Luka Modric's riveting autobiography, like him, covers a lot of ground

Chances are that if you’re a sucker for football intelligence, then Luka Modric is your guy. Intelligence is that one quality valued by football intellectuals more than anything else. Great coaches, from Johan Cruyff to Pep Guardiola, have built entire empires around it. In fact, when Barcelona appointed Cruyff as manager, one of the first things he did was to do away with the rule that a midfielder must be at least six feet tall to get into La Masia, the club’s famed youth academy. Instead of pure physicality, the Dutchman demanded something completely different from his ideal midfielder: positional sense, strong technique and, above all, a preternaturally sharp footballing brain.
 

Modric would have flourished under Cruyff. In a game that is now inhabited by tactical hyperbole, Modric is the simplifier, providing much-needed clarity of thought, running the game on his own terms, in his own style. He sees passes and spots spaces like no one else, exhibiting the expert control of a circus juggler and the unlikely physical toughness of a middle-aged gym dad. But above all, he does all this with a casual finesse, a player giving the impression that he is simply doing his job — the welcome anomaly in a sport drunk on the concept of superstardom.
 

Naturally then, while talking about the ever-demanding José Mourinho in his recently released autobiography, he writes: “Today, players are sensitive to criticism. It turns out that, when someone tells them something they don’t want to hear, they get offended, like true prima donnas.”
 

Modric’s backstory — or some part of it — has become common knowledge since his exploits in the 2018 World Cup, which played a huge part in him winning the Ballon d’Or. Modric was only six when his grandfather, Luka Sr, was gunned down by Chetnik forces at the outbreak of the Croatian War of Independence. The family had to flee home, spending time in refugee camps and cramped hotels. Modric’s football upbringing began at an academy in the coastal city of Zadar, amid the background noise of relentless enemy gunfire. It was a childhood, he writes, which toughened him up, but it was also one that makes you wonder how Modric was able to make it as a professional footballer at all, let alone play for arguably the most famous club in the world.
 

The book, co-authored by journalist Robert Matteoni, covers a lot of ground: from the lows of toiling away in the badlands of the Bosnian league to the highs of winning multiple European Cups and taking a country of four million people to the final of the World Cup. Modric writes about it all with a childish innocence, even if that comes at the cost of the book seeming a touch puerile in its construction. But then again, this makes up a big chunk of the Modric phenomenon — he brings simplicity and humility to everything he does.
 

As someone who’s inherently smart and good at absorbing information, Modric’s memory is exceptional. He talks about war, living in exile, being turned away by clubs because of his size, among other things, in great detail, opening up on his difficult beginnings at such length for perhaps the first time. “My heart breaks every time I think of (my grandfather) dying, literally on his doorstep,” he says, adding that when he was 10 and his third-grade teacher asked the class to write an essay on a topic that had had an impact on them, he wrote about his grandpa’s death and guns and grenades.
 

The most startling part here, however, is not what Modric endured, but how he feels no bitterness at what happened. Modric never hints at hate or revenge in the book, instead stressing that this was something that war made him go through.
 

Personal hardship aside, the book comes with some enjoyable football stories as well. A particularly good one involves Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, who Modric met at the oligarch’s yacht in Nice at the end of the 2010-11 season. A secret rendezvous — enlivened by the fact that Abramovich’s security detail is perhaps only next to Vladimir Putin’s — the two discussed a possible switch from Tottenham Hotspur, a move that was blocked by the predictably bolshie Daniel Levy, the Spurs Chairman. There are also bits about how Mourinho once almost made Cristiano Ronaldo cry, and why Carlo Ancelotti is every player’s dream manager.
 

And if you’ve ever wondered how Zinedine Zidane has been able to achieve such ridiculous success as coach despite possessing no conventional managerial traits, Modric has an explanation: the Frenchman is a great motivator and his tactics are straightforward, things his Real Madrid players respond rather well to.
 

All of that, though, doesn’t do enough to mitigate a problem common to many football autobiographies: the annoying tendency to reduce a book to a series of match reports. Modric does a fair bit of that, sometimes failing to give enough insight into what goes behind in the glossy universe of the modern footballer that is usually cut off from the casual fan. More depth into how he thinks and views the game would also have been welcome, especially given that Modric has always operated at a different sporting plane to his peers.
 

There are some odd mentions, too. That Modri· is a big basketball fan is well known, but him describing former Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade — someone almost his age — as “one of his idols” seems a bit bizarre.
 

Expectedly, the book lifts when Modric talks about Croatia’s World Cup adventure, the crippling disappointment of which is evident in Modric’s writing. Modric well understands the value of opportunity, because he grew up in a land where there was very little. Croatia may never go that far in a World Cup again, and that’s why the loss to France hurts Modric even today. But Modric, as his autobiography reveals, is also incredibly positive, a man constantly looking to improve. That will, perhaps, be his defining legacy on the pitch as well: a player who spent much his life making the best better, but in the process, became the best himself.