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ZLATAN, THE SWEDE

Trying to define Swedishness requires the embrace of a paradox. On the one hand, there are idealised stories of independent, individualistic, and unbreakable Vikings or the strong-willed Vasa-family who are said to have founded the kingdom of Sweden. The myth they all carry through time can be concluded in the Swedish saying: ‘He who stands alone is strong.’

On the other hand, the prevailing idea of the perfect society today is one that places at the centre the loyal team. In building the welfare state, the story of collective effort has been at the centre of the narrative. Everyone pays taxes. Everyone contributes. Everyone joins in. Everyone benefits. Without the collective — the workers’ movement, the trade unions, the temperance movement, the awakening movement, the women’s liberation movement, without the collective agreements in the labour market — the Swedish welfare state would not be so strong and stable.

The Swedish Model is based on an agreement between state and individual. In case of weakness, illness, or distress, the individual in Sweden can turn to the state, who then gives a direct response in the form of grants, pensions, and insurance systems. It frees the individual from family dependence, class consciousness, or the humiliation of seeking charity from private benefactors. All state grants (except for parental leave) are now directly linked to the individual citizen. In Germany, they are more often linked to the family, while the individual in the United States turns to her or his social networks or charities to receive aid in crises, not to the state. So, in Sweden there are two narratives, two stories. The one about a strong individual, the other about a strong collective. In between, we find Zlatan Ibrahimović.

In the early days of Zlatan’s career, he was repeatedly described as a sulky kid, self-centred and, worst of all, a terrible team player.

In the year of 2000, Zlatan was still an unknown but unusually talented footballer, without even a nickname. In an interview with a Swedish newspaper, he claimed that he would be a professional in the prestigious Italian club Inter Milan within just a few years, and was described as a ‘rough diamond, a Hulk, a different type of football player’.

The Swedish journalist Agneta Furvik has scrutinised the Swedish media’s encounters with Zlatan during the first years of his growing fame and the pattern is clear. He is overwhelmingly often characterised as someone who stands out, who differs from the rest of the players in the Swedish national team. Adjectives such as ‘cocky’, ‘cheeky’, ‘impulsive’, ‘spontaneous’, and ‘individualistic’ are the words most often used to describe him, all of them synonyms to the equally reoccuring ‘un-Swedish’.

In the arena of sport, issues of national identity are just as important as the beauty of the game and sometimes they take over completely — nothing new there. But in Sweden something has changed radically since that day in 2000 when the nineteen-year-old Zlatan was interviewed. A shift of paradigm. Sweden before the year 2000 was quite simply another country.

The list of fundamental changes in society is long, and the direction of travel has been entirely one-way, from public sector to private, from state responsibility to individual, from a structure based on the collective to a structure based on individualism. The wave of change has swept over the educational system, changed the terms for retirement, created a decentralisation of the labour market, changed the rules for dismissing people, and initiated the selling of public housing to private owners — to mention just some of the transformations.

When a conservative alliance came to power in 2006, the shift was speeded up. Individualism was the way to freedom, they declared. The powers of the public sphere and the state itself should decrease, and the individual should gain more influence: this was their operating principle.

At a press conference in 2011, the prime minister was asked about the 400,000 Swedes who had been kicked out of the unemployment insurance fund since he won the election — how would they be able to support themselves if there was a major recession? Prime Minister Reinfeldt replied, ‘One gets support and help from one’s parents, partner or otherwise. If the worst comes to the worst, there are other social security systems to catch you should you fall.’

An unambiguous proof of a changed system. The Swedish welfare system was no longer valid for all Swedish citizens. Now was the time of the individual. And Zlatan was never again accused of being a bad team player in an un-Swedish way. On the contrary. Prior to the World Cup qualification match against Portugal in 2013, Zlatan Ibrahimović held a press conference in his role as team captain for the national football team and managed to portray his personality as well as express the new Swedish times in one single sentence: ‘If I am to succeed, the whole team must do their job.’

The following year, Zlatan was the main character in a commercial by Volvo titled ‘Made by Sweden featuring Zlatan’.* There, he recites the national anthem with slightly changed lyrics. (The word ‘North’ was replaced by ‘Sweden’ in the phrase ‘I want to live, I want to die in Sweden’.) The film consists of winter landscapes, mountains, rivers, forests, and open spaces. The car model it is meant to promote doesn’t account for more than 25 per cent of the film’s total time. Instead, the focus is on Zlatan. He pulses in deep, white snow, goes deer hunting, takes a winter bathe in a lake covered in ice, and hangs out with his family in a rural cottage. No collective, no social network nor friend as far as one can see.

[* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbvdzQ7uVPc]

Could Volvo have shot the same movie in 2000? Of course not. Times have changed. Alone is strong. Zlatan is strong. Zlatan is Volvo. Volvo is Sweden. Sweden is individualistic. In other words: Swedish society has caught up with Zlatan Ibrahimović. The journalists who portrayed him in the first years of his career were all wrong. He wasn’t un-Swedish. He was simply Swedish before everyone else was.