Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a Swedish football player. He is also a word. The Swedish Language Council included the verb “to zlatan” last December, meaning to do something audacious or outrageously brilliant. “Wow,” you might say, if you were visiting Stockholm and had just witnessed someone pay a bill by flicking a note directly into the till from ten yards. “You zlataned it!”

Ibrahimovic has performed the audacious and the impossibly brilliant throughout his life. Like the time in a league match in the Netherlands, while playing for Ajax, he slalomed through several defenders, swerving this way and that, before slotting the ball, with the neatest of flourishes, into the back of the net, a goal that almost brought the internet to a standstill when it