Search: 'Zlatan Ibrahimovic'

Swedish travel agencies selling up to five times as many package deals to Old Trafford

11 July ~ In spite of both Sweden’s and Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s underperformance at the Euros, the latter’s status and commercial drawing power is just as strong as it was before the tournament. After a decade of pilgrimage to Milan, Barcelona and Paris it is now time for Manchester to be the hottest destination for the relatively well off among Swedish football fans. It’s fair to assume that the weak British pound will also contribute to the stream of travellers.

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by Guillem Balague
Orion, £20
Reviewed by Tim Stannard
From WSC 313 March 2013

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If Pep Guardiola thought a sabbatical year spent hiding in plain sight in New York would offer a much needed respite from football, he was being a touch naive. Over four hairline-damaging years, Guardiola was in the news for what he had won with Barcelona. Since announcing his departure from the Nou Camp in April 2012, headlines have been dominated by what Guardiola might achieve next. The news that Bayern Munich are set to be the next port of call merely quadrupled the chatter, such is the fascination with the future of the former Barça boss.

In Another Way Of Winning, Spanish football journalist Guillem Balague offers a timely indication of whether Guardiola will ever be able to repeat his La Liga success in the Bundesliga. As well as recalling a stereotypical fairytale story of a gangly Nou Camp ballboy becoming the Barcelona boss via an outstanding playing career, the biography attempts to dissect Guardiola’s psyche to discover how a managerial rookie transformed Barça into one of the best club teams in the history of football.

Through testimonials from friends, colleagues, players and Guardiola himself, Balague describes a contradictory character who has both enormous confidence in his coaching abilities and philosophies on football, as well as frequent moments of self doubt and insecurity. Guardiola struggled to cope with conflict and confrontation, a necessary evil of his job, but still had the courage to jettison dressing room heavyweights such as Ronaldinho, Samuel Eto’o, Deco and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for the simple reason that he had no connection or “feeling” 
with the players.

For an emotional personality, handling the expectations of supporters and media demanding constant success, keeping the team’s tactics fresh, the endless provocation from José Mourinho and the illnesses suffered by Éric Abidal and Tito Vilanova took too much of a toll. Guardiola struggled to separate his personal life from the job, a feat that one of his mentors in the game, Alex Ferguson (who writes the introduction), has been able to achieve. The physical transformation of the former Barça boss between his first and last day at his job is startling.

While the question of why Guardiola left the best club in the world was an easy one to answer for Balague, the poser of whether his success can be repeated elsewhere is a tougher one to tackle. The answer is positive. Guardiola did have outstanding talents at his disposal but his development of Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets, Pedro and to some extent the transformation of Lionel Messi into a pure goalscorer are often overlooked. As are the absolute commitment and passion that Guardiola would bring to any role.

Trying to break down the inner workings of someone’s psyche is a tough ask, especially one as complex as Guardiola who himself struggles to live with his conflicting characteristics. Nonetheless, Balague’s attempt is an intriguing and enlightening read on a figure who is still only in his early 40s and whose next challenge is about to begin.

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The making of the greatest team in the world
by Graham Hunter
BackPage Press, £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien 
From WSC 304 June 2012

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Graham Hunter’s new book about Barcelona arrives at a moment when the European and Spanish champions have been looking noticeably shaky for the first time in almost four years, dropping some very cheap points against La Liga’s minnows and going out of the Champions League to Chelsea. The 2005 publication of a similar book about Real Madrid, John Carlin’s White Angels, was immediately followed by the Merengues embarking on one of the worst runs in their history, so the club will not thank Hunter for his timing.

Like Carlin’s book, this one adopts a distinctly obsequious and worshipful attitude to its subject. Barcelona might play the most satisfying football witnessed on European fields since the days of Michel Hidalgo’s France, but they have a habit of reducing those who write about them to mushy superlatives and awestruck religious conversions. There is a fair bit of that here too, the details of which I will spare you.

Still, Hunter is not purporting to offer up a warts-and-all exposé, though plenty of dirt is dished about the decay that enveloped Joan Laporta’s presidency after the 2006 Champions League triumph. He can be partly excused on the grounds that there is so much about Barcelona that can be praised: the breathtaking football, the far-sighted youth policy and, not least, their charismatic yet contemplative outgoing manager.

The summer of 2008, when Guardiola was appointed, is shown to be a pivotal point in Barcelona’s history, not just because of his subsequent extraordinary feats, but also because the club came very close to giving the job to José Mourinho, who was then, as he remains now, the club’s sourest foe. When interviewed by board members Txiki Begiristain and Marc Ingla, Mourinho gave a “dazzling” presentation, but blew it by scoffing at the idea he would have to water down his behaviour at Barcelona. “I just don’t like him,” Ingla said to Begiristain afterwards.

So Guardiola it was. A scarcely credible run of nine major trophies out of a possible 12 ensued. Hunter centres the book on this “man of vision”, who sits up all night watch- ing football videos, never drinks, cries after important wins and lost his remaining hair rapidly after taking the manager’s job, yet shows utter ruthlessness when panning players who are not up to it (such as the hapless Aliaksandr Hleb, Dmytro Chygrynskyi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who, for all his flicks and tricks, proved horribly ill-suited to Barcelona’s dizzyingly complex system).

This is not a biography of Guardiola, but he dominates the book. The chapters on the star players are much shorter and relatively unrevealing. Hunter based those chapters on face-to-face interviews, which sounds great in theory, but modern footballers give little away at the best of times. So you are left with a flawed but fascinating study of a team moulded very much in its manager’s image – a team that, its recent stumbles notwithstanding, has reshaped the technical limits of modern football in a way that scarcely seemed possible beforehand.

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Zlatan Ibrahimovic spares no one in his hugely popular, highly readable and uncompromising autobiography, writes Marcus Christenson

Zlatan Ibrahimovic, it turns out, tells a story the way he plays football: he pulls no punches. The player, who has kung-fu kicked his Milan team-mates Rodney Strasser and Antonio Cassano, punched Jonathan Zebina and reportedly kicked Mark van Bommel on the shins several times during a half-time interval, published his autobiography in Sweden at the end of last year. It did not disappoint.

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Derek Brookman discusses the possibility that Ajax’s recent mediocrity may not just be a passing phase

When Martin Jol’s Ajax embarked on a magnificent late-season run in the spring, winning their last 13 league matches in a row while scoring 47 times in the process, it seemed like – for the club’s supporters at least – the natural order was being restored.

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