Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.
When Zlatan Ibrahimovic arrived for his first day of practice with the LA Galaxy in March of 2018, he was well established as one of the game’s all-time greats and a polarizing figure known for his cartoonishly massive ego. He had a best-selling autobiography entitled “I am Zlatan” and a follow up, “I am Football.” But surely, his new teammates suspected, some of that was just an act — a put-on for the public.
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“You kind of see some interviews with him and you think, ‘There’s no way he’s like that,’” former Galaxy goalkeeper David Bingham says.
Then head coach Sigi Schmid introduced Ibrahimovic to the group, asking him if he’d like to say a few words. He stepped to the center of the locker room, all eyes upon the 6-foot-5, long-haired, tattooed international superstar with a black belt in taekwondo.
“Do you believe in God?” Zlatan asked, to puzzled glances from around the room.
A couple of guys in the back answered sheepishly in the affirmative.
“OK,” Zlatan answered. “Then you believe in me.”
That was it. “That was our first impression of him,” Bingham says.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic left Major League Soccer at the end of the 2019 season, departing for a final taste of European glory at A.C. Milan. His two years with MLS’s most decorated franchise were brief and not as successful as either party would’ve liked. It marked the first time he failed to win a trophy with a club since he moved from hometown side Malmo FF in Sweden to Dutch giants Ajax in 2001. It’s undeniable, though, that he left his mark in the U.S.
Zlatan’s exploits in America have entered the realm of legend, even only a couple of years removed — the one-sided bets, the photoshoots, the petty feuds with opponents and teammates alike. Some of it feels as surreal as that introductory exchange in the Galaxy locker room. And nearly every story leaves you wondering — is it all for show, or is Zlatan Ibrahimovic really like that?
I came, I saw, I conquered. Thank you @lagalaxy for making me feel alive again. To the Galaxy fans – you wanted Zlatan, I gave you Zlatan. You are welcome. The story continues…Now go back to watch baseball pic.twitter.com/kkL6B6dJBr
— Zlatan Ibrahimović (@Ibra_official) November 13, 2019
“You’ve heard about Kevin, right?”
Chris Pontius is hunkered down in his chair at an outdoor bar in Washington, D.C. It’s warm and breezy and Pontius is fully vaccinated. For the past 15 months, the entire city has been cautious, on edge about doing anything like this. Tonight, though, things are starting to feel normal again. The whiskey is flowing and so are the stories.
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Pontius, now retired, was a fan favorite in D.C. and later in Philadelphia. Tonight he’s come to this bar to discuss something entirely different.
Pontius was there through Zlatan’s entire stay in MLS. The highs. The lows. For acts of greatness on the field and tantrums off it. For the greatest goal in Major League Soccer history. Yet, right now, the story Pontius is trying to tell through fits of laughter is about none of those things.
It’s about Kevin.
In early May of 2018, the Galaxy were facing off against the Houston Dynamo on the road. As Pontius tells it, LA looked gutless in the game’s early goings and, at halftime, Zlatan made his frustrations known.
“We need more guys to get stuck in on tackles,” Ibrahimovic bellowed. “Like Kevin.”
Ibrahimovic’s teammates were intimidated by the giant, ferocious Swede, who was prowling around the locker room, unloading on each and every one of them. But mostly they were confused. You see, there was no Kevin on the team. Zlatan, at this point, had been with them for weeks.
“Finally someone musters up the courage to ask him,” says Pontius, “who is Kevin?”
Ibrahimovic motioned toward defensive midfielder Perry Kitchen, who was seated at his locker. “Him,” said Ibrahimovic. “Kevin.”
Like any good mythology, the Kevin story has different versions. We’re first introduced to Kevin by Toronto FC defender Eriq Zavaleta.
“The game (in 2019) that we won 5-3 — where Zlatan scored his 500th (career) goal — I heard Zlatan screaming at his teammates,” Zavaleta says. “He was yelling, ‘KEVIN! KEVIN! PLAY FORWARD.’ Perry Kitchen had the ball at that point so I thought to myself, ‘Who the hell is Kevin?’ There was no Kevin on that team, to my knowledge.”
“You know about Kevin, right?” Nashville SC defender Walker Zimmerman asks us weeks later.
