Malmo’s favourite outcast son Zlatan Ibrahimovic returns with PSG a conquering hero

In Stortorget Square, Malmo, the citizens of the Swedish city will have big-screen, live Uefa Champions League football this evening.

The privilege comes to them courtesy of Malmo's most celebrated son. Zlatan Ibrahimovic has organised, with the blessing of the local authorities, the World Cup-style live broadcast of Malmo's meeting with Paris Saint-Germain.

He will be on that screen, of course, the towering figurehead of PSG, the skyscraper on modern Malmo’s iconography.

Twenty years ago, as a young teenager growing up there, Ibrahimovic had barely ever ventured as close to the city centre as Stortorget, or so he reckoned.

His childhood was spent on the margins, all about the tough district of Rosengard, and the ghettos his parents had their homes in.

It is unclear who is relishing this reunion more, the club where Ibrahimovic did his apprenticeship and brought in a then startling transfer fee by Scandinavian standards, around €8 million (Dh31.31m), when he was sold to Ajax Amsterdam, age 19; or Ibrahimovic himself.

He has come a long way, and though he may be a little more discreet about boasting of that fact than he was when he sped around Malmo in his first flashy car, this homecoming will hardly be conducted incognito.

On his way around the city, to the team hotel and then to the Malmo stadium, he will pass signposts to his own past.

The stadium Malmo have sold out for tonight’s fixture is not the one where he played in their pale blue, not just in the top flight, but during an unusual season in the second tier, when he made his first major impact as a showy, skilful prodigy.

The old Malmo arena was replaced seven years ago by the Swedbank Stadium, a project facilitated by money the club earned from his sale.

"Zlatan saved Malmo," his former youth coach, Ola Gallstad, told Le Parisien. "The income he brought in came at a time when the club was not in good shape economically and it allowed a new era to begin, plans for the new ground to take shape."

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Ibrahimovic will doubtless glimpse spots where once upon a time, as a boy, he would have looked for bicycles to steal.

He became an expert unpicking their locks, a talent that would get the young rogue into trouble when, after practice, he pinched the bike belonging to a Malmo coach.

He will turn his head in the direction of Rosengard, his old haunt, and perhaps remember that, coming from there, made him sense throughout his youth he “came from the wrong side of the tracks,” he later reflected, or “feel like I came from Mars”.

He might think back to Lorensberg, where he had his first home away from his father or mother, a studio flat, once he was a paid-up footballer.

The non-conformist in him was forged in Malmo. The son of Balkan immigrants, he felt the outsider among the “posh kids” of areas like Vellinge.

He often rubbed people up the wrong way. The parent of one junior colleague organised a petition to have him removed from the team. He was restless even as a kid, switching junior clubs frequently.

As a world-class superstar he would do the same, from Ajax, to Juventus, to Barcelona, to AC Milan, and, three years ago to Paris. At all of those he would win league titles; at Malmo he was not around long enough to do so.

Around the time he signed the deal to join Ajax, a song was released in Sweden, with the line “I come from the same town as Zlatan”. He was not yet 20, but by then a subject of enough fascination it became a hit among young Swedes.

His country is grateful that earlier this month he guided them into the finals of next year’s European Championship, which may turn out to be his last international tournament.

Many in Malmo will be proud to be from the same city as him tonight, even if, as his superwealthy employers flex their muscles, Malmo end up eliminated from European competition at the end of Zlatan’s return.

sports@thenational.ae

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