Zlatan Ibrahimovic is in a bad mood. A really bad mood.
In Paris Saint-Germain's League Cup win over Saint Etienne, the Swede verbally destroyed teammate Javier Pastore for not passing him the ball. Ibrahimovic's visible anger and frustration was frightening. He scored the winner in that match, but there was no celebration, just a long scream and a tense face.
You can read Ibrahimovic like a book. What you are reading at the moment is not very positive, for the striker or his club.
At 33 and coming off a heel injury, Ibrahimovic is struggling to find his form and get back to his best. Last season, he was on another planet. This term, he is among the mere mortals.
In a 4-2 loss at Bastia in mid-January, he had one of his worst games in a PSG shirt. He recorded a single shot in 90 minutes, and it wasn't on target. That hasn't happened to Ibrahimovic since his move to the French capital. To shoot just once against Bastia, who sit 19th in Ligue 1, says it all.
And I can promise you, Bastia being strong defensively had nothing to do with the Swede's subdued performance. On any given day, Ibrahimovic would terrorise Bastia's central defensive pairing of Sebastien Squillaci and Francois Modesto.
The problem is that Ibrahimovic is not himself. He's not fit, and he's not too bothered either.
PSG boss Laurent Blanc admitted his star player is struggling on Sunday after his side's 4-2 win over Evian.
"He is not as at ease as last season if we compare the two," Blanc said. "We have to help him get back to that level, but it will be very difficult because it was a very high level last season."
I wonder whether his striker appreciated the confession. But Blanc can see what we all have seen, and the stats are quite telling.
Ibrahimovic has not scored in his last four league games. He has eight league goals in 13 matches, but they all came in just four games. He has just one assist. In the course of those 13 league games he has played this season, he made no direct contribution in eight of them.
Even his importance to the team can be questioned. PSG have not lost without him in the 12 games he has missed this season. More importantly, they have won only 56 percent of the games he has played in (10 wins, five draws and three defeats) against 72 percent last term. Les Parisiens' best game of the season was their 3-2 Champions League win over Barcelona at the Parc des Princes, which Ibrahimovic missed through injury.
The heart of the problem is the heel injury that kept him out from September to November. It was a massive blow for him. The pain has gone, but the fitness has too. For a big guy like Ibrahimovic, whose body is used to playing every three days, such a long break is hard to come back from.
He is less mobile this season, and he spends much more time in the box than he did last year when he frequently dropped deep to get involved in buildup play -- as evidenced by his solitary assist. His nerves appear for all to behold, in episodes like his rollicking of Pastore or his pair of yellow cards for dissent in his past four games.
Compounding matters, his teammates haven't lived up to last season's performances either. PSG have no momentum and no margin for error, lying third in the table, four points off leader Lyon.
Despite all of that, Ibrahimovic has scored 90 goals in 111 matches across all competitions for Paris Saint-Germain, by far the best ratio in the history of the club. He is still the biggest star in French football, he is still capable of moments of genius and mentally, he is where he wants to be.
Thijs Slegers, a Dutch journalist close to Ibrahimovic, said in L'Equipe last week that "Zlatan likes Paris and he is happy there. It is very interesting for him. It is the kind of challenges he likes: building one of the new big clubs."
PSG will hope, then, that Ibrahimovic's problem is a physical one. To overtake Marseille and Lyon in the standings, the club will need Ibrahimovic at his best, or at least at the best he can be. Blanc thinks he is not far off that.
"Physically, he has improved," Blanc said. "He works hard at training but he is not 25 anymore and he needs to recover. With the accumulation of games, it's difficult. But I think we can expect better things from him in the coming weeks."
Ibrahimovic himself often says that in order to play well, he needs to be angry. Let's hope that for the sake of PSG and their fans, his bad mood quickly becomes anger because he doesn't play so well when he is moody.