Sir Alex made me shut down my website!

“I think [social media] affects you,” said Mikael. “Everybody says I’m not reading it, but you have to, and you are just curious to know what people think about you. It’s important to not be obsessed by it, which is difficult to assess when you are a player when you are just turning 20, playing first-team football and you are under a lot of scrutiny.

“Yourself, your performance, [and] your private life is exposed, so I think it would have been tough [for me]. But the fact that I was settled with my wife [helped] and I think also the manager was a good policeman in that respect. In a good way. I use this word because at my time we just started the players to have our own website, so I was tempted to do it, so I did. Someone was running a page for me.

“In the beginning, we would do interviews after every game so, about I don’t know, 10 questions after every game. On the phone, someone would write down and then we’d post it on the website the day after, probably. But then it started being picked up by the tabloids, you know the papers, and when it was translated then the boss could read it. And with some of them, he wasn’t happy at all. You know, when you say, ‘I don’t think we performed well,’ he thought that only he could say that.

“So for me, it was my interview on my website and then it was on the back page of the paper, so I got the hairdryer twice. So I shut down the website straight away after that!”