Kitchen himself, now with the Columbus Crew, has his own version of events.
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“Chris is wrong,” Kitchen says. “That was a different time. The Kevin thing started immediately.”
The day after the Galaxy’s stunning, come-from-behind 4-3 victory over LAFC — a game in which Zlatan scored arguably the most memorable goal in MLS history within his first 36 hours of arriving in the United States — Schmid gathered his team for a post-game tape session. While going through the film, the veteran MLS coach asked his charges if they had any observations.
“Zlatan spoke up and said something along the lines of: ‘In games like these we need to have more bite, we need to be nastier. Like Kevin,’” says Kevin Kitchen. “And he pointed to me, over in my direction. I was like, looking around, to my left, to my right, making sure there wasn’t a Kevin on the team. I said, ‘Are you pointing to me? My name is Perry. It’s right above my locker.’”
“Yes,” replied Ibrahimovic. “You are Kevin.”
“The guy was so confident that he stood there and just tried to tell me I didn’t know my own name, man.”
“He called Perry ‘Kevin’ every day for the next year and a half,” Pontius says, still laughing. “I swear, to this very day, if he saw Perry again he would just say, ‘What’s up, Kevin?’”
The amazing, exponentially growing bank balance
Like any tall tale, Benny Feilhaber only ever heard this story second-hand. He was playing for the Galaxy’s crosstown rival, LAFC, when Ibrahimovic first arrived in the city, and word got out that Zlatan had made quite the impression on his new teammates.
“Honestly I can’t even remember who told me this story,” Feilhaber says, “but I heard that one of the first things he said in his first training — and would have been the day before we played them with LAFC — he told everybody that, ‘All you guys might have an idea of why I’m here, but I have over 100 million dollars in my bank account. I’m not here for money. I want to win.’ I think that’s a pretty cool thing to say. That definitely gets the attention of the players and lets them know that he is a competitive motherfucker.”
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The amount grew just a couple of months later when Zlatan launched into one of his usual halftime rants.
“He stands up and yells, ‘Are we going to start playing for real?” says Kitchen. “Or are we just going to be on vacation? Because if we’re just going to be on vacation, no problem. I have $200 million in the bank. I can relax. That’s not a big deal to me.’ It was… a little hard for us to relate.”
Finally, former Galaxy assistant Dom Kinnear recalls an exchange with Ibrahimovic after he scored a brace against RSL later that same summer.
“He does his press, and we’re walking off the field,” Kinnear says. “He’s walking behind me and he goes, ‘Hey Dom. Hey Dom. Not bad tonight, huh?’ I turned around and I said, ‘Yeah, big man. You were on it. It was good to watch.’”
Relishing the moment, Zlatan offered up a further bit of analysis:
“Not bad for a 37-year-old with $300 million in the bank.”
“I’ll spend your fucking money however I want”
Pontius, who retired last year, had a distinguished run in MLS. Though injuries derailed him for long stretches, he remained a productive player throughout his decade in the league. So in late 2018, when Pontius notched his 50th career MLS goal, teammates current and former offered their congratulations. But Zlatan? Not so much. The following year, Ibrahimovic took the shit-talking to another level.
“Chris, 50 goals? It’s nothing,” Pontius remembers Ibrahimovic saying. “By the time I leave the Galaxy, I will have as many goals as you do in your entire career.”
Zlatan was coming off an abbreviated 2018 campaign in which he scored 22 goals in 27 matches. He was also injured, and some suspected he might need surgery. Pontius liked his odds, so he pushed back.
“Everyone else starts goading me on like, ‘Man, put money on it!’,” says Pontius. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, fuck you.’ I’m looking at him, he’s on the table getting his Achilles worked on; people are talking about him needing surgery. I was like, ‘Put your money where your mouth is. I’ll bet you $1,000.’”
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The two agreed on terms — Pontius threw in $500, and if he emerged victorious, he’d take home $1,000. Zlatan’s $1,000 investment would earn him an even return. For the remainder of the season, Pontius — who had fallen out of the starting lineup — watched Ibrahimovic’s goal tally climb. Eventually, in the last few weeks of the season, Zlatan notched his 51st, equaling Pontius’ total at the time. The following week, Pontius struck back, scoring the final goal of his MLS career, a late one after entering as a sub against Vancouver.
