino.

”We need confirmation ...”

”Screw that,” he said, getting the others on side, and then we finally went in. I'd never seen so many reporters, and I answered their questions, but the whole time I could hear the roar out in the stadium. Everything was nuts, I'm telling you, and afterwards I got out of there and changed into my Bara kit. I'd been given number 9, the same number Ronaldo had when he was at the club, and now things were getting really emotional. The stadium was at boiling point. There were sixty or seventy thousand people out there. I tried to take a few deep breaths, and then I went out. I will never be able to describe it.

I had a ball in my hand, and I went out to that stand they'd set up, and the crowd were roaring all around me. Everybody was screaming my name. The entire stadium was cheering, and the press guy was running around saying stuff to me all the time, like, ”Say 'Visca Bara'!” which means 'Go Bara', and I did what he said, and I did some tricks, up and down, on my chest, on my head, backheels, all that stuff, and the spectators were screaming for more so I kissed the club's crest on my s.h.i.+rt. I have to tell you about that. I got a lot of s.h.i.+t for that, like, how could he kiss the club's crest when he'd only just left Inter? Didn't he care about his old fans? All kinds of people grumbled about that. There were comedy sketches on TV and c.r.a.p. But the press guys had asked me to do it. They were going crazy, like, ”Kiss the crest, kiss the crest,” and I was like a little boy. I obeyed. My whole body was vibrating, and I remember I wanted to go back into the changing room and calm down.

There was too much adrenaline. I was shaking, and when it was finally over I looked over at Mino. He'd never been more than ten metres away. At times like that he's everything to me, and together we went into the changing room and looked at all the names on the wall: Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Henry and Maxwell, all of them, and then mine, Ibrahimovic. It was already there, and I looked at Mino again. He was blown away. It was like he'd become a parent. Neither of us could take it in. It felt bigger than we could have imagined, and just then a text pinged on my phone. Who was it? It was Patrick Vieira. ”Enjoy,” he wrote. ”This doesn't happen to many players,” and honestly, you can hear all kinds of things from all kinds of people. But when a guy like Vieira sends you a message like that, you know you've been involved in something incredible, and I sat down to catch my breath.

Afterwards I told the journalists: ”I'm the happiest guy in the world!” ”This is the greatest thing that's happened since my sons were born,” the sort of things I'm sure other sportsmen have said before in similar situations. But I really meant it. This was big, and I went to the Princesa Sofia hotel, which was also besieged by fans who thought it was a ma.s.sive deal just to have a chance to see me drinking coffee in the lobby.

That night I had a hard time getting to sleep, no wonder really. My whole body was jumping, and sure, I did feel that my hand wasn't all right. But I didn't give it much thought then, either. There was so much other stuff going round in my head, and I didn't think there would be any problems at my medical the next day. When you join a club it's routine that they give you a thorough check-up. How much do you weigh? How tall are you? What's your body fat percentage? Do you feel match-fit?

”My hand hurts,” I said at the medical, and the doctors did an X-ray.

I had a fracture in my hand. A fracture! That was insane. One of the most important things when you join a new club is that you get to be there in the pre-season and get to know the guys and their game. Now that seemed to be out of the question, and we had to make a quick decision. I spoke to Guardiola, the manager. He seemed nice and said he was sorry he hadn't been there to welcome me. He'd been in London with the team, and just like everyone else he declared that I needed to get match-fit as quickly as possible. They couldn't take any chances, so they decided to operate on me straight away.

An orthopaedic surgeon implanted two steel pins in my hand to hold the fracture in place and help it heal faster. The same day I headed back to the training camp in Los Angeles. It seemed absurd, somehow. I'd just been there with Inter Milan. Now I was arriving with a new club and a huge plaster cast round my hand. It would take at least three weeks before it healed up.

24.

WE WERE GOING TO BE PLAYING against Real Madrid at home at Camp Nou. This was in November of 2009. I'd been out again for 15 days. I'd been having pains in my thigh and would be starting on the bench, which of course was no fun. There are few things like El Clsico. The pressure is enormous. It's war, and the papers produce special supplements that are, like, 60 pages long. People talk about nothing else. These are the big teams, the arch-enemies facing one another.

I'd had a good start to the season, despite the fracture in my hand and all the upheaval. I'd scored five goals in my first five league matches and was praised to the skies. That felt good, and it was clear La Liga was the place to be. Real and Bara had invested the equivalent of nearly two and a half billion Swedish kronor in Kak, Cristiano and me, and the Italian Serie A and the Premier League were both worse off. La Liga was on top now. Everything was going to be brilliant. That's what I thought.

