LA Galaxy and Zlatan Ibrahimovic: Your culture matters

Zlatan Ibrahimovic has again been criticised for his teamwork and personality in the dressing room. The former LA Galaxy star’s time in MLS proves that your culture matters.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is one of the best players to ever play in Major League Soccer. The Los Angeles Galaxy star played for two years, scored an astonishing 53 goals in 58 games, and would have been named a two-time MVP if not for two historical individual seasons on behalf of Josef Martinez and Carlos Vela.

And yet, for all his brilliance on the pitch, the difficulty he caused off it meant that he returned to European football and AC Milan with exactly nothing to show for his efforts. Two years in lowly MLS and the Lion won nothing.

You did not need his teammates to tell you that there were problems in the camp. You simply needed to watch the matches and see the distance and awkwardness between Zlatan and his apparent teammates. But as the weeks and months have passed by, the stories have slipped out.

This week, it was the turn of Emiliano Insua, who never even played with Zlatan at the LA Galaxy. Insua arrived this offseason, after Zlatan had left. And yet, despite never having even played with the Swede, the Argentine knew the trouble he caused.

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“They say that he wasn’t a good teammate and that is why he left,” Insua told Ataque Futbolero via ESPN FC. “As a player, he was very good, but as they told me, he was not a very good colleague.”

This comes in the aftermath of an explosive interview with Sebastian Lletget on BSI: The Podcast. Lletget went into detail about the difficulty that he and his teammates found when dealing with Zlatan.

“That’s complete insanity to do that to one of your teammates,” Lletget said when asked about Zlatan pushing him out of the LA Galaxy wall in a match versus LAFC, a moment that went viral for all of the wrong reasons. “Complete insanity. I was telling him in that play, ‘this guy is alone. Should I just go?’ He’s like, ‘stay, stay, stay. Don’t go. Don’t go.’ And I’m like, ‘Ibra, there’s a guy.’ And you can see in the video, before that, I’m like flinching. ‘Should I go? Should I not?’ And then, literally as he’s about to kick it, he just shoves the sh*t out of me.”

“I definitely put that in the back of my brain, in a vault,” he continued. “It is one of those moments that shows his true colours.”

Lletget continued to highlight Zlatan’s egotistical nature with another story: “After that game, we were eating breakfast. We came in for recovery. I sat down. He sits in the corner. We were all chatting. Our administrator comes in, Zach, and Ibra is like ‘you see how I pushed him? You see that’ and like chuckled to himself and sipped his coffee.”

“You couldn’t be free. It was super frustrating,” Lletget said regarding the atmosphere in the dressing room. “You feel like you want to literally take your boots off and just walk off the field.”

“In the locker room, the way I like to explain it, it’s like he’s a good guy, a nice guy, if you’re not his teammate,” Lletget said. “Being his teammate was very difficult.”

“It’s tough to play against him; it’s tougher to be his teammate,” Lletget soundly concluded.

Zlatan’s demeanour, his personality, his ego, and his thorny ways made him an extremely difficult teammate, so much so that for all his brilliance on the pitch, he was a net-detriment to the team. The LA Galaxy will be better off without him.

The whole ordeal goes to show the importance of culture. The dressing room is holy, sacred. It must be protected and preserved, and the relationships that players and coaches form will have an impact in their play on the pitch. They are humans, after all, and humans are emotional, spiritual, living, feeling, thinking beings.

Zlatan arrived at the LA Galaxy and dishonoured all of this. He soured the dressing room, upset his teammates, and he squandered the chance to lead the Galaxy back to MLS glory. The skill-obsessed, social-media-frenzied, highlight-junkie fan may have loved him and his chatshow appearances, but Zlatan ruined the Galaxy’s culture. And the team lost because of it.