People have been trying to retire Luka Modric for more than six years. It was in the aftermath of the 2018 World Cup that friends first gently began to broach the subject: his contemporaries Mario Mandzukic and Vedran Corluka had called it a day after Croatia’s defeat in the final, and Modric himself knew there would be a certain elegiac poetry in taking his curtain call at the moment of his country’s greatest achievement. Plaudits ringing in his ears, the Golden Ball in his grasp. Leave them wanting more, and all that. But still, something in him rebelled.
“My heart told me to stay,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “Playing for your national team is one of the most fulfilling experiences; I still want to feel it. I feel fit and motivated. It’s true that retiring after the silver medal in Russia would have left the biggest impression. But I don’t care much about impressions.”
