Football dominates the annual list of the most described Swedish sports stars in the media, which the analysis company Retriever produces in collaboration with TT Nyhetsbyrån.
Pandemic-tired Swedes threw themselves over the men's national team in general and the European Football Championship in particular this summer.
It missed an injured Ibrahimovic, but he still tops the list and is mentioned in 25,146 articles before national team captain Janne Andersson in second place.
The duo is followed by national team stars Emil Forsberg, Dejan Kulusevski and Alexander Isak.
This is the tenth time since 2010 that Milan's 40-year-old Swedish star tops the list.
Rewritten ski star
Only in sixth place is the first non-football athlete, the skier Frida Karlsson, who is thus also the most described female sports star.
Best Olympic athlete is found first in ninth place - Olympic gold-winning pole star Armand Duplantis.
In the 2016 survey, after the Olympics in Rio, there were four Olympic profiles in the top 10 with swimming star Sarah Sjöström in the lead in fourth place.
Now she is 16th.
The Olympic party disappeared
The explanation?
The time difference to Tokyo with many competitions at night and early morning, that the Olympics hardly became the usual party with a bubble and without an audience and the new Discovery + which broadcast the Summer Olympics for the first time.
The channel was initially criticized for technical fuss, broadcasts without a Swedish commentator and the difficulty for viewers to find their sports.
- It was a little smaller Olympics all around.
It is probably something when it is in the "regular" channels that makes it more accessible to the general public.
It might also have been a different news situation around the Olympics with corona, nothing wrong with Discovery, but if it had been on SVT or TV4, maybe their morning programs and other news programs would have pushed it more, says Jenny Wikstrand.
Another difference is also in the media coverage of the Olympics versus the national football team.
- Football is always so huge, it is reported from every training, prelude and press conference while it becomes more concentrated around competition for Olympic athletes.
Peder Fredricson is first found in 40th place despite a fantastic year and the nail-biter when Sweden won Olympic gold in the team competition.
However, it triggered the biggest interaction on Facebook.
- It is the individual article that has received the most interactions this year with likes, comments and shares on Facebook with 45,000 interactions.
Hook this year's rocket
When it comes to interactions on Facebook, however, ski star Ebba Andersson is the best of the year.
When she won the World Cup in January, there were 30,000 interactions.
This year's rocket in Swedish sports is volleyball star Isabelle Haak, who climbed from 265th to 66th place on the list of 4,508 items.
The success of the European Championships with a quarter-final place meant that the number of articles with her increased by 762 percent compared to 2020.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic's dominance as the hottest sports Swede is a chapter in itself.
He has won the survey ten times, 2010-2017 and the last two years.
Charlotte Kalla won 2018 and Janne Andersson 2019.
- About 80 percent of Zlatan's publicity is about sports, the other 20 percent is different.
For example, David Lagercrantz and Zlatan's book will be a film, there is some publicity about it, last year there was some controversy about the statue.
That media image is not on the other sports stars, says Jenny Wikstrand and continues:
- Zlatan is big, but he was bigger before.
He peaked in 2016 with 50,000 articles, now he has 25,000. He will certainly stabilize at a high level as a celebrity, but now it is linked to his comeback in the national team.
CLIP: Zlatan on playing the World Cup: "Who does not want to be there?" (November 8, 2021)
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The last time Zlatan played in the World Cup was in 2006. Photo: Bildbyrån