The Premier League 60: No 51, Luka Modric

Running each day until the new season begins, The Premier League 60 is designed to reflect and honour the greatest players to have graced and illuminated the English top flight in the modern era, as voted for by our writers.

You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order (they didn’t), but we hope you’ll enjoy their stories. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to the series here.

So, how did he do it? How did skinny little Luka Modric, the boy genius Tottenham Hotspur signed from Dinamo Zagreb, look so out of place on his arrival in the Premier League, only to then master it? Not even out wide or as a No 10, but right there in the middle of the pitch, as the scampering heart and brain of Harry Redknapp’s 4-4-2?

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The answer is in his calves.

“In training, you couldn’t get the ball off him,” Jamie O’Hara once told me, speaking about a man he played alongside for Spurs. “Even though he was so small, his calves were like bricks. He was so strong and had this low centre of gravity.”

Remember what English football was like in the early years of Modric? He arrived in 2008, towards the end of an era best described by Jorge Valdano, who said that Chelsea’s Champions League semi-final against Liverpool in 2005 was just “shit on a stick”. Argentina international turned respected football writer Valdano said that tie represented the domestic game’s worst trends of the decade: “Very intense, very collective, very tactical, very physical, and very direct.”

The leading midfielders of this Premier League era were all big, powerful guys who charged around the pitch, imposing their physicality on their opponents. Frank Lampard. Steven Gerrard. Michael Essien. Darren Fletcher. Michael Ballack. The closest things in English football to a playmaker were Paul Scholes and a young Cesc Fabregas, who had both learned to make up for their lack of stature by giving as good as they got.

So, when Tottenham director of football Damien Comolli used to think during the Martin Jol and Juande Ramos eras about how to get the club into the top four, he might easily have decided that was the direction in which he wanted to take them: more shit on a bigger stick.

But Comolli had other ideas. He had been looking at the stats of Jol’s side, which had managed fifth-placed finishes in 2005-06 and 2006-07 but not taken that next step. And Comolli decided that their way into the Champions League was more technique and skill. Spurs were not scoring highly for successful passes in the final third or percentage of possession in the opponent’s half. In 2006, they signed Dimitar Berbatov from Bayer Leverkusen, and in 2007, Gareth Bale from Southampton.

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When it came to finding Modric, the key man was Riccardo Pecini, a young Italian scout whom Comolli brought to the club in 2005. Pecini went on to work for Monaco in the early years of the Dmitry Rybolovlev era and is now the chief scout for Sampdoria, but back then, he was working for Comolli in Italy and the Balkans.

And it was there that Pecini first set eyes on Modric playing for Dinamo Zagreb. Watch clips of Modric from back then and he already has all the skills that would make him one of the greatest midfielders of his generation: the balance, the first touch, the deceptive burst of pace. But he was even slighter then than when he was at Spurs or Real Madrid. And long before there was a debate about whether he could cut it in England, there was even a debate about whether he had the physicality to cut it in Croatia. As a teenager, Dinamo sent him on loan to Zrinjski Mostar in the rougher Bosnian league to toughen him up.

But by the age of 20, Modric was a star for Dinamo. Pecini was instantly convinced and when Comolli watched him, he too “fell in love”. Tottenham thought they were on to something, so in November 2007, they went to see him again, this time at Wembley in the European Championship qualifier against England most famous for Steve McClaren having the temerity to use an umbrella when it was raining. Spurs were convinced but when they tried to do a deal with Dinamo president Zdravko Mamic in the January transfer window, they got nowhere.

Comolli knew that the longer the 2007-08 season went on, the greater the chance he would be beaten to Modric. Sven-Goran Eriksson’s Manchester City and Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United were both keen and Barcelona wanted him too — but the Catalans had doubts about whether Modric could make the step up to their level straight away. So, one day that April, Comolli told Daniel Levy he was anxious about losing the player, and the risk of a year’s worth of scouting work ending up in the bin. Levy flew straight to Zagreb on a private jet. At 3am next morning, he called Comolli. He had a deal with Mamic for £16.5 million — Modric was coming to White Hart Lane.

But even after a brilliant showing for Slaven Bilic’s Croatia at Euro 2008, there were still doubts about whether he could cut it in England. Comolli remembers being “slaughtered” at the time for believing that little Luka Modric could deliver in England. “He’s too small, too weak, doesn’t score goals, doesn’t make goals” — Comolli remembers all the criticisms.

