Do we like Zlatan Ibrahimović?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing hateful in his own words, but a few clumsy jokes and comments on women, plus a close-to-Trump snap, keep him short of a clean bill.
Zlatan grew up in Rosengård, a rough, immigrant-heavy part of Malmö, the son of a Bosnian father and a Croatian mother. He has said himself that he was a bike thief as a kid. Football dragged him out: Malmö FF, then Ajax, Juventus, Milan, Barcelona, PSG, Manchester United and LA Galaxy, with league titles at a long run of clubs.
The ego is the brand, and the 2026 World Cup was the biggest stage for it. FOX hired him as an analyst in March, with no TV experience, and he was one of the loudest voices in the studio. After the final he said it was the first and last time for him, though some reckon that could be a negotiating move. He also skipped Sweden's 5-1 opener against Tunisia for the UFC event at the White House, and Expressen and a Swedish midfielder criticised him for it.
On the harm check, there's no campaign against anyone's rights and no conspiracy rabbit hole in what turned up. There are a few moments, though. In 2013 he told Expressen you can't compare men's and women's football, and the Swedish women's coach Pia Sundhage called it sad for Swedish football. In 2024, on IShowSpeed's stream, he played a 'first one to move is gay' game that Football Italia called homophobic, and Corriere della Sera reported he said he felt pushed into it live.
On politics, his line in 2021 was that athletes like LeBron James should 'do what you're good at', not weigh in on politics. Turning up at Trump's UFC event reads two ways: either a footballer enjoying a big sporting night, or someone cosying up to a president who lots of the page's readers don't back. He didn't say anything harmful there that I could find, so it's the optics, and where you land is up to you.
The Lukaku row in the 2021 Coppa Italia is the racism question. A pitchside mic reportedly picked up Zlatan saying something about voodoo to Romelu Lukaku, and the BBC linked it to earlier comments about Lukaku. Zlatan denied racist intent, writing that in his world there is no place for racism. In 2018 he also said Swedish media attack him because of 'undercover racism', which is a claim about how he's treated, not anyone else.
The good stuff is real, if not huge. In 2015 he was the face of the World Food Programme's '805 million names' campaign, revealing 50 names of hungry people on his torso after scoring for PSG, and he copped a yellow card for the shirt-off. He didn't organise it, but he used a goal and a yellow card to point people at hunger. In 2017 he also won a defamation case against a former athletics coach who suggested he'd doped.