Am I The Only One Who Rates Him?

etc.

12 million? maybe put a decimal point in there and it could be a decent deal

 

don't have a problem with him as a player my problem is the fee plus wages could be spent on better players

 

He doesnt do his job... Score goals..

 

Here's his record for last season and it doesn't look very good to me.
http://www.soccerbase.com/players/player.sd?player_id=42482&season_id=140

35 games 8 goals including a hat trick against Leyton Orient.

 

i suppose rather than just laughing i should add some substance to the discussion

>arrogant tosser
>needs too many opportunities to find the net
>can play a blinder or play like he's blind - shola mk.2
>£12 mil is an extortionate fee for him, sure he's "premiership proven", but all he's proven is that he's nowt special.

would rather take the chance on a foreign import for half the price who could turn out to be better.

 

seems to be a 1 in 4 striker looking at those stats, Id take him(for 5million).

 

These were the stats I was looking for, seen them quoted alongside some on SSN when Arsenal tied up Gervinho, Bendner's record compared with all the other forwards at the club for goals & assists etc is poor, wouldn't pay more than 7m for a player I used to think was alright

 

I never understood why Wenger ever played him as a right winger. Why would you do that, infact everything about Benter confuses me to be honest

 

Sorry but ibrahimovic is amazing just because h doesnt run at defenders full pelt and has had a few bad cl games against british teams doesnt mean hes overrated at all. His goalscoring record speaks for himself and his techique is fantastic i dont think there is a player on this planet who has better technique and close control than him he is also a powerful player and great in the air not particually pacey though ill give u that but pace isnt his game. Hes a rich mans berbatov except better. I dont like people saying hes overrated cos he had 1 bad game against man u in champs league and thats all they have seen of him.

As for bedtner i think he would be quality at toon but we have zero chance of getting him when champs league teams r after him

 

Like i said earlier he is probably the most valuable player at the moment, not in money terms but to the team, eight consecutive league titles? 9 in the last decade.

 

agreed the title stat is crazy. great player i get annoyed when hes called ovverated just because he doesnt run past players using pace and smash a shot at goal! i rember seeing him score a goal from ajax where he walked past 8 players and the goal keeper and tapped it in, thats how you dribble! beating basically the whole team not going fast than about 5mph lol.

 

9 titles with 5 different teams as well (technically 2 were revoked in the Italy match fixing scandal though)


herre's a vid that shows just how **** he is:
[video=youtube;02hTp9o4v_k]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02hTp9o4v_k[/video]
(the tune's Rob D - Clubbed to death, incase anyone was wondering)



and here's a good article about why he divides peoples opinions so much.
c+p for the lazy:

The Winningest Loser
Swedish soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimović confounds the sports world's most-cherished clichés.​

It's hard to know whom Zlatan Ibrahimović tortures more, his opponents or his fans. For his on-field adversaries, the big Swedish striker is the most consistently, and maddeningly, triumphant player in soccer. Ibrahimović wins soccer leagues the way FDR won presidential elections. Since transferring to Ajax from his boyhood club, Malmö FF, in 2001, he's picked up nine league championships in 10 years. (Two of them, won with Juventus in 2005 and 2006, were technically revoked by the verdict in the calciopoli case.) He has, ridiculously, achieved this feat while jumping to five different teams, in three countries. When his A.C. Milan squad clinched the scudetto last month, it was the Italian club's first title since 2004. It was Ibrahimović's eighth in a row.
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And yet despite his status as either the game's most dominant figure or its most improbably potent good luck charm, Ibrahimović is widely perceived, even by his own supporters, as a moody, eccentric player. The accepted narrative of his career depicts him as a locker- room prima donna who wilts under pressure and whose success is a kind of monstrous joke. Pained Ibraphiles can look back on a long catalog of slights. There's the general mockery: of his appearance (tall, vulpine, shaggy), scoring record against English clubs (dismal), stretch Hummer (gold), jeans (factory distressed), tendency to vanish in Champions League games (real), and ego (prodigious). There's the embarrassment brought on by his famous sense of modesty. "Can anything stop you from becoming the best player in the world?" he was asked in 2001, to which he responded: "Injury." There was the time Martin O'Neill called him "the most overrated player on the planet." There was the day the great center back Alessandro Nesta, now his teammate at Milan, declared that he was "a ****."

And there are the controversies. By soccer standards—restaurant DJs are hospitalized and children mowed down seemingly every day, and that's only Steven Gerrard—Ibrahimović's scandals aren't especially outrageous. For Ibrahimović, scandal is a volume business. He specializes in a particular type of micro-flare-up, the blog-post-sized crypto-drama that draws attention simply by being so strange. Last month, he celebrated Milan's scudetto win by kicking his squadmate Antonio Cassano in the face. During his stint with F.C. Barcelona in 2009-10, he made bizarre homophobic comments to a reporter who questioned his sexuality after an equally bizarre picture of him standing extremely close to defender Gerard Piqué started circulating on the Internet. Ibrahimović scored 16 goals in 29 league games with Barcelona. But supporters debated whether his blockbuster transfer was merely a bad mistake for the club or the worst of all-time.