When Redknapp replaced Ramos, he imagined Modric as his new version of former West Ham United and Portsmouth midfielder Eyal Berkovic — a player to get on the ball in between the lines, whether from the wing or playing off a striker. And in his first season, that was how he played. There were flashes of brilliance, those beautiful little touches, the stepover to create space, a winning goal against Chelsea — first time, from the edge of the box — but he did not look like a player in control of his environment quite yet.

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The question with Modric had always been whether he could be trusted to handle playing in a midfield two. When Redknapp took over, he was reluctant to use him there. But with the emergence of Bale as a left winger rather than a left-back, Redknapp’s options were limited. And despite the protestations of his coaching staff, he decided to take the risk. It was one of the most important moments in Modric’s career, and one that he remembered at its glamorous climax.

There was Modric, playing in the middle of Spurs’ 4-4-2, alongside either Tom Huddlestone or Wilson Palacios. And it worked better than anybody could have expected. All of the fears that he might not be able to handle it melted away. As the Spurs players found out in training, there was more to Modric than first met the eye. Just because he was small, it did not mean he could be pushed off the ball. Remember those big calves? And if he could survive in training, he could do it in a match, up against opposition midfielders twice his size.

Of course, it helped that Modric was a bona fide football genius. O’Hara remembers that he had an innate first touch. “He knew where to take it, whether you were coming from the left, coming from the right, diving in, or standing him up.” Huddlestone remembers the way Modric could pass the ball with the outside of his boot, and how his calmness under pressure meant he could wriggle out of any situation. But all that skill was done in the service of a brilliant footballing mind. “He knew what he was going to do with the ball three passes before he even got it,” O’Hara says.

Tottenham with Modric in midfield were a different prospect. Not many Premier League clubs were brave enough to play this way, but Redknapp was, and Spurs were rewarded for it. In the 2009-10 season, they finished fourth, qualifying for the Champions League for the first time. It was their best league finish for 20 years and Comolli’s prediction — that Modric could guide Spurs into the Champions League — came true, two years after he was sacked by the club.

Modric had earned his chance in the Champions League with Tottenham and it was immediately obvious he was made for that level.

When reigning European champions Inter Milan came to White Hart Lane, Modric and Huddlestone controlled the game in midfield, providing the perfect platform for Bale to do his damage. The first goal was made by Modric, driving forward, skipping past Sulley Muntari with a stepover, playing a delightful reverse pass between Lucio and Javier Zanetti for Rafael van der Vaart to convert. When Werder Bremen visited, Modric scored his first Champions League goal for Spurs. Under his magical guidance, they were on their way to the quarter-finals, the club’s greatest European season since winning the UEFA Cup in 1984.

Modric was so good that year — winning Spurs’ player of the season award — that it became evident they could not keep hold of him forever. Sir Alex Ferguson loved Modric but Manchester United were reluctant after the long negotiations with Levy to sign Berbatov five years earlier. Modric nearly went to Chelsea that summer, but Levy dug in his heels. So Modric stayed for one more year, guiding Spurs to another fourth-place finish. It was only Chelsea’s miracle win in the final that denied Tottenham another Champions League season.

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But it was time for Modric to go and he moved to Real Madrid in August 2012 for £30 million. Everyone who had believed in him up until that point — Pecini, Comolli, Levy and Redknapp — was vindicated more than they could have dreamed. In eight years at the Bernabeu, Modric has won two La Liga titles and four Champions Leagues, orchestrating Real Madrid’s play from the middle of the pitch, just as he had done at Spurs.

And in December 2018, Modric was awarded the Ballon d’Or, the first man not called Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo to win it since Kaka in 2007 — back when Modric was still a youngster in Zagreb. It was Modric’s reward for a remarkable career, and for guiding Croatia to the World Cup final that summer.

When Modric picked up the prize in Paris, he was interviewed on stage by former Spurs playmaker David Ginola. Asked about that transition from playing as a No 10 in his youth to the all-action midfielder who ran games, Modric recalled that moment, eight years before, when Redknapp decided that size was not the only thing that mattered in his midfield.

“This change of positions, it has helped me a lot in my development,” Modric told Ginola.

“Before, I used to play more offensively. But when I dropped back, I could read the game better, show my creativity more, and more aspects of my game. Who did the change? It was my second year at Tottenham, when Harry Redknapp was in charge. He put me in the middle. From there, I was playing central midfield.”

(Photos: Getty Images)

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