Zlatan Ibrahimovic Asked His Autobiographer 'Who the F--k Is David Beckham?'

Leave it to Zlatan Ibrahimovic to claim ignorance of one of the most globally popular footballers on the planet. 

Scratch that, to claim ignorance of one of the most popular humans on the planet. 

But that's what writer David Lagercrantz has revealed to the Telegraph in an interview about working with Ibrahimovic on the madly popular 2011 bestseller I Am Zlatan. 

Ibrahimovic had no idea who David Beckham was. Or at least he claimed as much, before the two were teammates for Paris Saint-Germain in 2013. 

Lagercrantz gives a lot of insight into what it was like ghostwriting Ibrahimovic's book and delivers one particular nugget of a quote on Ibrahimovic's Beckham knowledge.

"I told (Ibrahimovic) that I had just read David Beckham's book and that was such a boring book, actually," Lagercrantz said. "And he had a good answer: 'Who the f--- is Beckham?'" 

Classic Ibrahimovic. 

He also admits that many of the Ibrahimovic lines weren't actually said by Ibrahimovic, more that it's just a "literary illusion of Zlatan Ibrahimovic." 

"

I sat with him for 100 hours and that was quite an adventure. I didn’t lie. I didn’t want to make him better or nicer than he was. I said to him from the beginning, ‘You can’t be moral. Just speak out, for God’s sake.’

I think it really was his true voice. The key thing is that I was not working as a journalist. I was not quoting him. I know this – if you want to find something that sounds true and authentic, the last thing you want to do is quote. I don’t think I have any real quotes from him.

I tried to get an illusion of him, to try and find the story. I tried to find the literary Ibrahimovic.

"

Read the entire interview here.