Zibanejad played football as a child before deciding to pursue hockey. He began playing hockey at the age of six in Hammarby IF, where he played a total of seven seasons before the club went bankrupt in 2008. He is fluent in English, Persian, Finnish, and Swedish.
Yet considering that Mehrdad Zibanejad had barely even heard of the sport growing up in Iran, and has never skated in his life, it’s more than a tad intriguing to see how he came from there to here. He was a star tennis and volleyball player, but any kind of idyllic life disappeared after his teenage years.