“Zlatan has been keeping track, obviously,” says Pontius. “And in the final game of the season, against Houston, he scores an absolute banger. I had no chance of coming back. He laughed and he looked over at me after the game. I knew I had to pay up.”
The next day, Pontius brought in the $500. Ibrahimovic was seated next to his son Max in a room at Dignity Health Sports Park, and the two were playing Fortnite. “The guy had an entire room in his house where he’d play Fortnite with his kid,” Pontius remembers.
“So I give Zlatan the money and he turns to Max, hands it to him and says, ‘Do you know how many Fortnite tokens we can buy with this?’”
Pontius was surprised. He didn’t think Ibrahimovic, one of the wealthiest players in the history of the game, would actually take his money. ‘I said, OK, well at least give it to charity or something. Fortnite? No.”
Ibrahimovic offered his response, which was about what you’d expect.
“Chris,” he said. “I’ll spend your fucking money however I want.”
The Zlatan Whisperer
At the end of our chat with Pontius, he tells us to get a hold of Dom Kinnear. ”Dom is a no-bullshit person,” he says, “and so is Zlatan. Ibra liked him.”
After Schmid left midway through 2018, Kinnear — a man who until recently had been involved in Major League Soccer in some form or another through every single year of its history — found himself faced with the daunting task of coaching Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
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“You are not coaching Zlatan,” says Kinnear. “What can you tell Zlatan Ibrahimovic, or show him from a soccer standpoint, that he hasn’t already seen? The only thing with Sigi and myself, and also (Schmid’s replacement) Guillermo (Barros Schelotto), was you just educate him on MLS. That’s all you can do.”
Kinnear would put together a dossier every week on the opposing team’s center backs — if one of them was weak on the ball, or would go to ground easily while defending, he equipped Ibrahimovic with that information. But the coach was never certain how much of an effect that even had on Ibrahimovic, a player who sometimes pointed out tactical inefficiencies or weaknesses that Kinnear himself hadn’t even noticed.
“He did some things over the years there where you end up thinking ‘this guy isn’t really just a player, he’s a bit of a genius,’” says Kinnear. “He just sees the game at a different speed. His vision is just completely pure.”
Off the field, Kinnear became one of the only people who seemed able to connect with Ibrahimovic on a deeper level.
Zlatan’s persona was endearing at times, but his reputation for being a difficult teammate, or being overly critical, had begun to rear its head.
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“Some of his own teammates were terrified of him,” says Pontius. “At the end of the day it goes back to him holding everyone to a higher standard in order to win. That’s just how he is. But he did cross the line with teammates, anyone will tell you that.”
“In MLS, it was difficult to play against him, but it was more difficult to play with him,” says Kinnear. “It was so mental; he’s not afraid to use any type of advantage, whether it be verbal or physical, to try and gain a leg up on you. For his teammates it was mentally tough for them because he would simply challenge them every day.”
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Ibrahimovic tore into some worse than others. Defender Rolf Feltcher, goalkeeper David Bingham and a few others are frequently mentioned by Ibrahimovic’s former teammates as the subjects of his outbursts, both professional and personal. U.S. national team midfielder Sebastian Lletget has been open about his fractured relationship with Ibrahimovic.
Late in the 2018 season, with the Galaxy on the verge of missing the playoffs and the locker room growing more and more tense by the day, Kinnear pulled Zlatan aside.
“I brought Zlatan into my office,” Kinnear says. “I told him: ‘Your relationship with the players here, it reminds me of my relationship with my father.’ I was terrified of my father but I loved him and I would do anything for him. But when he walked in the room, I was always a little bit nervous, because he was an intimidating person.
“I told Ibra that, with him, it was a bit of the same thing. I told him: ‘These players love you more than you know. And they will do anything for you, but they’re terrified of you and you intimidate them to the point where they’re very uncomfortable around you.’ I said, ‘If you show a little bit more compassion, and a little bit of appreciation — maybe even go out of your way to do that — you’ll get a lot in return.’”
Ibrahimovic, as his former teammates tell it, did have a kind and generous side. Twice during his stay in Los Angeles he welcomed the entire team to his Beverly Hills estate for a barbecue, giving them a taste of a lavish lifestyle that was out of reach for any of them.
