Monday night, Stockholm. A tall figure with a ponytail and a goatee makes his way on to the stage and prepares to start his acceptance speech. If there is a sense of history repeating itself, it is no surprise. History is repeating itself. It’s Groundhog Day. Zlatan Ibrahimovic has just become Sweden’s footballer of the year for a ninth consecutive year. It is his 10th Guldboll in total.
Anyone in that position could be forgiven for becoming a bit jaded. Not Zlatan. He has a line. Zlatan always has a line. This time he talks about when he was playing for one of Malmo FF’s youth teams. “Last year I promised to come back here to pick up my 10th Guldboll,” he says. “I don’t know if I can promise the same thing for next year. But this one has got me thinking about my time at Malmo when I was a young boy. I was sitting in the dressing room, had a look around and thought: ‘In order to be successful I need to be 10 times as good as everyone else here.’”
Zlatan, of course, became 10 times as good as anyone in that team and one senses that he, even now, still thinks he is 10 times better than most players he comes up against. And sometimes he probably is.
On Saturday night Zlatan will experience that odd sensation of coming up against someone just as confident as himself. Nicklas Bendtner and Denmark stand in Sweden’s way in the Euro 2016 play-offs with the first leg at Friends Arena in Stockholm. It’s Zlatan v Lord Bendtner. Battle of the egos, battle of Scandinavia. Friends Arena has sold out and the two countries’ media have been ramping up the rhetoric before the game, Denmark’s channel Five producing an advert where a young girl menacingly cuts Pippi Longstocking’s bunches, Ikea furniture is thrown out of a house and Abba records and CDs are burned.
Everything will focus on the two strikers despite both of them trying to downplay the clash earlier in the week. “It is your job to write,” Bendtner, who has had a stomach bug but should still start, told journalists. “It is your job to get me to talk about this. I can’t do much about that but I can’t see why we should be compared to each other. I think he’s great. A good player and a good person. I know you really want me to talk a lot about this … but I won’t.”
Move on, nothing to see here. It was reminiscent of the time Bendtner interrupted a journalist and said “No” before he had even heard the question. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask,” complained the journalist. “I could hear it was a stupid question,” came Bendtner’s reply.
It is a remark Zlatan would have been proud of and the similarities between the two are obvious: the extraordinary self-belief, the one-liners, their playing positions and their stature as their countries’ most famous footballers for the last decade. They have, however, had wildly different careers and even if you disregard the fact that Zlatan is a more naturally gifted player there seems to be one thing that sets Zlatan and Bendtner apart: their mentalities. Neither, it must be said, act like a grown-up – although they have both mellowed since becoming fathers – but whereas Zlatan comes in the shape of a sulky teenager, Bendtner resembles an angry five-year-old constantly on the brink of a tantrum.
Throughout his career, when Zlatan has suffered a setback he has gone home, got angry, thought about what to improve, and come back determined to prove everyone wrong. Bendtner, on the other hand, appears to self-destruct and smash up a gym or rub his genitals on a taxi if something has gone against him.
There is a passage in Zlatan’s book, I am Zlatan, when he talks about his first full season at Ajax. Things were not going according to plan. Co Adriaanse, first, and then Ronald Koeman, kept him on the bench, preferring the Greek striker Nikos Machlas.
Zlatan writes: “I am really not a person who walks around being satisfied: ‘I am Zlatan, wow!’ Rather the contrary it is like a film that is on repeat and I am thinking all the time: should I have done that or that? What can I improve? I always – always – take something home with me from games and matches and that is quite hard of course. I am never really satisfied, not even when I should be.”
It is difficult imagining Bendtner saying something similar. That season ended with Ajax winning the league and Ibrahimovic coming off the bench in the 78th minute to score the winning goal in extra time in the cup final against Utrecht. He never looked back.
That was in 2002, 13 years ago. Since then he has won 11 league titles in three different countries (even though Juventus were stripped of two titles because of the Calciopoli scandal). He has played in four major tournaments for Sweden, broken his country’s goalscoring record and will retire a contented player.
