Plenty of visitors to Paris, including French ones, have complained about the snobby attitude of Parisians over the years. Ibrahimovic has also had one or two harsh things to say about the locals.
After one particular match for PSG earlier this year, Ibrahimovic mouthed off about the local "caviar-munching" supporters. It followed a match that PSG won, but were whistled by sections of the notoriously hard to please home crowd.
“I don’t know what they want. We win, we lose and they whistle.
"Maybe they are used to eating caviar before they come to the match.”
It wasn’t the first time that he had taken the local crowd to task for whistling his team. After a match in 2013 he said: “They demand a lot. Which is strange when you look at what they had before, which was nothing.”
SEE ALSO: Ten of the best quotes from Zlatan Ibrahimovic
He’s into liberté, but not fraternité or egalité:
The big striker might have a few issues with some of France’s founding principles. While he clearly values liberté, given that he seems to do what he wants on the pitch, he looks as though he might have a certain issue with fraternité.
If you watch Zlatan lope around the pitch during any PSG game as his team mates do all the running and hard work to get the ball back it’s clear the principle of “brotherhood” or fraternité is not valued that highly.
Then there’s his view on egalité, which perhaps can be summed up in this quote he gave to a journalist when asked about the role of his wife in his career: “My wife stays at home to look after my kids. It’s the only thing I need her to do. She has nothing to do with my football.” Let’s just say he’s unlikely to be the guest speaker at Femen’s Christmas party this year.
He does not fit into France’s secular model
The conversation went a bit like this.
Journalist: “What will be the outcome of this clash?”
Zlatan: “Only God knows.”
Journalist: “It’s difficult to ask him.”
Zlatan: “You’re looking at him.”
France’s founding principal of “laïcite” which is a strict separation of all things God-related and the state has made it hard for the self-declared God Zlatan to exert his influence over French football and society at large. He might be more comfortable playing for the Vatican 11, and the football-loving Pope Francis would only be too happy to sign him up.
France's pesky Socialists
You can only have imagined Zlatan's reaction when Socialist president François Hollande got elected and promised to introduce a 75 percent tax on millionaires, footballers included. Although Zlatan ended up not having to pay the tax himself, the French socialists have never let him forget how obscene they think his wages are.
"These numbers are not impressive, they are indecent," said the then Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac when asked about Ibrahimovic's salary
"They are indecent at a time when everyone in the entire world is making efforts and knows the terrible consequences of a crisis," said Cahuzac, who was soon fired for tax dodging.
French football too small for the big Swede
Ibrahimovic has made it pretty clear from the very beginning of his time at PSG that France’s Ligue 1 was simply too small fry for him although he was prepared to put up with it.
“I don’t know a lot about Ligue 1, but Ligue 1 knows exactly who I am,” was what he said when he first arrived in France after being bought by PSG's Qatari owners with their petrodollars.
Essentially this seems to be the reason for his foul-mouthed rant on Sunday. His frustration with the standard of the refereeing can be seen as a sign of his irritation with the French league in general, whose standing is well behind that of the English, Spanish, Italian and German leagues.
(Photo: Alpha/Flickr)
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