“We went on a fishing trip,” Kitchen remembers. “We chartered a boat on an off day, just went out and went fishing. That was just kind of cool to see just a big guy like that spend time with us, enjoy the day, have a few drinks and just be one of the guys. That was definitely a good memory. He’s a good fisherman, honestly — we caught a bunch of bonito fish.”
“But Zlatan,” Kitchen adds, “he always wants more. So he ended up going down to Mexico (with teammates Matt Lampson and Servando Carrasco), along the west coast, to go marlin fishing.”
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“If they have $100 million, they can see me naked one time”
We’re all asked to do things outside of our job description every now and again. But Brendan Hannan — the Galaxy’s former head of PR — never thought he’d find himself presenting a row of thongs to Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Yet there he was in the summer of 2018 when ESPN The Magazine tapped Zlatan to be part of its Body Issue, their annual release where athletes from around the world pose in the buff.
“He was like, ‘No, I will not shoot naked,” says Hannan. “For someone to see me naked, that will cost $100 million. If they have $100 million, they can see me naked once.’ Mind you, he’s saying this to me, probably, while he’s standing around naked in the locker room.”
But it was the cover. And covers mean more to everyone, including Zlatan. Weeks earlier, GQ Magazine had wanted him for an eight-page spread. Zlatan wouldn’t do it without being guaranteed the cover. GQ explained to Hannan that after the shoots, they usually take a look at the end product to determine whether it’s worthy of a cover story or not. There would be no promise. To Zlatan, things were simpler: “Covers only.”
“Any team in MLS would take literally a quarter-page in GQ,” Hannan says. “But this is Zlatan. So now I have to call back Gentleman’s Quarterly and tell them that no, this Major League Soccer team will not do an eight-page spread in their magazine unless he gets the cover.”
Back on set of the ESPN shoot, Hannan held out thongs for Zlatan’s approval. It was a tough sell at first.
“He turns to me and says, ‘Brendan, you know this thing goes up your ass, right?’ and I’m like, ‘Listen, I’ve not worn one, but yes, that is my understanding.’”
The first two Zlatan tried on don’t fit. The third fit comfortably, always a relative term in these cases. The photographer, though, was worried that he wouldn’t be able to photoshop the thong out of the image — Zlatan has a large, geometric tattoo on his rear end, something they wanted to display prominently. They asked Hannan to approach Zlatan with an intimate ask.
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“So I ask him: ‘Zlatan, they want you to adjust your thong down a little bit,’” Hannan says. “He just looks at me, deadpan, and says, ‘Brendan, do you want to see more of my ass?’ And I was just like, ‘Yeah, I guess that’s the goal here.’”
Zlatan obliged, and the photos came out spectacularly.
“Zlatan was better than Jean-Claude Van Damme”
Comedian and co-head writer of “The Late Late Show with James Corden” Ian Karmel wasn’t interested in seeing more of Zlatan as much as he was in learning more about him. Karmel is an NBA devotee. But he works alongside a crew of Brits who grew up adoring soccer the way he grew up adoring his hometown Portland Trailblazers. And when it was announced Zlatan would come on the show in May 2018, Zlatan’s fanboys emerged from the woodwork.
“The way they talked about Zlatan was like… different,” Karmel says. “It was like a combination of Dennis Rodman and Allen Iverson. It was just like, ‘You’re not going to believe this guy.’”
The first sketch idea was to present Zlatan to Corden a la the 1980s Tom Hanks film “Big.” Zlatan is the fortune-teller at the carnival. The five-minute sketch with over 10 million views on YouTube took about 45 minutes to shoot. Karmel said it took about three to four run-throughs for Zlatan to get comfortable and get the cadence down — a far smaller time investment than athletes usually require.
“He still killed it,” Karmel says. “He did as good as some actors do. We did a bit with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Zlatan was better than Jean-Claude Van Damme.
“The other great thing about Zlatan was he came in with this established comedic archetype of himself. It’s something anyone can latch onto. You may not know that he could score a goal from midfield, but you understand the guy who refers to himself in the third-person and who says the World Cup is worse off with not having him in it.”
