Zlatan Ibrahimovic has never been shy about revealing some, even difficult, details from his career and life. Hence, it is not surprising that he wrote several autobiographies.
Ibrahimovic‘s parents, Sefik and Jurka, emigrated from Yugoslavia to Sweden, and they had Zlatan in 1981.
They came to Yugoslavia with Zlatan for a while, and after that,war broke out in the former country and they divorced.
A few years ago, he spoke for the Italian “Corriere dello Sport” about Yugoslavia and what his father Sefik was doing during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
“Yugoslavia is among my first memories as a child. They took me there as a child in the car or by train. Communism ruled there, it was another world,” Zlatan was honest.
Then he referred to the shocking death of Sefik’s sister.
“During the war, every day there was news of the death of someone we knew, my father suffered a lot because of it. He helped refugees a lot, and he tried to protect me. He always did that. When his sister died in Sweden, he didn’t let me go to the morgue.”
Ibrahimovic speaks the languages of the former Yugoslavia very well, and he often visited Belgrade. Today, he has a much better relationship with his mother Jurka than with his father Sefik, and at the beginning, he didn’t even want to have the family name, according to N1.
He got into a conflict with his father while he was at Ajax, so he played with his first name on the shirt. Reconciliation followed before moving to Juventus.
“I am closer to my mother. It’s the same with my father as always, I’m not as close to him as I am to my mother because we’re both big egoists. I am the same as him and when he fights with me he doesn’t realize that he is fighting with himself because we are identical in behavior. He made me who I am today.”
Then he spoke of his mother.
“My mother was strict, she beat me more than my father. He never did that. With him, it was enough for him just to tell you something and to look at you to understand everything.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
