Asked to pick, he declined
Luka Modric wants no part of the debate. Spanish daily AS caught up with him at Milanello, AC Milan’s training base, and the Croatian midfielder refused to put a single name forward for the next Ballon d’Or.
“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t want to name anyone or say who deserves it most,” he said. “People will vote and decide the winner. There are plenty of contenders, from Real Madrid and other teams. We’ll see who comes out on top. I’d rather not give names.”
The shortlist writes itself anyway. Kylian Mbappe, Rodri and Jude Bellingham are the three names that dominate most projections.
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The award that broke a ten-year grip
Modric has been through this. His 2018 win closed out a decade in which Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi had passed the trophy back and forth between them.
He still calls it “the biggest individual prize there is”. And he keeps returning to the context of that night. He beat Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar and Karim Benzema, having come from a country with almost no weight in the game’s power structures.
That part matters to him. Players from football’s smaller nations almost never get near the ballot.
Bellingham gets the compliments, not the endorsement
On Jude Bellingham, Modric was warmer. “From day one, I saw something different in him,” the former Real Madrid man said.
He sees a future leader, and he liked what he saw at the World Cup and in the England midfielder’s start to the season. But the praise stops short of a public vote.
Modric plays his football at Milan now, a long way from the glare he lived under in Madrid.
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