Enter, Zlatan: An Epic Hero For Our Absurd Age

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

If we lived in the days of the Viking sagas, Zlatan Ibrahimovic would have had half a library dedicated to him by now. He is the boy who came from nowhere to become a king. The boy who, armed only with his sheer will and talent, became a man capable of destroying everything in his path. Once upon a time, men like Zlatan led fighters across rough seas, took coastal towns by force, wielded axes, drank from tankards and ate wild boar at long, wooden tables.

We don't live in the days of Viking sagas, though. We live in the age of expensively-produced branded content, when men like Zlatan play a sport marketed across the globe as a combination of the battlefield and the circus, when men like Zlatan – and really, there is only one man like Zlatan – are asked by car companies to enshrine their own myth in the minds of the world's captivated fans.

And so on Sunday, as the great Swede announced himself to English football with a towering header at Wembley, I returned to the Volvo adverts that portray Zlatan as what he is: one of the epic heroes of our absurd, entrancing, enthralling, appalling, capitalist age. Two adverts particularly spring to mind. The first is called Prologue; the second is called Epilogue.

Only Zlatan could have two four-minute-plus adverts called Prologue and Epilogue made about him. Only Zlatan could have those adverts look like scenes taken from Batman Begins, with Zlatan in full Christian Bale-in-the-frozen-waters-finding-himself mode. As their names suggest, the two pieces are a beginning and ending of sorts, peppered with lines that only Zlatan could say. "This is not my home", he intones at the beginning of Prologue, "I come from a different place".

He comes, in fact, from the once notorious social housing developments of Rosengård, Malmö. The narration continues: "My mother is from Croatia". A chord change in the music, a suspension: "And my father comes from Bosnia". From a village that would later be ethnically cleansed. A Muslim father who drank, a Catholic mother prone to violent outbursts: "And I grew up in this tiny suburb in Sweden".

In Epilogue, Zlatan is shown on the pitch in his last ever game for Sweden. He salutes the fans, goes into the changing rooms and then to the shower. His hair is long and wet. Once again, he's the Viking warrior. He is the man who, in yet another Volvo advert, recites the Swedish national anthem while stalking an elk through the frozen wilds of the north.

He leaves the stadium, meets his wife and two children. From Paris to Malmö: the Sat Nav will get them there. Through the streets of the French capital, out into the countryside and from there, north, again. Driving the awe-inspiring bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö, the camera swoops over the housing estates Zlatan came from.

The camera pans up to a railway bridge: Rosengard Centrum. The warrior is home. He pins his Sweden shirt to the fence of the local five-a-side court – paid for by him and bearing his name – takes his two to children and leaves. A modern Swedish myth made by an iconic car company – a car company now owned by a Chinese corporation.

These adverts give you a clue as to why the arrival of Ibrahimovic in England is so fitting right now. No person does epic like Zlatan. No league does it quite like the Premier League. Both do it with an enormous helping of absurdity: in the case of Zlatan, knowingly so; in the case of the Premier League, completely earnestly.

That Zlatan is totally in on his own absurdity now seems clear. As a brilliant, revealing interview (convened for the "worldwide event" that was the unveiling of the Swede's fashion brand) with The Guardian's Morwenna Ferrier demonstrated, Zlatan is at heart a private man who says outrageous things for effect and does outrageous things because of his drive and sheer ability.

He is the master of the show but, as a quick-witted, intelligent man, he knows this. From a country defined by its modesty, he has always stood out because of his sheer immodesty. Sweden, in spite of its much-vaunted social democracy, has welcomed many immigrant groups but struggled to integrate them. Zlatan, as ever, is an exception. Despite being the son of immigrants, he has become the most famous Swede in the world.

The Premier League – and the TV companies that have propelled it into the financial stratosphere – seems much less knowing about its operatically gluttonous excess. It has become a vehicle for money laundering and an open hiding place for human-rights abusers. It is defined more and more by outsized personalities and outsized transfer fees. Manchester is now the focal point for this, with the rivalry between Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho described in biblical terms, just as the transfer fees they shell out on single players could feed and house the city's homeless population for the rest of their lives. As the country falls in on itself, its football league provides a heady, dazzling distraction.

Zlatan stands outside this but is also emblematic of it. For one, he hates Guardiola and will be a key player in the psychodrama that is Pep vs. Jose. For another, he is the most alpha of alpha males, a strutting stag in a room full of primping princes. He is the brand's best friend in the brand's favourite league. A great individual in a culture obsessed with the individual, despite the fact that, against all the odds, it was an unheralded collective – Leicester City – that won last time round.

Zlatan is also 35 in October. This is surely his last bout. He is a marquee name but he's not the future of the game, and so there is something about Zlatan to Manchester United that feels just a little bit like Major League Soccer: a legend making one more move before he sets sail into the sun, a signing to please the money men on all sides, rather than to serve the team.

But despite all this – despite the absurdity of the Premier League and the obscene amounts of money thrown around in desperate political times, the feeling of the last days of Rome being played out again before our own eyes and the suspicion that Zlatan cannot, surely, be the player he once was – it feels intoxicating (dangerously so) to have the man of Norse (Volvo) legend walking among us. Besides, he still looks good and given that, at Barcelona, he barely covered more ground in one game than goalkeeper Victor Valdes, it would be stupid to suggest that Zlatan has ever needed a young man's vigour to do damage on the football field. As he told MUTV – almost 50 times – in an interview, he has come here to "win", to be a "god" compared to Eric Cantona's "king".

He recently caught the biggest pike of his life (a fishing "PB"). This is surely a good omen. Odin is pleased. Zlatan is still his favoured son.