Zlatan Ibrahimovic arrived as a king, left football a legend

To understand Zlatan Ibrahimovic you have to start in Rosengard, the social hotspot in Malmo where he grew up as the son of a Bosnian father and a Croatian mother. That is where his character was formed and where he learned to assert himself; Rosengard laid the foundations for what he later marketed as "Zlatan style." When a 19-year-old Ibrahimovic received an offer from Arsenal in 2000, Arsene Wenger insisted on a trial.

"Zlatan doesn't do trials," he replied — he did not want to be part of a random list of applicants but the benchmark against which others were measured. That "me against the rest of the world" approach remained his driving force. "You can take the boy out of the ghetto, but you can never take the ghetto out of the boy," Ibrahimovic once said, and he cultivated that difference even on the pitch.

Where others preferred to play it safe, he sought the extraordinary: numerous acrobatic, spectacular goals reflected the same uncompromising, surprising spirit with which he spoke.

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