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Zlatan had such a blast that he came back the last week of October 2018. Karmel and the writers came up with another bit: “Zlatan Ibrahimovic can really do anything.” They sent Zlatan’s inner circle 41 questions in total, seeing which he would do for a late-night TV audience. Some were outrageous, some were free-throws. Who would’ve thought, though, that Zlatan would end up grinning ear-to-ear while flossing on national TV?
“I think he’s always in character,” Karmel says. “He’s very nice. I don’t know if he’s humble, but he’s very nice in person. He’s not a dick.”
Zlatan vs. MLS
Ever since David Beckham arrived as MLS’s first designated player, it has seemed as though there’s a tacit agreement with its biggest, often-aging European stars: the league pays you an exorbitant salary — perhaps above and beyond your on-field worth at this stage of your career — and you smile wide for the league’s marketing machine.
But if MLS thought it could tame the pricklier parts of Zlatan’s persona, that he would play nice and merely hype El Trafico on the Late, Late Show… well, that was a miscalculation. Perhaps no superstar in league history more often put it on blast whenever a microphone was pointed in his direction. Ibrahimovic called out MLS’s playoff setup, the synthetic turf fields of the Pacific Northwest, America’s pay-to-play youth soccer system, the referees, on and on. And while this surely raised much consternation at league headquarters in Manhattan, not everybody around MLS minded.
“I remember him saying certain things that I agreed with and others that I didn’t,” Feilhaber says. “The thing I disagreed with was him crushing the MLS playoff system. But there were other things that he criticized that were true and I was just glad that somebody was finally saying something, somebody who has no reason to hide.”
Ibrahimovic’s frustrations came to a head during a road trip to San Jose midway through his first season, which involved a short flight up the Californian coast. But he was traveling with an MLS team, not Manchester United. So this wasn’t a cushy chartered flight. It was Southwest Airlines. Just picture it: this 6-foot-5 literal and figurative giant of his profession staring grumpily at his phone at some random LAX gate surrounded by the unwashed masses.
“I mean it was just the flight that was the easiest to get, it gets you there,” Kinnear says. “And obviously they went out of their way to get him a one or a two to get him on the plane the quickest — but hey, at the end of the day, he’s still standing in line with everybody else. It’s Southwest. I was cracking up because you know it’s driving him crazy.”
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Even in the scaled-down world of MLS travel, Southwest Airlines is the league’s great leveler, affording every player — big and small, rich and poor — the same 26 inches of legroom.
“But those are the things that he kind of looks at and is like — from where he came from, in Europe, and pro soccer to here there are just some massive gaps,” Kinnear says. “And he was never afraid to voice that. Because I do think he comes from a place of knowledge, and obviously if commissioner Garber is saying ‘MLS wants to be a top league’ in such-and-such a year, or a ‘league of choice,’ these are things that people need to hear, these comparisons of how things are over here and where they came from.”
“Enough with the banana balls!”
Perry Kitchen may have suffered the indignity of being called “Kevin” for a full year and a half, but his teammates are quick to clarify something: Zlatan liked him. Kitchen has a well-earned reputation for hard-nosed play, something Ibrahimovic appreciated. What he didn’t appreciate from time to time, according to many Galaxy players, was Kitchen’s service.
Zlatan felt that Kitchen was sometimes incapable of playing a low, driven ball to him from behind the line. He’d play bending balls, according to Ibrahimovic, with too much spin on them. Pontius, Zimmerman and others remember hearing the Swede’s voice cut across the pitch mid-match: “Kevin! Enough with the banana balls!”
Ibrahimovic offered up his complaints in other ways, another player said, like leaving a banana peel in Kitchen’s boot before training one day, yet another example of his tendency to blur the lines between petty cruelty and humor.
Zlatan was definitely joking — we think — after the Galaxy’s match against Sporting Kansas City in 2018. Kitchen, perhaps taking a bit of the forward’s advice, played a picture-perfect, lofted ball directly into his path on a counterattack. Uncharacteristically, Zlatan miffed the chance, smiling to himself afterwards. In the locker room after the match, Pontius remembers, Ibrahimovic offered his analysis.
“The only reason I missed that shot,” he told his teammates, “was because I was shocked that Kevin played me a ball like that.”
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“His teammates aren’t even here to protect him”
Nedum Onuoha had just settled in front of his locker in the away dressing room at Dignity Health Sports Park when an unwelcome guest walked in. It was April of 2019, and Zlatan had just dominated Real Salt Lake, scoring a late winner after throwing an unsuspecting Onuoha to the ground by the neck in the first half, amongst other tussles.
