It was June 18th 2006. The occasion was a mostly dull, scoreless match between Croatia and Japan on Match Day 2 in Group F of that year’s World Cup in Germany. Both teams would take a point from the encounter, a point which would ultimately prove to be useless in either side’s quest to reach the knockout stages of that tournament. Yet, looking back on it, that match would unexpectedly turn out to become a significant part of Croatian World Cup history. It was the match where their wonder boy, a certain Luka Modrić, would for the first time ever set foot on a World Cup pitch. More than 16 years have passed since then and now, at age 37, the wonder boy has become the undisputed leader of his national team. Now as Croatia managed to get past the Japanese in the Round of 16 of this year’s World Cup and are about to take on heavyweights Brazil in the quarterfinals, one fears that it will be Modrić’s last match on the world’s greatest stage.
Modrić has won everything there is to win in club football, in some cases many times over. His trophy cabinet includes no less than five UEFA Champions League titles, four FIFA Club World Cups, four Spanish and European Super Cups each, three La Liga titles…the list goes on and on. We have not even begun to mention his individual awards. They include seven Croatian Player of the Year awards, one Ballon’d Or, one UEFA Player of the Year award, as well as a FIFA Men’s Best Player trophy.
It is not as though Real Madrid simply had great success while Luka was there. In fact, he was the engine behind that success. Modrić was and to some degree remains the unsung hero of that team. In the national side, the situation is different. His name and those of Marcelo Brozovic and Mateo Kovacic – his partners in the Croatian midfield line – are known by virtually every child in the country. Where Modrić goes, so does the national team.

Croatia had heroes before Modric, of course. There was Davor Suker, Robert Prosinecki and the rest of the 1998 World Cup bronze medal-winning team. They were a special generation of players, one that many thought would remain a one-off in the country’s football history. But then Russia 2018 happened. At a time when people believed that the chance for a Modrić-Rakitić golden generation may have passed, they and their teammates outdid the side of 1998 and reached the final.