Luka Modric #10

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Two decades with the national team the once-generational player is closing in on 200 caps - an obscene number. The captain has still got it, at the age of 40, and has been a key player for Milan this season. The national team coach, Zlatko Dalic, calls him “the engine of this team”. Also the most-decorated player in Real Madrid’s history, having won 28 trophies despite only joining them shortly before his 27th birthday. Modric really is larger-than-life and his personality is complex and layered, from the war child-come-Ballon d’Or story to his legal troubles. “What people don’t realise about Luka,” said the late Tomislav Basic, one of Modric’s early coaches whom the player called his “second father”, “is that he is largely self-taught. For many days and months, this under-nourished, small kid played with the ball by himself in a parking lot by a refugee hotel, banging it against the wall and then controlling it.” This was where his trademark moves, like the outside-of-the-foot trivela or the half-turn when receiving the ball, came to be.

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