“It’s time to say goodbye to football”, announces Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who is retiring at 41

Wherever he went, Zlatan Ibrahimovic never left anyone indifferent. Thousands of AC Milan fans felt it on Sunday June 4 at the San Siro stadium. After the Rossoneri’s victory (3-1) against Hellas Verona on the last day of Serie A, the club celebrated its Swedish striker, who announced to the public that he was retiring, at 41 years old. “It’s time to say goodbye to football“, launched Ibrahimovic, tears in his eyes, like some of his teammates.

This year, the Swedish giant will not have been very present with them. In his last season as a footballer, Ibrahimovic only played four games, the last on March 18 against Udinese. History will remember that he scored that day and wore the AC Milan captain’s armband. The Milanese tifosi paid him a beautiful tribute with a tifo where it was written “GodBye“.

In Milan as elsewhere, Ibrahimovic has always made an impression. Trained in Malmö, the Swede joined Ajax Amsterdam at 19, before discovering Serie A with Juventus and Inter Milan, AC Milan’s rival. It was in Italy, in a league reputed to be tough for attackers, that Ibrahimovic established himself as one of the best scorers on the continent. With Inter, he won three league titles in a row between 2006 and 2009.

Angry with the Champions League

Despite good statistics, his 2009-2010 season at FC Barcelona, ​​which he joined for an amount of 70 million, is considered a failure. His relationship with Pep Guardiola is not good and the Swede will leave Catalonia as quickly as he arrived. This is where his love story with AC Milan started, as short as it was intense since he played two short seasons between 2010 and 2012, before returning to the Lombard capital in 2019. Subsequently, Ibrahimovic Above all, he became the first world-class player to join Paris Saint-Germain, whose new Qatari owners wanted to conquer Europe, in the summer of 2012.

Ibrahimovic was then 31 years old but was in the shape of his life. The titles of champion of France are linked, like those of top scorer for the Swede. His strong personality – he’s not shy about saying he’s made Ligue 1 back”more prestigious” – made him a celebrity in France. The term “zlataner”, which means to beat your opponent – preferably by humiliating him – is essential in current vocabulary and is often used on set in the media.

With PSG – of which he is the third top scorer in history (154 goals) – Ibrahimovic works in Ligue 1, as during this victory in Troyes in March 2016 during which he scored a quadruple (9-0 ). It will symbolize, with Laurent Blanc in particular, one of the best periods of Paris under the Qatari flag. A PSG never satisfied, always inclined to score one more goal. He won 12 titles in Paris, his biggest total in a club.

A star in the United States

But, like PSG, Ibrahimovic has never conquered Europe. With the Parisian club, he will experience four eliminations in a row in the quarter-finals and will be decried for his inefficiency in the big games. The Champions League will remain as the missing trophy on its huge list (32 titles). In the national team, Ibrahimovic has established himself as the best player and scorer in the history of Sweden (122 caps, 62 goals), but has never been able to consider winning the Euro or the World Cup.

Ibrahimovic, they are also gestures of pure madness, acrobatic recoveries of which only he had the secret. A great lover of martial arts, the Swede has more than once used his qualities acquired by practicing them to “zlatan” his opponents. In Paris as elsewhere, he scored goals that will be remembered. Like this acrobatic return scored from more than 25 meters with Sweden against England in November 2012.

Before returning as king to Milan, Ibrahimovic had also discovered England, with Manchester United, where he had suffered a serious knee injury. At 36, his body then began to call him to order, which did not prevent him from living the “American way of life” with the Los Angeles Galaxy in 2018 and 2019. A true star of the MLS, the United States football championship, Ibrahimovic would later declare, in his purest style: “I was too strong for MLS.“

Returning to Milan in 2019, the Swede has played less in the past two seasons, but still experienced the joy of a new league title last year in Serie A, alongside the French Mike Maignan, Theo Hernandez, Pierre Kalulu and Olivier Giroud. The four were present at San Siro and moved to tears when one of the greatest strikers of the beginning of the century put an end to his career.