Thus the peculiar agony of the Ibrahimović fan: Your club gets to win a championship, magically, but you're simultaneously forced to endure an endless series of embarrassments. It's enough to make supporters wonder whether winning a championship is worth it. Perhaps the best measure of Ibrahimović's legacy is that he's not particularly well-liked by fans at any of the clubs he's left, despite the fact that he brought nearly all of them trophies. Ibrahimović might be the only athlete who could win eight titles in a row and not have that seem like the most salient fact about him.

When he's paying attention, Ibrahimović is a player of vast talents, amazingly graceful for his size, with a body that's able to arrange itself into any combination of angles. In four of the last five seasons, he's led his team in goals scored; the exception was the year at Barcelona, when he finished second behind Lionel Messi. "He can change the breathing patterns of 80,000 people," a friend in Milan once told me. He can score with power, with slippery technique, with devastating timing. In one delirious goal, netted for Ajax against NAC Breda in 2004, he starts with the ball 10 yards outside the penalty area. Then he embarks on a low-tempo invalidation of the entire NAC defense, a leisurely dribble through the area during which he foils six separate challenges, then the goalkeeper, with a string of erratic feints. By the time he finally shoots, four defenders have fallen down. The rest have forgotten what year it is.

And this is where that gold stretch Hummer raises its deepest philosophical conundrum. One of the characteristic anxieties of sports culture is the tension between virtue and entertainment—a putatively old-fashioned ideal of discipline, moral instruction, and self-sacrifice against a narrative craving for theater, color, and flamboyant self-promotion. This division predates the 1960s—Achilles was the first contract holdout, just as he was the first draft dodger—but Ali's knockout of Liston in '64 and England's World Cup victory in '66 provide the guideposts for the age of modern media. From the mid-60s on, on both sides of the Atlantic, the games we watched would be populated by charismatic bigmouths and noble warriors of duty, with nobody in between.

The racial component to that division is obvious, Joe Namath aside, and it's relevant that Ibrahimović—a non-blond Swede whose parents emigrated from Eastern Europe—has at times been targeted for his racial ambiguity. (Fans in Serie A have taunted him as a "dirty gypsy," a hugely charged insult in Italy.) But the real trouble for Ibra is that his particular style of arrogance leaves him nowhere on the sliding scale that determines an athlete's cultural identity. You know how this works. The media, which creates the appetite for big personalities, also punishes the players that feed it. The modest-seeming guys, the Kevin Durants and Leo Messis—the ones who make commentators say, "as great as he is as an athlete, he's an even better person"—are held up as paragons. The bigmouths and the LeBrons, who represent mass-media values far better than the faux-conservative rectitude that's baked into most sports pundits, are the ones who drive ratings.

The normal redemption narrative for a player who's been villainized for his ego runs through "passion" and hard work. Cristiano Ronaldo can be derided as a preening gigolo, but because every carefully gelled hair on his head seems to be devoted to soccer, he earns a measure of respect. Winning, commitment, and hard work are all supposed to be closely linked. But here's the thing about Ibrahimović: He wins and wins without seeming to give a ****. Ibra checks out of games for long stretches, is easily distracted, doesn't try all that hard with the media, and, when he happens to feel like it, plays unforgettably awesome soccer. The one thing the sports culture can't stand is a player who doesn't acknowledge the sports culture—someone who gets Bill Russell's results with Wilt Chamberlain's lifestyle and work ethic. Ibrahimović wins championships without exhibiting any of the virtues that we've collectively decided to believe championships exist to corroborate. And so he's punished twice—first for not being stereotypically heroic, and second for not being stereotypically villainous.

The irony is that Ibrahimović's indifference to all this macronarrative folly is one of the qualities that make him so exciting to watch. It's his audacity, finally, that makes his fans love him, no matter how absurd he becomes. Once a game or so, Ibrahimović tries something that no other player would even think of. He scores goals in positions from which other strikers would never imagine a shot. See, for instance, his famous strike for Juventus, hit from 35 yards out, while tightly marked, with his wrong foot. Or his off-balance cross-goal scissor kick for Milan against Fiorentina last season. (After that amazing moment, he managed to injure himself during the goal celebration—a characteristically Ibrahimovićian touch.) These may be the moves of a player so anarchically self-absorbed that he believes his own fiddling around on a soccer pitch takes precedence over the rules that govern a multibillion-dollar cultural behemoth. They're also the moves of a player who can make 80,000 people hold their breath.

 

Yes but he's one of your favourite sportsmen.

 

because he's funny not because he's good

 

Ok, can't think it what he's funny, but then that is just my opinion.

 

2 reasons

1) watching him mess stuff up on the pitch is brilliant
2) Watching interviews of him just makes me laugh as he thinks so much of himself

 

Fair enough on the 1st one, though u can say that about many players and can't say I've ever seen an interview with him so can't really judge him on that 1.

 

I'd have him to be honest, 99%. I honestly don't hold high hopes for anyone decent coming anymore. Fatty and his clan are starting to worry me

 

3rd - those pink boots he wore...

 

That was just embarrassing.