Sometimes the greats are simply the ones who run the most. Luka Modrić, a fugitive from war, walked two and a half miles to reach his local playing field. He was named in honor of his grandfather, killed in the Yugoslav Wars in December 1991. At the age of sixty-six, Luka senior was shot down as he tended his herd fewer than 500 yards from home. At the time, the future midfielder was six years old. His grandma Jela hid with him in the house when she saw army trucks passing by and kept the door closed, until she heard the goats making their way back home without her husband.
The Modrić family relocated to a refugee camp in Makarska, known as “the town of children.” After several months they moved again, to Zadar, where Luka became obsessed with football. At the height of his adolescence, he watched on TV as a heroic Croatian national team reached the semifinals of the 1998 World Cup in France.
Time and time again, football shows us how much depends on willpower. As a teenager, Luka Modrić played his first final after suffering all night from a fever. To make sure he wouldn’t be left out of the team, he told no one. Athletic prowess wasn’t his strong suit. Too short and too frail, he would have surely been dismissed had it not been for the fact that Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta—players similar to him in size—were building the best midfield that history had ever seen at Guardiola’s Barcelona. He was determined not to give up. In his autobiography, written with Robert Matteoni, he recalls that he was driven by a single obsession: “to grow taller.” He did stretching exercises with little success. Biology and health conspired against him. In his first final, the team ended up winning because of his goal—scored, incredibly, with his head.
His first great coach was Domagoj Bašić, a full-time pedagogue who taught his players to cope with injustice. During practice he acted as referee and deliberately made bad calls so the boys would learn to control their reactions. He also introduced them to literature. “He would give us a book and a week to read it,” Modrić writes. “After that, he would quiz us to see if we’d done what he asked. He’d gather the team in a circle and ask each player a question from this or that chapter. We could choose what we wanted to read . . . I agreed to read Robinson Crusoe.” For a survivor like Modrić, there was no greater story than that of a castaway who saved himself on a desert island. Domagoj Bašić, still a young man, was later killed, the second death to leave its mark on the midfielder.
To prepare in case things didn’t work out in the unstable Croatian league, Luka started training to become a server. Sportswriting looks for connections in the most random details—one can easily associate the job of a waiter, who distributes plates from table to table, with the task of distributing passes from midfield. Luka’s creativity also lent itself to the task of mixing cocktails. He hated washing dishes, however, the restaurant equivalent of fetching stray balls on the sidelines.
In Zadar, Luka spent almost six years living in temporary housing. After the war, his family became refugees. Years later, a rumor circulated that Modrić had been so poor he’d used wooden shin guards. In reality he treasured a plastic pair emblazoned with the image of Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, better known as Ronaldo. Modrić dictated his autobiography in part to correct the myths about his dramatic childhood. But even the more realistic descriptions of his life contain an epic aspect. War, displacement, the death of decisive role models, and physical shortcomings all helped shape the destiny of a chronic survivor.
After Zadar, Luka went to the Croatian capital, where he made his entry into professional football with Dinamo Zagreb. He chose the unclaimed number 23, because it had been used by David Beckham and Michael Jordan. After a bout in the English Premier League, the midfielder arrived at Real Madrid, where he ran like a fugitive and distributed enough passes to become one of few players to win six Champions League titles.
During the 2022 World Cup, I exchanged daily letters with the Argentine writer Martín Caparrós for El País. “There are some players who stand out more from their teammates than from their opponents,” I wrote. “Modrić is reminiscent of Hagi, who delivered an individual masterclass in the Romanian midfield during the 1998 World Cup in France, but always seemed to run out of steam in the seventieth minute. Modrić, on the other hand, always has an exhausted look on his face but never tires. It’s a contradiction that accentuates his leadership. The bags under his eyes are those of a shepherd watching over his flock.”
The grandfather who gave Luka his name was killed while caring for his goats. For someone who grew up with bombs falling from the sky, few things could be more perilous than making a living under the open air. Luka takes this risk on the pitch, his running fueled by the fierce urgency of a man trying to lead his herd to safety.
Translated by Francisco Cantú