FourFourTwo’s Best 100 Football Players in the World 2016: No.18 – Zlatan Ibrahimovic

“It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” One of the many soundbites attributed to Muhammad Ali, who passed away this year, could easily have been said by Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The striker’s career has been driven by two forces: bragging, and backing it up. This year, the latter has never been more necessary.

It doesn’t matter if you’re being tongue-in-cheek or masking insecurity with bluster: when you say, “I won’t be King of Manchester – I will be God of Manchester,” you tend to invite scrutiny, especially in English football’s microclimate of self-importance. Furthermore, the sceptred isle has never allowed itself to be convinced by Ibrahimovic’s qualities. As soon as he signed for Manchester United, then, it was vital for his image that he delivered on his bombast.

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Huw was on the FourFourTwo staff from 2009 to 2015, ultimately as the magazine's Managing Editor, before becoming a freelancer and moving to Wales. As a writer, editor and tragic statto, he still contributes regularly to FFT in print and online, though as a match-going #WalesAway fan, he left a small chunk of his brain on one of many bus journeys across France in 2016.