During the same time Bendtner has won a Serie A title, the FA Cup and the German Cup although he has not been a key player in either of the three triumphs. There have been times when Bendtner has threatened to play to his potential, but those moments have been too few and far between.
As a snapshot of the Dane’s career, it is worth going back to October 2013 and Denmark’s World Cup qualifier against Italy in Copenhagen. Bendtner was back in the Danish team after an enforced break and when the stadium announcer got to the striker, the crowd bellowed out his name so loudly it was surely heard across the water and all the way to Sweden. This was a comeback, almost a love reunion. Six months earlier a pale and shocked Bendtner had stood on the steps of Copenhagen city court and explained it was “the worst day of his life”. He had been fined £80,000 and banned from driving for three years after being caught drink-driving, more than three times over the legal limit.
Denmark’s coach, Morten Olsen, immediately said he would not pick Bendtner for the next six months to give the striker “time to reflect”. And reflect he did. By the time he was lining up to face the Italians he literally looked like a new man. His appearance had always been immaculate but now he stood there with a full beard and his newly-long hair tied up in a top-knot.
He had not played regularly for Arsenal or Juventus, where he had been on loan, for more than a year but on that night he was immense. He played like a striker obsessed, fuelled by the adrenaline of being back in red and white. He beat Gianluigi Buffon with two headers the Italian could do nothing about.
Denmark were winning 2-1 and Bendtner was about to celebrate the most eye-catching night of his career … and then, in the 91st minute, Alberto Aquilani equalised. It was so Bendtner. Almost there, but not quite. Denmark didn’t make it to the World Cup.
The crowd’s enormous tribute before that game, and the Danish fans’ response to his drink-driving ban, sums up their relationship to the striker. He is not mocked in Denmark in the way he is abroad. He is liked back home but it also a marriage of convenience. Bendtner gives them something that no other striker seems capable of: goals. He has scored 29 international goals, many of them very important, and a look at his rivals for the position up front shows why the Danes are willing to forgive and forget so often. His backup for the Sweden games is Morten “Duncan” Rasmussen, who failed to make it at Celtic, and in previous years it has been Simon Makienok Christoffersen, who is currently on loan at Charlton from Palermo. Zlatan’s position in the Sweden team is similar. There is no one who comes close to his quality up front. John Guidetti, Ola Toivonen and Marcus Berg are Erik Hamren’s options against Denmark. Enough said. Equally, Zlatan’s relationship with the Swedes has been a tempestuous affair but in recent years he has become much more folkkär, more appreciated by the public.
And while he has collected Guldbollen 10 times he has won Jerringpriset, an award where the public votes for the best sportsman of the year, only once. And he still doesn’t sing the national anthem before games (although he does seem to like his own version of it).
His demeanour has been a problem as well. Swedes, like Danes, are not naturally boisterous and there have been times when Zlatan’s un-Swedishness (read cockiness) has troubled the Swedes, made them feel uncomfortable.
Despite this, he is a national hero now. There is now a warmth towards Zlatan that there was not before.
He is also respected in the Swedish dressing room with players talking about “a different Zlatan” behind closed doors. “He is a person who cares about others,” the debutant Gustav Svensson told Aftonbladet this week. “He contributes a lot. He carries with him a lot of respect and that is very important for the team as a whole. He is humble and puts the team first.
“When he shouts it is for the team’s best and everyone listens. He likes to joke and make sure that there is a good atmosphere. The Danes have taken a lot of shit this week.”
Zlatan is desperate to play in one more major tournament and only Denmark stand in his way. He once said that “everyone who stands in my way loses” but that is clearly not true. Zlatan may think he is 10 times better than anyone else – and maybe 20 times better than Bendtner – but in the end it will not come down to that. It is a team game after all and, while the main protagonists may not agree, the tie could just as well be settled by a Christian Eriksen free-kick or an Erkan Zengin screamer.
But one thing is for sure. If Zlatan and Sweden are eliminated by Bendtner and Denmark, the scars will take a long time to heal, especially for Sweden’s leader and captain. A defeat could very well spell the end of his international career and it is perhaps only then everyone in Sweden will realise just how lucky they have been.
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