Zlatan Ibrahimovic was more than just the cocky Swede who did not follow the rules

I t is September 2003 and Sweden have just been awarded a second penalty against San Marino in a European Championship qualifier. The team’s designated penalty taker, Kim Källström, has dispatched the first and expects to take this one too.

However a 21‑year‑old Zlatan Ibrahimovic has other ideas. He is the player who has been fouled and grabs the ball to take the spot-kick. He scores to make it 5-0 but no one is in a mood to celebrate with him. He has disobeyed orders and, even worse, has put himself above the team.

It is a pretty un-Swedish thing to do but then one of the most fascinating aspects of Ibrahimovic’s long and successful career, on which he called time at the age of 41 on Sunday night, is just how unconventional he was in a country where you are not supposed to stick out.

He was cocky and brash. He didn’t like to follow rules. He said he would become the best player in the world. He stole bicycles, threw eggs at windows, joked that he had a gun in his bag at an airport security and pretended to be a police officer to arrest someone he and his friend thought was a sex buyer. It turned out to be a priest trying to help the sex workers.

Ibrahimovic’s parents came from Yugoslavia and there were times during his upbringing in Sweden when he felt he did not fit it in. In his autobiography, I Am Zlatan, he wrote: “I was a small guy. I had a big nose and I had a lisp and had speech therapy. A woman came to me in school and taught me how to pronounce the letter s and I thought it was humiliating and I guess I felt I had to prove myself.”

He did that on the pitch. He stood out from an early age. He started playing for local club Balkan where, according to legend, he was called up for an under-12s game at the age of