I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic

The bestselling book in Europe this year has been the autobiography of Swedish soccer player Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Zlatan looks like a hulking brute but has amazingly quick feet, so it is very hard to take the ball from him by fair means or foul. He once scored four goals in a match between Sweden and England, one of them after an English defender tried to tackle him and sort of bounced off. He plays in France now, and French soccer fans have begun using the verb zlataner to mean "flatten." This is by itself enough to get his memoir published, but it has become a bestseller for other reasons. From the review at the New Statesman:

To write the book, he reflects: “I had to go back in my memory, and shit, I realised I hadn’t always been a good person.” Yet the onetime bicycle thief and school bully isn’t presented in a vacuum. Zlatan tells an immigrant’s tale that resonates across Europe as he guides us through the milieu of toplevel football.

His parents, a violent Croatian charwoman and a drunken Bosnian janitor, separated when he was two. He was raised in Rosengård, a deprived area of Malmö. Almost everyone around him was an immigrant, so he grew up knowing almost nothing about Sweden. He never watched Swedish TV, didn’t visit the city centre until he was nearly 17, and lusted from afar after the blonde Swedish girls who lived in actual houses somewhere far from Rosengård. He imagined their parents saying, “Darling, could you please pass me the milk?”, or “Do you need any help with your Swedish history?”. His own relatives mostly exchanged death threats. In his words, “I felt inferior. I held tight to football.” This early section of the book offers a rare insight into European ghetto life.

When he joined Ajax Amsterdam at the age of 19 for a Swedish record transfer fee, his mother was distraught: “God oh God, Zlatan, what happened? Have you been kidnapped? Are you dead?” Seeing his face on TV, but not speaking much Swedish, she had assumed he was in trouble again.

A classic immigrant tale indeed. The increasing integration of the European economy has meant millions of people moving to other countries where they mostly live in immigrant-only neighborhoods on the fringes of the great cities and experience a world of slights great and small.

Zlatan's financial troubles ended when he began playing big-time soccer, but not his cultural and linguistic confusion. He has played in five countries in 11 years, experiencing jarring changes of locker room culture as well as difficulties settling into domestic life. The experience seems to have tied him ever more closely to the country of his birth. He is now captain of the Swedish national team and married to a Swedish woman, living in the sort of house he used to fantasize about. On the wall is a picture of his dirty feet, the gift that lifted him out of poverty and into a fairy tale life.

I wonder if there will be a reaction all across Europe against the internationalism of the EU, with a rise of nativist political parties, anti-Brussels agitation, and nostalgic popular culture.