Never one to adhere to the unwritten rules of sport, Ibrahimovic then entered RSL’s safe space to continue the shit-talking.
“Have you calmed down yet, big man?” Onouha remembers Ibrahimovic asking with his first words.
At that point, Onouha had had enough.
“It was one of the most surreal moments I’ve ever had in my career,” he says. “If you have an issue with somebody, that never happens. To see an opposing player in your own dressing room like that — that’s only if it’s someone they’re friends with.”
Perhaps no other player in MLS history has elicited such a wide range of reactions from opponents in every corner of the league.
“Within the first 10 minutes or so, I was already yelling and telling my teammates that their team doesn’t give a fuck about Zlatan,” former D.C. United striker Quincy Amarikwa says of his brush with Ibrahimovic in 2019. “You could tell. You could see it. These guys don’t give a shit about this guy. They fucking hate him. He’s a piece of shit. And his teammates aren’t even here to protect him. I think that caught them all off guard — like, shit, nobody’s ever said that out loud.”
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But Zlatan’s superstardom was impressive to at least some of his MLS opponents. Before RSL trudged to the tunnel in Carson after that loss, Onuoha turned and saw a teammate he declined to identify asking Zlatan for a selfie. On the field.
“This is how bad it was,” Onuoha says. “We’ve lost now. He scored a goal. I’ve had my battle with him. But all that happens and one of my teammates is going to ask him for a picture on the field straight afterwards. I’m thinking, ‘My goodness gracious. What is going on here?’”
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Smashed, and grabbed
Zlatan crafted a bushel of signature memories in MLS — spectacular goals, villainous moments, milestones and the like. None of them, though, hold a candle to his first goal in the league. It’s one that defied logic and belief in so many different ways. His 40-yard volley, just moments after entering the match, will go down as maybe the most memorable moment in the league’s history.
Kinnear remembers it well.
“Even now I’m getting the chills just talking about it because it was so incredible,” he says. “When he shot and scored, I didn’t move. I just put my head down in my hands and I almost started… openly crying? I thought to myself ‘I cannot believe that I have just seen this.’ It wasn’t quite out-of-body but it was just an emotional feeling.”
“Who thinks to shoot from there?” asks Pontius. “A bouncing ball — who sees the keeper out that quickly. And then you factor in that he just got in the day before, and the magnitude of the game? The fact that we’d been losing? All these things… it being the first ‘El Trafico?’ It was just beyond belief. I wouldn’t even try that shot in a training session.”
The following Tuesday, the Galaxy gathered for a tape session. At some point, Kinnear played a clip of Galaxy defender Ashley Cole advancing with the ball, some 40-50 yards from goal. He’d included it in the video package because he thought Cole should have held the ball longer, that he released it too quickly. “What should Ashley have done here,” Kinnear asked the group.
“He should’ve shot,” said Ibrahimovic. Some of the group chuckled. “I’m serious. He should’ve shot. You don’t see it?”
“After the meeting he comes up to me and he says ‘the goalie was off his line the whole game,’” says Kinnear. “I looked at the tape, and he was right. Ibra knew that. The whole game. He knew when he subbed on that (Tyler Miller) would be off his line and he knew if he got a chance he’d shoot. Only Ibra would have scored that goal.”
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Zlatan’s introduction scarred LAFC, initially. And it kickstarted what’s become one of MLS’s most intense rivalries.
“It’s the best rivalry in MLS,” says Zimmerman. “You have so many storylines — you have the drama on the field, you have fans vandalizing the stadium seats and all of these fights outside the stadium that you’re hearing about. So very quickly you learn that this was a pretty serious rivalry on all accounts. It felt like a playoff game every single time we played them. It has not lost any momentum over the years.”
“I think Zlatan probably lived in our brains for the next year and a half after that first game,” says Feilhaber, the former LAFC midfielder.
LAFC head coach Bob Bradley often made his opinion of Zlatan known, according to current and former LAFC players. Bradley, a by-the-book, team-first coach if there ever was one, considered Ibrahimovic the antithesis of a model teammate.
