Zlatan Ibrahimović has given his first major interview in the Bosnian language on the show (Ne)uspjeh prvaka on Arena Sport, where he spoke openly with Slaven Bilić about his childhood in Sweden and the impact of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ibrahimović grew up in Rosengård, Sweden. Although his father and much of his family come from Bosnia, he explained that he did not experience the war directly. According to him, the conflict did not significantly shape his upbringing, but he recalled two moments from that period that have stayed with him.
“In Rosengård, we were all together. To us, everyone was equal: Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, Albanians—it didn’t matter where you came from. We respected each other,” Ibrahimović said. “Then the war started. At that time, we didn’t read newspapers, and I didn’t even have a phone. I had a television, but I didn’t watch the news.”
He recalled sensing that something was wrong because his father was constantly on the phone. “I realized he was speaking to family in Bosnia, trying to help them,” Ibrahimović said. He would often visit his mother, who lived just five minutes away so that he and his siblings could stay close to both parents. One day, when he went to her home, everyone was dressed in black.
“I asked why they were all wearing black, and they told me to go outside and play football. They didn’t want to tell me,” he said. Only later did he learn that his grandmother had died during the war. “They wanted me to behave like a child, to enjoy life and play football. They protected me from the truth.”
Ibrahimović also described another moment when he felt the war’s impact—this time through the arrival of refugees in Sweden and the change in mentality they brought with them.
“My father pushed me to play football. They kept me outside so I wouldn’t feel what was happening,” he explained. “Then refugees arrived in Sweden, and they had a different mindset. ‘I’m Bosniak, you’re Serb’—that’s how they thought. When they came to that ghetto in Rosengård, everything changed.”
“In my head, it was different. For me, it was Yugoslavia,” Ibrahimović said. “All my friends were together, and we didn’t care who was who. But they were very different. We fought with them. They couldn’t accept that everything was so mixed. For me, it was never like that
