Luka Modric, from a war refugee to the Golden Ball

[Akrapovic]

It took 4,019 days, a decade, to see a different player than Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo lift the trophy for the best player in the world. The Croatian, the chosen one.

Although what unbalances the games are the goals, a footballer who stood out above the rest was the Croatian Luka Modric, captain and referent of his selection. The man who has won the Golden Ball of Russia 2018, which credits him as the best player in the tournament. A refugee of war who appealed to fate, to coincidences and also to the causalities of his talent to put to dream a country of four million inhabitants, which today has healed a little more the scars of war.

Read more: Croatia, from the war to dream of winning a World Cup

"All that generation inspired us. Now it's our turn to make history, "said Modric before starting participation in his second World Cup. And he has achieved it. After winning his fourth Champions League this season, the star of Real Madrid is a firm candidate to win the Golden Ball, a prize given to the best player of the year, in a decade in which Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have been with the trophy.

It has not been easy for Luka to get here. Especially for the episodes of his childhood, in which he was affected by the war and the violence that hit his area of birth. Soccer was the tool that his family used to evade tragedies and overcome the most critical moments. Undoubtedly, the hardest was when the Modics had to flee their village to avoid the bullets that were fired by the armed confrontation between Croats and Serbs, product of Yugoslavia's desire for independence.

Stipe Modric, Luka's father, witnessed the murder of his father, only 500 meters from the house where they lived. This episode occurred in one of the incursions in the Obrovacki region by the Serb rebels. Something that caused his precipitate flight to Zadar, where they had to live in the same place with other families who also fled the war.

It was the Hotel Kolovare, where I played football because there was nothing better to do. In an afternoon of pirouettes with the ball, an employee of the establishment saw him and was impressed, so he spoke with his relatives and told them about the possibility of taking him to tests at the NK Zadar. There he met Tomislav Basic, head of the team's quarry. Was 10. The Modric family survived as it could due to the inclemencies of war. But that was never a limitation, on the contrary, it served to strengthen him, so he explained it to the newspaper Marca de España in an interview published this year, in which he stressed that "the war made me stronger. They were hard times for me and my family. I do not want to drag that theme forever, but I do not want to forget about it either. Now I have the feeling that I am ready for anything. "

The war in Croatia ended with Operation Storm, the biggest ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the Balkans, which ended with the expulsion of 250,000 Serbs living in that country and the death of 20,000 Croats. After this, the Modric did not want to return to the one that was their house, they preferred to stay in Zadar, a city that Luka today feels like his own. His mother got a job as a seamstress, since before he worked in a textile factory, and his father, when he returned from military service in Croatia, was hired to maintain the aircraft at a military base.

In Zadar, Modric had the experience of living with football, understanding it and loving it. He was hired by Dynamo Zagreb, at age 16. But there they doubted him at first because of his apparent physical fragility. That very short, that it lacks strength, that it does not have a football player's body. Excuses were left over and that's why he went on loan to Bosnian football.

The problem became an opportunity. There he took off, regained confidence that doubts had been removed and between 2004 and 2008 he won six titles with Zagreb, a team in which he was led by one of his childhood idols, Zvonimir Boban, a member of that Croatian national team in 1998. That's when Tottenham paid 27 million euros to take him to English football.

Although he took a long time to adapt to life in London, his great performances with the Spurs unleashed the interest of Real Madrid, a club he finally reached in 2012 after declaring himself in rebellion. The rest is counted alone. An angular piece in the project of the white team, with which he has won 14 titles, including four Leagues of European Champions. Because of his career, his legacy and his desire to always put his country on top of everything, Luka is the maximum reference of his team, which he leads with the same courage that his father did in the war.

He is a perfect midfielder, with an innate ability to interpret matches and decipher them, to detect the opponent's faults and just attack them there. That was his premise in Russia 2018. Luka Modric earned the respect of the entire world.