At 15, Zlatan Ibrahimović nearly quit football for a job at Malmö's port
As a teenager Zlatan Ibrahimović came close to abandoning football to work at the Port of Malmö, until his coach talked him out of it. He went on to win 34 trophies, score more than 570 goals and find the net in four different decades, from the 1990s to the 2020s.
Born in Malmö on 3 October 1981 to a Bosniak Muslim father and a Croat Catholic mother, both immigrants, he got his first football boots at six and bounced between local clubs, including one founded by Yugoslav immigrants. Home life was chaotic; at nine he moved in with his father, often went hungry there and ran to his mother's for dinner, and he shoplifted and stole bikes. His co-author David Lagercrantz has described a player who turned the anger and wounds of that childhood into fuel, feeling poor and out of place beside middle-class teammates and vowing to prove himself.
He broke into Malmö FF's senior side in 1999, a season that ended in relegation, and attracted Arsène Wenger's interest before Ajax signed him in 2001 for 80 million Swedish kronor. What followed was a tour of Europe's giants: Juventus, Inter Milan, where he won three straight Serie A titles, Barcelona, AC Milan and then Paris Saint-Germain, where four consecutive league titles made him the club's top scorer at the time he left.
Later came Manchester United, winning the League Cup and Europa League in 2016–17, then LA Galaxy after a serious knee injury, and finally a return to Milan, where he helped revive the club and won his fifth Serie A title in 2022 before retiring the following year.
For Sweden he scored a record 62 goals and won the national player of the year award 12 times, ten of them in a row. His 35-yard overhead kick against England won the 2013 Puskás Award. The one prize that eluded him was the Champions League, and his habit of discussing himself in the third person became as famous as his volleys.
Source: Zlatan Ibrahimović
