Croatia captain Luka Modric, who left Real Madrid after 13 years at the La Liga club, has completed his move to AC Milan on a one-year deal with an option to extend until June 2027, the Serie A side said on Monday.
The midfielder’s arrival was confirmed by new AC Milan head coach Massimiliano Allegri earlier this month.
“Very happy to be here to start a new chapter in my career,” said Modric, who turns 40 in September, in an Instagram video shared by AC Milan.
Photo: AFP
AC Milan said that Modric would wear the No. 14 shirt, which he previously wore during his four years at English side Tottenham Hotspur to honor Dutch great Johan Cruyff.
“It’s an immense honor for them to compare me to [Cruyff]... I wore the No. 14 at Tottenham in honor of him, and because the No. 10 wasn’t available,” Modric had said after winning the Ballon d’Or in 2018.
Modric, regarded as one of the greatest midfielders of all time, announced in May that he would leave Real Madrid after the FIFA Club World Cup. He has made 597 appearances for the Spanish club, winning 28 trophies, including four La Liga and six UEFA Champions League titles.
He played his last game for Real Madrid on Wednesday last week, coming on as a second-half substitute during a 4-0 loss to Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup semi-finals.
“It’s a bitter end ... he’s a legend of world football and of Real Madrid. He’ll be remembered for many more good things than for the 25 minutes he played today,” Real Madrid head coach Xabi Alonso said after the match.
Modric, considered Croatia’s greatest player of all time, has represented the country a record 188 times, scoring 28 goals. He won the Golden Ball at FIFA World Cup 2018, where he led Croatia to the final for the first time.
He won the Ballon d’Or in December that year, becoming the first player other than Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo to win the prestigious annual award since 2007.
Modric’s arrival reinforces an AC Milan midfield that also features Youssouf Fofana, Yunus Musah and Ruben Loftus-Cheek, with Samuele Ricci joining from Torino earlier this month.
AC Milan, who failed to qualify for a European competition after finishing eighth in the Italian top-flight last season, begin their Serie A campaign against promoted US Cremonese on Aug. 23.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS