Zlatan Ibrahimović: a monument and a mirror of his time

Abstract

ABSTRACT In October 2019, Zlatan Ibrahimović, the most successful and famous Swedish football player ever, was honoured with a monument by the Swedish Football Association and the city of Malmö. Born in Malmö in 1981, Ibrahimović grew up in a migrant area of the city (Rosengård). Growing up, he played football in local teams, and at the age of 19 he was sold by Malmö FF to Ajax for the highest transfer fee ever in Sweden. However, when Ibrahimović unexpectedly entered as an investor in rivalling Stockholm-based football club Hammarby in November 2019, he challenged local identities: The place is the team, the team is the family, and betrayal of the place and the team is a betrayal against the family. The monument was soon vandalized and taken down, facing an uncertain future. The aim of this article is to understand the different interpretations, eruptions of emotions, and conflicts that the monument of Zlatan Ibrahimović raised. As a theoretical frame, three disciplinary perspectives will be used: a cultural historical and a historical didactic perspective, with the intention of understanding the motives and signals send and received through public art in the city space area; a second perspective with a focus on the special use of history in sport, where gender and nation form an interpretive framework in this study; and finally, a third ethnological perspective based on ‘scaling’, where a monument as a social phenomenon can change meaning depending on geographical scale from district to city to nation and a global scale.