Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo… and Luka Modric.
This summer we will see two football icons make their final World Cup appearances. It means that, despite being one of the top five midfielders of all-time, Modric’s own farewell has been overshadowed to near anonymity.
At almost 41 years old, Croatia’s magician remains at the heart of his national team. He is the central reason why they are international football’s great overachievers.
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A country of just 3.8million inhabitants which declared independence in 1991, Croatia is six years younger than Modric himself. Yet, the tiny Balkan nation reached the semi-finals in Qatar, while they went one step further in making it to the World Cup final four years earlier. Modric was awarded the Ballon d’Or that season for his role in that latter feat.
Having first appeared in the World Cup in 2006, he will likely make his 200th appearance for Croatia in North America — he is the fifth-most capped men’s player in history.
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Even now, in the winter of his career, the skills which made him still ooze from every touch and glance. Never relying on any overwhelming physical gifts, Modric’s core ability is manipulation — his mastery of both space and the ball itself.
He is that rare player who exists in alternative dimensions; he knows where passing lanes and defensive wrinkles will form before the angles required seem possible. He drifts away from defenders with what appears to be a simple step. Trying to distill his genius is like attempting an autopsy on a will-o’-the-wisp. Lethal over both a dead ball and a live one, his abilities from outside the box make him one of the best pure ball-strikers that the game has ever seen.
“His outside-of-the-boot pass reminds me of Roger Federer’s backhand,” his former international manager Slaven Bilic told The Athletic in 2023. “I saw that when he was 18 and it was regular. He made it better, he improved that pass, but he had it in his locker even then.
“People ask me, ‘Did he change?’. Of course he changed, but like the iPhone changes every couple of years. They have reached the iPhone 15 or 16 — he has also upgraded, but he had it all in the beginning. He made Croatia a bigger country.”
Luka Modric’s playing style
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On-ball involvement
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Press resistance
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Front-foot defending
Compared to peers across Europe | Serie A, 2025-26
Metrics derived from The Athletic’s player roles model.
Portugal attacker Bernardo Silva, himself at the top of European football for a decade, told The Athletic in May that Modric was the greatest player he had ever played against.
As a child, coaches worried that the young prospect lacked the physical capabilities for an elite career in the game; he could set the tempo of a game, but needed to be handled with the softness of a crystal timepiece.
“Did I notice something, did I see something?” says Romeo Jozak, former technical director of both Dinamo Zagreb, Modric’s first club, and the Croatian national team. “At 18, he wasn’t one of the most talented prospects; we couldn’t say: ‘We knew the guy’. I didn’t. Nobody knew. He was just a young, skinny blond guy.
“But the one thing that was inescapable, that is fact, and that is a key part of his play now is that he was so protective of the ball. When he was playing as a No 6, in defensive midfield, we subconsciously knew that he was not going to lose the ball. He could be pressed in the back by two guys — where if you lose the ball, you’ll likely concede — and he was always switching, turning to the side, and wiggling out. In his first touch, he perfectly set up his body position — and he’s still doing it now..”
Luka Modric’s most common passes
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Open-play 15+ yard pass clusters | Serie A, 2025-26
Thirty years ago, when Jozak first laid eyes on him, Modric was growing up in the coastal city of Zadar as a refugee, his family victims of the brutal Yugoslav Wars — a series of conflicts that killed an estimated 130,000.
Modric’s grandfather was one of the victims, executed by Serb rebels in the tiny mountain hamlet that the family called home. Before the war, as a tiny child, Modric wandered the hills as a goat shepherd. After the fighting began, he would hide under the stairs in a cellar with his mother.
Football was an escape, a compulsion during the difficulties of his teenage years, his family displaced from their ancestral village. His journey, while still not at an end, took him to the top of the world’s most popular sport.
Having moved from Dinamo Zagreb to Tottenham Hotspur as a 22-year-old, he was at the vanguard of the introduction of technical midfield play to the Premier League, almost a decade before that style was fully realised by Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City sides of the late 2010s.
Then, on signing for Real Madrid in 2012, he arrived in La Liga, a competition typified by the wizardry of Barcelona metronomes Xavi and Andres Iniesta, and arguably eclipsed their legacies, gradually returning Madrid to their place as the continent’s dominant force.
In all, he won four league titles and six Champions Leagues during his time at the Bernabeu, while simultaneously developing a defensive game entirely in keeping with his preternatural understanding of the ball’s direction.
Now, ahead of his final World Cup, he is in the red and black stripes of another iconic club, Italian side Milan, who he joined from Madrid on a free transfer last summer. Modric missed much of the end of the season after fracturing his cheekbone in April, and looks set to don a protective mask in North America this summer.
There is something appropriate in this, anonymity once more, for a player defined by his innate undefinability, his ability to elevate others, a superhero in red and white checkers.
