Why should fitting into the very specialised Barca machine be the only criteria?
It's not. Eto managed to win CL
with Inter. The criteria here is that Zlatan never was an integral part of the team that was
top, was even close to winning CL, i don't think he ever played in semi-final. Apart from Barcelona where he could not make it.
So what does it tells us about a player? He left Ajax 12 years ago,
in all that time just one semi-final of CL. Just one and with a team where he did not fit in really, the team that won CL before him and funny enough won it again as soon as they shipped him out.
Of course it is way-way easier to be a top guy in a teams like Zlatan's Inter, Juve, Milan, PSG. Bullies at home and almost pushovers in Europe against top guns. If Zlatan would have been really a top player, without any buts or ifs, you would expect that once, even just once he would have led his team at least to the semis of CL, maybe to the final. And Zlatan did play in a championship winning sides, so it's not like he was tasked to lead Spurs to CL win. And we are talking not 3-4 years, but a huge 12 years span. The whole career almost.
For me, that shows his true leadership skills. Below par really, if you don;t consider the hype. He is fine when you need to bully a small team back home (in league), thus winning lots of league titles, but when it comes to deliver in top matches in Europe he stumbles. Like he did last year, this year and any other year for that matter.
I don't recall Eto'o ever inspiring his team like Zlatan at Milan.
You mean Inter or Ac Milan?
AC Milan with him was a bit pathetic, worse Milan side in these years, miles behind real top team that Milan had in the middle of 2000s, of course they are even worse now. As for Inter, well Zlatan never inspired Inter to do anything substantial in Europe, they were always flops and hardly competitive on a big stage, they won Serie A in a very comfortable fashion with big guns out of the way, their rival was Roma as a i remember, the same one that lost 7-1 to United. All you need to know about that Serie A titles really.