Zlatan Ibrahimović and the Milan purge he survived without a job title

Zlatan Ibrahimović

Photo: Colleen Sturtevant / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 3, 1981 Västra Skrävlinge församling
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Eredivisie ×2 · Serie A ×3 · La Liga · Ligue 1 ×4 · EFL Cup 2017 · Europa League 2017
Individual awards	MLS Goal of the Year Award · MLS Newcomer of the Year Award · FIFA Puskás Award

When AC Milan’s owners emptied the club’s offices after a fifth-place finish, the chief executive left, and so did the head coach, the sporting director and the technical director. One man stayed. Zlatan Ibrahimović had no job title to lose. He is formally an adviser to RedBird Capital, the fund through which Gerry Cardinale owns Milan, and Cardinale has called him his proxy at the club. For more than twenty years Ibrahimović demanded the ball and the microphone. His influence now runs through a channel nobody outside the building can see, and he answers to one person.

The arrangement suits a career that was always narrated as one man against the room. He was the boy from Rosengård who stole bicycles, the teenager Arsène Wenger failed to bring to Arsenal, the striker who told Pep Guardiola exactly what he thought of him and then put it in a book. He also talks about himself in the third person. That habit is part of the joke, and part of the strategy.

Rosengård and Malmö

His parents both left Yugoslavia for Sweden and met there: Šefik Ibrahimović, a Bosniak from Bijeljina, and Jurka Gravić, a Croat. Their son arrived in Malmö on 3 October 1981 and grew up on the Rosengård estate. The marriage broke up, and he lived mostly with his father. In his autobiography he describes a fridge packed with beer and little else, and a boy who ran across town to his mother’s for dinner.

He played for FBK Balkan, a club founded by Yugoslav immigrants, before Malmö FF took him on. He broke into the first team in 1999, the season Malmö went down, and helped bring them straight back up. Ajax bought him in 2001. Ronald Koeman made him a starter, he won two Eredivisie titles, and he scored twice against Lyon on his Champions League debut.

Four leagues and a missing trophy

Juventus paid €16 million for him in 2004, and Fabio Capello set about making him ruthless in front of goal. The two league titles he won in Turin were later stripped from the club in the Calciopoli scandal. As Juventus went down to Serie B, Ibrahimović left for Inter and won three Serie A titles in a row. Barcelona signed him in 2009. He won La Liga in his only season there, fell out with Guardiola and was loaned to AC Milan, where he won the league again.

Paris Saint-Germain made him the face of their new project in 2012. He won four Ligue 1 titles, and in his final spring in Paris he joked that he would stay only if the Eiffel Tower were replaced by a statue of him. Manchester United offered a reunion with José Mourinho, and with it the EFL Cup and the Europa League in 2017, although a knee ligament injury kept him out of the final in Stockholm. Then came Los Angeles: two goals on his LA Galaxy debut against LAFC, the first from 45 yards, and later a 500th career goal against Toronto, whom he called “my 500th victim”.

For Sweden he scored 62 goals, still the national record. The last of the four he put past England in the first match at the Friends Arena, a bicycle kick from 35 yards with his back to goal, won the 2013 FIFA Puskás Award. He won Guldbollen, Sweden’s player of the year award, a record 12 times.

The hole in the record

For all of that, he never won the Champions League. In his prime the criticism was specific: he went missing on the biggest European nights. Barcelona signed him as reigning European champions and went out in the semi-final to Inter, the club he had just left. When he joined Milan he said he had come to win it. The swagger made him great copy, and it also let him set the terms of his own story. I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović, the autobiography he wrote with David Lagercrantz, tells the childhood and the quarrel with Guardiola in his own unsparing words, and almost every adversary in it comes off worse. Malmö found out what that self-authorship could cost. Weeks after a bronze statue of him was unveiled outside the city’s stadium in 2019, he bought 23.5 percent of Hammarby, a Stockholm rival, and Malmö fans vandalised the statue and set it alight.

The second Milan

He went back to Milan in January 2020, at 38, joining a team that had not won the league in almost a decade. They won it in 2022, with Ibrahimović as the dressing room’s loudest voice and an occasional scorer. In March 2023 he became the oldest player to score in Serie A, at 41, and on 4 June 2023 he announced his retirement at San Siro. Six months later RedBird hired him as an operating partner and senior adviser to the club.

In that job the line between influence and accountability has stayed blurred. After the clear-out of May 2026, Italian reporting put him and Cardinale at the head of the search that ended with Rúben Amorim being appointed head coach in June, and placed Ibrahimović directly below the owner on the sporting side. When results go wrong, nobody is quite sure what to blame him for. That is the advantage of a post with no name on the door.

The studio and the screen

Fox Sports hired him as a studio analyst for the 2026 World Cup, his first television job, alongside Rebecca Lowe, Alexi Lalas and Thierry Henry. The reviews were warm. When Spain beat Argentina in the final on 19 July, he signed off on air: “It was the first and last time for me.”

The screen had come to him before. The documentary Becoming Zlatan followed his years at Malmö and Ajax, the 2021 film Jag är Zlatan cast a child actor as the boy from Rosengård, and Guillaume Canet put him in Roman armour as Caius Antivirus in Astérix et Obélix : L’Empire du Milieu. His partner is Helena Seger, and their two sons, Maximilian and Vincent, both play professionally. Maximilian left Milan for AZ Alkmaar this summer.

Amorim’s first season is the first real test of a sporting structure Ibrahimović helped design. A striker could point to the scoreboard. An adviser can only point to the people he chose.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, Paris Saint-Germain, pep guardiola, AC Milan, Zlatan Ibrahimović, Gerry Cardinale, Rúben Amorim