“Bob probably did not like Zlatan,” says Zimmerman. “Based on our tape sessions — he’d say ‘you know this guy is not going to defend, you know he’s just going to complain about his teammates.’ Mainly his narrative was always that ‘that’s not the type of player that we’d want on our team … we could’ve had him but we didn’t want him because we want more of a team, we want to have standards here.’ He never would’ve put up with that personality as a coach, so he obviously ended up hating that personality as an opponent, as well.”
It took Bradley’s LAFC nearly two seasons to beat Zlatan’s Galaxy. The win came when it mattered most: in the postseason, when the two sides matched up in the 2019 Western Conference semifinals. It ended up being Zlatan’s au revoir to MLS.
The game encapsulated all of Zlatan: a goal, an assist, looking flustered and pedantic on the field, and finally, a gesture befitting the sometimes problematic aspects of his personality. One of LAFC’s superfans, an anonymous bald man who paints his entire head and face black and gold for matches, known as “SOCCERHEAD” to his fellow supporters, made a double throat-slash gesture, unknowingly signifying his club had ended Zlatan’s reign in MLS. The superstar striker then grabbed his crotch and blew kisses to the fan as a rebuke.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic aimed an indecent gesture at an LAFC fan following the Galaxy's 5-3 loss to their rivals. https://t.co/GHgbAMUxCI pic.twitter.com/b6dKA7FDES
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) October 25, 2019
“We took pleasure in beating him in the playoffs,” says Zimmerman. Years later, you can almost feel him smiling through the phone.
“I AM ZLATAN! I REMEMBER EVERYTHING!”
They say that Cozmo, the LA Galaxy’s purple-skinned, yellow-haired mascot, is a U.F.O. — a “Universal Futbol Olympian.” As legend has it, he arrived in Carson, California, in 2003 after crash-landing his spaceship and was offered a 1,000-year contract on the spot.
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In 2018, after 15 years on the job, Cozmo’s path intersected with another supernatural creature: Zlatan. Cozmo had already worked alongside the likes of David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Landon Donovan and Robbie Keane. But Zlatan and Cozmo formed a special kinship, two out-of-this-world personalities wandering the halls of their earthly home.
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On a good day, Ibra would greet everyone in his path. He’d spot Cozmo, pulling him aside for a chat. “Are you going to do something funny today?” the purple one remembers him asking from time to time.
“There were other matches where, as soon as he turned the corner, you’d know ‘nope, not today.’ His eyes were glued to the floor or they were aimed above everybody. When he had that look, you’d know. Walk right past him.”
At a season ticket holder event in 2019, Zlatan’s larger-than-life personality — and his self-awareness — shined through. The Galaxy had rented out a local multiplex, placing a few players in each theater. Fans would visit each one, giving them an opportunity to mingle with their heroes. Cozmo found himself in the same theater as Zlatan, along with several Galaxy staffers. The group made small talk as they waited for fans to arrive.
“At some point I realize that Zlatan is staring at me,” Cozmo says. “And you can feel it. He’s looking at me, and he doesn’t blink. I said, ‘What’s up, Z?’”
“When I go out there,” asked Ibrahimovic, “do you think I should be Zlatan? Or should I be Zlatan.”
“It was literally a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ kind of thing,” says Cozmo. “It caught me off guard. I looked at him and said, ‘I think when you go out there, you should be Zlatan.’ When I say this I have my hand up, like I’m holding some magic crystal or something. Zlatan’s eyes squint and he points at me and he says, ‘I like the way you think.’”
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Moments later, fans filled the space and Zlatan emerged to greet them. Supporters shrieked when they realized the theater they’d chosen contained the megastar. Two young kids — five and seven — approached Zlatan, unable to contain their glee.
“Zlatan! Zlatan! Do you remember us?!” Cozmo remembers them asking.
“Totally in Zlatan character,” says Cozmo, “he says ‘OF COURSE I DO! I AM ZLATAN! I REMEMBER EVERYTHING!’ And the kids are just kind of stunned. Then he sits up and looks over at me and he just says, ‘Cozmo. I cannot do it. I can’t do it’ He gets off the chair, gets down on his knee and says, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know you, what is your name? Nice to meet you.’ He totally pulled a 180. It was hilarious.”
(Top photo: Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports)