By STEVEN HOWARD
Published: Today at 00:59
HE is the highest-paid player in Italian football — earning £1million-a-month.
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Yes, per MONTH. And AC Milan fund almost his entire tax bill.
If they didn’t, he wouldn’t have gone there.
He has a string of Ferraris and hunts boar on his own Swedish island.
He has 11 tattoos including a red dragon on his back, the ace of hearts and clubs (for good luck) and the saying “Only God Can Judge Me” inscribed on his side.
And he once said: “Agents are just for bad players. The big clubs come straight to me.”
Arrogant? You imagine so. Fully conscious of his own worth? Without a doubt. Outspoken? Decidedly.
Welcome then to the world of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the man standing between England and Euro victory in Kiev tomorrow. Defeat for Sweden and they will more or less be going home.
The 6ft 5in striker is known everywhere as Ibra. Or Ibracadabra. The Magician.
In 11 seasons away from his native Malmo, he has won nine titles in Holland, Italy and Spain. Last season at AC Milan, he scored 35 times to break Andriy Shevchenko’s record.
By doing so, he became the first player in Italian football history to finish Serie A top scorer with two different clubs.
He is captain of his country with 31 goals in 77 internationals.
Yet when he published his autobiography last year, it was not a celebration of this glittering career but an excuse for an explosive attack on ex-Barcelona boss Pep Guardiola for, so he claims, wrecking his one season in Spain. As broadsides go, it was up with the best.
He wrote: “It started well but Messi moaned he wanted to play in the middle. So I was sacrificed.
“I felt crap when I was sitting in the locker-room with Guardiola staring at me like I was an annoying distraction, an outsider in the great Barca family.
“He was a wall, a stone wall. I’d walk into a room and he’d ignore me. Then he started his philosopher thing. I was barely listening. Why should I? It was advanced bulls**t about blood, sweat and tears.”
And it gets better. Ibrahimovic went on: “As he was staring at me, I lost it. I thought: ‘This is my enemy, this man scratching his bald head’.
“I yelled, ‘You have no balls. You s**t yourself over Jose Mourinho after what he did to you with Inter Milan in the Champions League. You can go to hell.’
“I was completely mad. I threw a box full of training-gear across the dressing-room at him.
“If I had been Guardiola, I’d have been s**ting myself.”
A bit different from the modern-day footballer tweeting he’s just had Shreddies for breakfast and now he is off to buy a garden hose.
But it wasn’t only Guardiola who got it straight between the eyes.
Even Freddie Ljungberg, probably second only to Ibra as Sweden’s most famous footballing export, received both barrels.
Ljungberg, always a prima donna, almost asked for what was coming when he demanded a special team bus during Euro 2004, one that would take account of his bad back.
Ibrahimovic responded: “He was always talking about how well they were treated at Arsenal. But this was too much. Who the f**k was he to come and play upper-class with us?”
All pre-meditated and ghost-written, perhaps. Yet Ibrahimovic, now 31, can still produce one-liners.
On Mario Balotelli setting off fireworks in his bathroom.
“I, too, like fireworks,” he said. “But I prefer to set them off in the garden. I try not to set fire to my own house.”
And on John Carew, who criticised him for moving club so many times: “What Carew can do with a ball, I can do with a tangerine.”
And on beating an opponent: “First, I went this way and he did too. Then I went that way and he did too. Then I went left again and he went off to buy a hot dog.”
So, no, he’s far from stupid despite a lack of education, a consequence of being raised in a Malmo ghetto as the son of a Bosnian father and Croatian mother.
It was called Rosengard — the Garden of Roses, a beautiful name for an ugly place. His talent, however, would enable him to rise above it.
Much of his life has been moulded by his wife Helena, mother of his young children, 11 years his senior and an immensely bright woman who was marketing boss of the Swedish airline FlyMe.
His career has taken him from Ajax (48 goals in 110 games) to Juventus (£14m, 26 in 92), Juve-Inter (£22m, 66 in 117), Inter-Barca (£60m 22 in 46) and Barca-AC Milan (£20m, 56 in 85).
They say he is more famous in Sweden than their Royal Family.
But some also say he shouldn’t be captain because he’s not Swedish — that he may have a Swedish passport but his blood is Yugoslavian.
And then we come to England and the fact he will not relish being up against two traditional centre-halves in John Terry and Joleon Lescott.
He has scored just three times in 15 games against English clubs and has rarely shown the form that has made him such an acclaimed figure in Italy.
He finally broke the ice when scoring twice for Barca against Arsenal at the Emirates in 2010.
He said before that game: “As always in England, the media are against me. All they talk about is how I don’t score against their sides.
“Just you wait and see. I’ll show you.” And he did.
His country have never needed his magic more than tomorrow.
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