Leipzig, deep in what used to be East Germany, late on Friday evening, and the talk was turning to eulogy. The speakers were all sober sorts, not given to hype or hysteria, and accustomed to handling the frenetic expectation that events such as the draw for a football World Cup can generate. On one subject, though, they all reached for superlatives.

Lars Lagerback, the head coach of Sweden, broke off from assessing his country’s immediate challenge — Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago and England as Group B opponents — to declare his team had possibly the best forward partnership of any country. One of that pair, he continued, “must be among the best centre-forwards in the world”.

The Trinidad manager, Dutchman Leo Beenhakker, was not so much strolling but sprinting down memory lane, boasting: “I was the one who picked him up to bring him abroad.”

A little later, over a glass of red wine, Sven-Göran Eriksson rolled out a red carpet: “If Zlatan Ibrahimovic goes on like he is at the moment, he will be the best in the world.”

World Cup 2006 has identified its central figure six months early. He is the giant Ibrahimovic, 24 years old, 6ft 4in, strong as an ox and with feet like Fred Astaire. Sweden might soar with him; Eriksson’s England might suffer because of him.

And Beenhakker will keep telling everybody that it was he who found Zlatan, the teenager from the ghetto with a tendency to impolitic behaviour but with gifts so out of the ordinary that his national coach sometimes struggles to recognise him as one of his own. “He can do things we have never seen Swedish players do before,” added Lagerback.

Actually, Ibrahimovic can do things that most football cultures sit up and take notice of. This season an Italian journalist came up with a nice phrase to describe the player’s recent work for Juventus: he was “half ballerina, half gangster”.

It paints a fine picture of an athlete whose subtle touch co-exists with a physical authority that can bully the biggest, strongest opponent. The phrase also captures some of Ibrahimovic’s edge. He can be provocative and confrontational, and he used to be a bit wild.

REWIND three weeks, to an autumn Thursday morning in northwest Italy. Juventus, runaway leaders in Serie A, are training at their temporary practice headquarters near the centre of Turin, next door to a prison.

Zlatan’s name is being shouted sporadically over the high wall that separates millionaires from miscreants. “Fab-i-o, Fab-i-o Capello,” the prisoners chant in honour of the Juventus head coach, and then “Ibra-ca-da-bra!”, turning Zlatan’s surname into a magician’s command. The serenade from the prison, by the way, is a regular enough ritual. Eventually somebody from the Juve staff hoiks a ball over the wall. The inmates cheer and start to play football among themselves.

Twenty minutes later, showered, dressed in leather jacket, long, baggy trousers, with his dark-brown mane trailing out from beneath a baseball cap, Ibrahimovic emerges, towering. Within the first minute of the interview, he swears; not a harsh expletive, but one strong enough to express his opinion of a section of the Swedish press, with which, he explains, he has long severed relations.

He has just received an award partly sponsored by a Swedish newspaper, and that is how the subject comes up. He is pleased to have been named his country’s footballer of the year, but cannot quite shake off the recollections of how his youthful celebrity once opened him to uncomfortable scrutiny.

For the next 45 minutes he doesn’t swear again, as he tells the story of gathering fame, confidence and various brief derailments on a career that he believes has found its right track at the summit of Italian football.

His tale starts in Malmo in the early 1980s, and a district called Rosengard. His parents were both from the Balkans, his mother a Croat, his father a Bosnian. They would count as New Swedes, but where they lived they would not be in a minority for that. “I would say there were a lot of immigrants in our area, maybe 90%,” Ibrahimovic recalls, “and in our area everybody knew each other and got along with each other.” He smiles, adding: “Even if it had the baddest reputation in Sweden.”

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