I had an offer from Arsenal – at first I was in awe of Wenger but his strange behaviour convinced me to walk away | OneFootball

Arsenal notably missed out on some big names during Arsene Wenger’s reign, but one of the most famous anecdotes of that kind must come from Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

The legendary Swedish forward, who would go on to score over 500 goals in a club career for the likes of Barcelona, AC Milan, PSG, and Manchester United, famously turned down a trial with the Gunners.

The line we’ve all heard dozens of times by now is “Zlatan doesn’t do auditions”, but it seems he wasn’t quite as direct with Wenger as that.

In fact, as per a section of his autobiography, as serialised in the Times back in 2013, this came more from Malmo’s technical director Hasse Borg than from Zlatan himself.

Still, it also seems to be the case that although Ibrahimovic went into his meeting with Wenger full of optimism and respect for the legendary French tactician, he quite quickly changed his mind.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic reveals Arsene Wenger’s strange and off-putting behaviour during talks

Not only was Ibrahimovic not happy about only being offered a trial, he also just got bad vibes about Wenger during their meeting.

“Only recently, I’d been a nuisance in the junior squad. Now, everything was buzzing around me, and Hasse Borg and I went out to Arsenal’s training facility in St Albans, and, well, you can just imagine.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic watches on during AC Milan vs Torino (Photo by Valerio Pennicino/Getty Images)

“It was hallowed ground, and I saw Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp out on the pitch. The awesome thing was that I was going to meet Arsene Wenger, right. Wenger hadn’t been with the club for very long at that point. He was the first overseas coach who’d been appointed at Arsenal, and the newspapers had carried headlines like, ‘Arsene Who?’, saying, basically, ‘who the hell is Arsene Wenger?’

“Straight away in his second season, he took home the Double – both the league title and the FA Cup – and was hugely popular, and I felt like a little boy when we stepped into his office. I shivered a bit under Wenger’s gaze. It was like he was trying to see right through me, or size me up. He’s a man who draws up psychological profiles of his players — are they emotionally stable?, that sort of stuff. He is thorough, like all great coaches, and I didn’t say much at first.

“I just sat in silence and was bashful, but after a while I lost my patience. Something about Wenger set me off. He would leap up every so often to check who was outside his window. It seemed as if he wanted to keep an eye on everything, and he kept going on about one thing all the time.

“‘You can have a trial with us,’ he said. ‘You can give it a try. You can test things out.’ No matter how much I wanted to behave, those words set me off. I wanted to show him what I could do.

“‘Give me a pair of boots. I’ll have a trial. I’ll do it right now,’ I said.

“Then Hasse Borg interrupted me, saying, ‘Stop, stop, we’ll sort this out, you’re not going to have a trial, not at all,’ and of course, I understood what he was getting at: either you’re interested, or you’re not. Having a trial means selling yourself short. It puts you in a weak position, so we said no: ‘We’re sorry, Mr Wenger, but we are not interested.'”

Wenger later defended this decision in an interview with BBC Sport, insisting it was normal to give trials to relatively unknown 17-year-old players at that time.

Still, there must be many Gooners out there still wondering what could’ve been if Ibrahimovic had come in and been able to link up with Thierry Henry and co.