Even in the pre-season when I was running round in a plaster cast with pins in my hand, I'd become part of the gang. It wasn't easy with the language, of course, and I hung around a lot with the ones who spoke English, Thierry Henry and Maxwell. But I got on well with everybody. Messi, Xavi and Iniesta are good, down-to-earth guys, awesome on the pitch and easy to deal with there's none of that, 'Here I come, I'm the biggest and best', not at all, and none of the fas.h.i.+on parades in the changing rooms that so many of the players in Italy got up to. Messi and the lads showed up in tracksuits and kept a low profile and then of course there was Guardiola.

He seemed all right. He'd come up to me and talk after every training session. He really wanted to bring me into the team, and sure, the club had a special atmosphere. I'd sensed that straight away. It was like a school, like Ajax. But this was Bara, the best team in the world. I'd been expecting a little more of an att.i.tude. But here, everybody was quiet and polite and a team player, and sometimes I'd think, these guys are superstars. Yet they behave like schoolboys, and maybe that's nice, what do I know? But I couldn't help wondering: how would these guys have been treated in Italy? They would've been like G.o.ds.

Now they toed the line for Pep Guardiola. Guardiola is a Catalan. He's an old midfielder. He won the La Liga t.i.tle five or six times with Barcelona and became team captain in 1997. When I arrived, he'd been managing the club for two years and had been very successful at it. He definitely deserved respect, and I thought the obvious thing to do was to try to fit in. That wasn't exactly something I was unfamiliar with I'd swapped clubs several times and never just barged straight in and started ordering people around. I sound out my surroundings. Who's strong? Who's weak? What's the banter like, who tends to stick together?

At the same time, I was aware of my qualities. I had concrete evidence of what I could mean for a team with my winner's mindset, and I was usually back to taking up a lot of s.p.a.ce quickly, and I joked around a lot. Not long ago I gave Chippen Wilhelmsson a playful kick at a session with the Swedish national team, and I couldn't believe it when I opened the paper the next day. People saw it as this fierce attack. But it was nothing, nothing at all. That's just what we do. It's both a game and deadly serious at the same time. We're a bunch of blokes who are together all day long and pull little stunts to keep ourselves going. Nothing more to it than that. We joke around. But at Bara I got boring. I became too nice, and I didn't dare to yell or blow up on the pitch the way I need to do.

The newspapers writing that I was a bad boy and stuff was definitely part of it. It made me want to prove the opposite, and of course it went too far. Instead of being myself, I was trying to be the super-nice guy, and that was stupid. You can't let the rubbish from the media get you down. It was unprofessional. I admit it. But that wasn't the main thing. This was: ”We keep our feet on the ground here. We are fabricantes. We work here. We're regular guys!”

Maybe that doesn't sound so strange, but there was something peculiar about those words, and I started to wonder: why is Guardiola saying this to me?

Does he think I'm different? I couldn't put my finger on it, not at first. But it didn't feel quite right. Sometimes it was like in the youth squad at Malm FF. Was this another coach who saw me as the kid from the wrong neighbourhood? But I hadn't done anything, hadn't headb.u.t.ted a teammate, hadn't nicked a bike, nothing. I've never been such a wimp in my life. I was the opposite of what the papers were saying. I was the guy who tiptoed around and always weighed things up beforehand. The old, wild Zlatan was gone! I was a shadow of my former self.

That had never happened before, but for now it wasn't a major thing. Things will work out, I thought, I'll soon be myself again. Things will loosen up, and maybe it's just my imagination, some kind of paranoia. Guardiola wasn't unpleasant, not at all. He seemed to believe in me. He saw how I scored goals and how much I meant to the team, and yet... that feeling wouldn't go away: Did he think I was different?

”We keep our feet on the ground here!”

Was I the guy who didn't keep his feet on the ground, is that what he thought? I didn't get it. So I tried to brush it off. Told myself: focus instead. Just forget about it! But those bad vibes were still there, and I started to wonder more and more: Is everybody supposed to be the same in this club? It didn't seem healthy. Everybody's different. Sometimes people pretend, of course. But when they do, they're just hurting themselves and harming the team. Sure, Guardiola had been successful. The club had won a lot under him. I've got to applaud that, and a win is a win.

But looking back now, I think it came at a price. All the big personalities were chased out. It was no accident that he'd had problems with guys like Ronaldinho, Deco, Eto'o, Henry and me. We're no 'ordinary guys'. We're threatening to him and so he tries to get rid of us, nothing more complicated than that, and I hate that sort of thing. If you're not an 'ordinary guy' you shouldn't have to become one. n.o.body benefits from that in the long run. h.e.l.l, if I'd tried to be like the Swedish guys at Malm FF I wouldn't be where I am today. Listen, don't listen that's the reason for my success.