Zlatan Ibrahimovic has played for some of the world’s biggest football clubs, but apparently the Swedish legend doesn’t count Manchester United among them as he hit out at their ‘small mentality’.
Ibrahimovic, 40, moved to the Premier League giants from Paris Saint-Germain in the summer of 2016, plundering an impressive 28 goals in his debut campaign with the Red Devils before a knee injury brought a premature end to his second season and an inevitable move to sunnier climes in Los Angeles.
But amid all the giants of club football that Zlatan graced (and that’s exactly how he’d put it) throughout his career – Ajax, Juventus, Inter Milan, Barcelona and so on – his time at Manchester United left him feeling that the club had a small mentality, when he discovered that his paycheck had been docked £1 ($1.30)… for taking a carton of fruit juice from a communal fridge during an away trip.
//www.instagram.com/p/BIlIu9LA1Gg
Writing in his new book ‘Adrenaline’, Ibra said that he was surprised to learn that “one of the richest and most powerful [clubs] in the world” had the gall to ask him to reimburse the costs of said fruit juice.
“One thing surprised me: everyone thinks of United as a top club, one of the richest and most powerful in the world and seen from the outside it looked that way to me,” he wrote. “But once I was there I found a small, closed mentality.”
Zlatan details a few incidents which led him to question if the Red Devils indeed remained a club of the type of magnitude that he expected, but it was the fruit juice episode which clearly appears to have been the most jarring, commanding several passages in the book.
“One day I was in the hotel with the team before a game. I got thirsty so I opened the mini-bar and had a fruit juice,” an apparently irate Zlatan recalled.
“We played and then went home. Some time went by. My pay slip arrives. Normally I don’t look at it. I only do so at the end of the year to see what’s come in and what’s gone out. But that time, I don’t know why, I was curious and realized they’d taken a pound off my monthly wage.