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His impact
His impact is clear for everyone to see.
PSG won the league title with two games to spare and excelled in the UEFA Champions League. They were beaten only once in the competition (away at Porto in the group stages) and were very unlucky to go out to eventual semi-finalists Barcelona on away goals. The result meant that PSG matched Barcelona evenly over their two legs, playing out a 2-2 draw in Paris before holding the defending champions to a 1-1 draw at the Camp Nou.
A season littered with exemplary performances
There is no one match to highlight Zlatan’s performances because he does so at the highest level all the time.
But there are few games that will surely stand out while chronicling his season. The first would be on the 18th of September, 2012 when he became the first player to score for six different sides in the Champions League (against Dynamo Kiev). On the 8th of October, he became only the third player to play in El Clasico, the Milan derby and the Classique between PSG and Marseille.
The highlight of his season would surely come against Barcelona, levelling against the Blaugrana in the 79th minute once Lionel Messi had opened the scoring in the first half, giving PSG hope and proving that Barcelona’s players were indeed human.
On the 11th of December, he scored his first-ever hat-trick in Ligue 1 in a 4-0 romp against Valenciennes.
These performances only add to one that left purists of the game gasping. You get no prizes for guessing which game I refer to here, because you know very well that I am talking about that night in Stockholm against England, with whom the Scandinavian nation have developed a rivalry in recent years.
That only once again shows how consistent Ibrahimovic has been over the past twelve months or so.
What next?
Ibrahimovic has already pledged his future to Paris Saint-Germain, but the truth is that wherever he goes, he will be successful, simply because that is just the sort of player he is. Now that he has sampled life in France, Italy and Spain, he might choose to ply his trade in Germany next year or hop across the Channel to England.
He has shown throughout his career that the only loyalty he shows (on the field) is to wherever his next pay cheque comes from and that will probably continue to be the defining characteristic of his career. Because at the end, there are three words that best sum up what Zlatan Ibrahimovic has achieved, the reputation he has built for himself and how unique he is to the footballing world:
I am Zlatan.
