Replies

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a brilliant player, when he makes the effort to be one. However, during all of 2006 he did not play well at all in the national team and certainly not during the World Cup, in which Sweden advanced to the knock-out rounds but lost to home team Germany.

There are other good Swedish football players. Not as good as Zlatan in his best moments, but definitely a lot better than an uninterested Zlatan.

The other two players that defied the curfew have realised that they were wrong and want to play in the national team again, and have been picked for the team too. Zlatan was picked to play but wasn't interested. In my opinion, either a _very_ immature behaviour or he is simply not interested in representing his country. In that case the country will do better without him.

Basically, I don't think Zlatan is uninterested in representing Sweden.

The underlying problem is rather that he seems to have a problem with authorities, with people acting bossy. Guess that phenomena is very common among coaches.

Furthermore, he seems to take things far too personal, just look at his relation to media.

I think you can't give a player like Maradona or Zlatan too much of strict, specific orders. They can do the impossible, they can lift a whole team, but they are not basically model team players (but not necessarily the opposite of team players. Calling Zlatan "selfish", like some people have done in the past, I regard to be unfair).