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Everybody knows the frequent criticisms of modern top-level football. The players earn too much and learn too little. There’s no loyalty. Aviator shades are stupid. Arrogance is unbecoming. The game is losing touch with the people that allow it to exist, while the stars are losing touch with reality itself. The same teams win everything all the time. Those are all valid, if exaggerated, gripes with what used to be known as the beautiful game. The players who best embody those complaints - the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, for want of a less obvious example - are despised, and usually rightly so.

And yet, it’s a thin line between love and hate. Def Leppard even made a song about where they meet. All it takes to turn a swaggering, preening, classless egomaniac into a widely accepted cult love affair is a few outlandish stories, a couple of unexpected non-footballing talents and the unswerving ability to win absolutely everything regardless of changes in circumstance. How does eight consecutive league titles in three different countries with five different clubs grab you?

Give or take the odd Calciopoli-revoked Scudetto, that is the incredible record boasted by one of football’s most arrogant, brilliant, over-rated, under-rated icons: Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

A few years ago, at the height of his powers with Internazionale, Ibra could do things with and to a football that few have been capable of - at least with such regularity - before or since. Some of the goals he scored with the Nerazzurri were almost superhuman, demonstrating extreme nonchalance, enormous creativity and the kind of deftness of touch that shouldn’t be available to a man who basically has to wear customised clown shoes. When he’s on, Ibrahimovic is one of the finest footballers anywhere in the world, and yet he is curiously under-appreciated and utterly fawned over in the same breath.

A large part of that paradox presumably comes down to the fact that Ibra is a bit nuts. Famously fond of giving his team-mates a friendly kick up the arse in training, the Swedish icon hits the headlines as often for his verbal poison darts as for his genius on the field. Makes a change from the sterilised hospital stench of the Premier League, at least.

Vitals: Zlatan Ibrahimovic

Clubs: Malmo, Ajax, Juventus, Internazionale, Barcelona, AC Milan
Career League Goals: 328
International Caps: 67
Consecutive League Titles: Eight (Not Out)

Ibrahimovic’s career began in his hometown, Malmo, where a respectable goalscoring record and his inimitable playing style attracted the attention of Dutch giants Ajax, among other suitors around Europe. It was in Amsterdam that Ibra came of age. By now a Sweden international, he was also a Godenzonen regular by the time Ajax returned to the Eredivisie summit in their double-winning 2001/02 season. His years in the Netherlands also saw him make his debuts in the Champions League, the World Cup in 2002 and the European Championships in 2004. Typically, his time at Ajax ended in controversy.

When his current club were drawn against Tottenham Hotspur in last season’s Champions League, the media were able to reopen the case surrounding Ibrahimovic’s Ajax departure. Spurs midfielder Rafael van der Vaart told the press that his secondary goal for the tie - after winning, of course - was to “play the ball through Zlatan’s legs. That would be a very nice bonus.”

The animosity dates back to an international clash between Sweden and the Netherlands in 2004, in which the Dutchman believed his Ajax colleague had deliberately injured him. Soon after that, Ibra was in Turin and starring in the black and white stripes of Juventus after a big money move. He never enjoyed universal popularity with Juve fans, but when the Calciopoli scandal wiped two of their Italian league titles from the record books and sent them into Serie B, Ibrahimovic followed the legendary Alessandro del Piero in pledging his loyalty to the club. Wait, what am I saying? He agitated aggressively for a move and ended up at Internazionale. It’s the Zlatan way.

There, he did some of his very best work. He made up for his lost championships by helping the Nerazzurri to bag Scudetti in 2006/07, 2007/08 and 2008/09, scoring goals along the way that were not only crucial but utterly brilliant. In my opinion his performances in an Inter shirt propelled him into the top handful of players in the world, albeit one destined to suffer both from his own languid style and his country of origin. He departed Milan in characteristically bizarre circumstances, acting as the strangely weighty ballast as Samuel Eto’o and a large sum of Catalan cash left Barcelona for San Siro. He’s even had his say on Eto’o's move to Anzhi Makhachkala.

Despite flashes of Ibra genius in Spain, he always seemed a little out of place in the Barcelona side, though it’s difficult to put one’s finger on why. In terms of quality he was certainly a match for Pep Guardiola’s amazingly talented outfit, and he’s not the kind of bulldozer that would have stuck out like a sore thumb in that team. As we now know, Guardiola had designs on a striker-less system that would inevitably have failed to bring out the Swede’s best.

A war of words with his former coach and a superb Serie A season later, Ibrahimovic is now embarking upon his second campaign with Inter’s rivals, AC Milan. In his season on loan from Barcelona, Ibra’s 14 goals in 28 Serie A appearances helped guide the Rossoneri to their first Scudetto since 2003/04. He secured a permanent move in June, and now spearheads an attacking offering that also includes Antonio Cassano, Alexandre Pato, Pippo Inzaghi and Robinho. It’s an incredible selection, and one in which Ibrahimovic suddenly seems right at home, when he’s not booting his team-mates around the training pitch.

Like him or loathe him, Zlatan Ibrahimovic adds a huge amount of value to the modern game. He scores brilliant goals, possesses all the skill in the world and even furnishes the media with brash and bizarre quotes about all and sundry within the game. And quite frankly, any man who’s managed to get on the wrong side of Martin O’Neill despite them practically not knowing one another starts from a positive position in my affections. He might not be a genius, but he’s close. And however you look at it he’s one of those characters who makes top-level football more interesting in an increasingly anodyne age.

Tags: AC Milan, Ajax, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Malmo, Sweden, Zlatan Ibrahimovic