Sweden legend, Zlatan Ibrahimovic has announced his retirement from Football.
He made this known in Sunday after AC Milan’s final match of the Serie A season.
“It’s the moment to say goodbye to football, not just to you,” said Ibrahimovic on the San Siro pitch following Milan’s 3-1 win over Verona.
Ibrahimovi has earned a reputation as an outstanding player thanks to his dazzling acrobatics on the pitch, potent long-range shoots and mastery of the ball. He has won 34 trophies throughout the course of his career, making him one of the most successful active players in the world.
He has over 570 career goals, including over 500 for his club, and he has scored at least once per decade for the past four decades.
Ibrahimovi joined with Ajax two years after starting his career with Malmö FF, where he established himself as one of the continent’s most promising forwards. He left two years later to go with Juventus and then joined Inter Milan in 2006, where he won three straight Serie A championships.
He relocated to Barcelona in one of the most costly transfers ever in the summer of 2009. After just one season, he joined Milan, a rival of Inter, and then relocated back to Italy. In his first season with them, he captured the Serie A championship.
Ibrahimovic joined Paris Saint-Germain in 2012, helped them win their first Ligue 1 championship in 19 years, and quickly became a key player in their hegemony over French football.
Over the course of his four years in France, he led PSG to four straight Ligue 1 championships and established himself as the club’s all-time leading goalscorer. He signed for Manchester United for nothing in 2016 and promptly won the Europa League that year. Ibrahimovic signed with LA Galaxy in 2018, but he returned to Milan two years later, earning his fifth Serie A championship the following year.
Over the course of his 20-year international career, Ibrahimovic is one of only eleven players to make 100 or more appearances for the Swedish national team. He has scored 62 goals, making him the country’s all-time leader. He competed for Sweden in the UEFA European Championships in 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 and the FIFA World Cups in 2002 and 2006.
Twelve times he has been named Sweden’s best footballer and he won the title 10 years in a row between 2007 and 2016.
Ibrahimovi has been included in the UEFA Team of the Year on four separate occasions (2007, 2009, 2013, and 2014) and the FIFA FIFPro World XI in 2013. In 2013, his best year, he placed fourth in the FIFA Ballon d’Or voting.
In 2015, he was chosen by UEFA as one of the top players who have not won the UEFA Champions League, and in 2019, he was named by FourFourTwo as the third-greatest player to never win the championship.
Off the pitch, Ibrahimovi is renowned for his aggressive demeanour, blunt remarks, and use of the third person to refer to himself.
