Modric risks too much always playing for Milan?

Luka Modric does not want to call the accountant for the calculation of contributions. At 40, he prefers to play that going retired and the world thanks: he sees him fight like a boy. Apparently effort is not heard and not by chance Modric in these days is with the Croatian national team, which he has always kept a lot: he does not stop. This season with Milan, Luka stays on the pitch for 77 minutes per game, as in the previous four years it had never happened. Allegri makes him play owner and replaces him only when the game is on ice. Notice to evolution: Modric at Real played 76 minutes per game in 2021-22, 61 minutes in 2022-23, 49 minutes in 2023-24, 47 minutes last season. A descending curve: less and less. Allegri reversed the trend.

The numbers of Modric 40 years old

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The question is automatic: does Luka like this risk falling into the performance or even getting hurt? Immediately, instinctively, a reason to fear and one to stay calm. The forties who played in Serie A are few, very few: Ibrahimovic, Totti, Zanetti, Costacurta, Quagliarella, goalkeepers such as Buffon and Ballotta. Modric must cross an almost uncontaminated territory: find traces of some past explorer from there, not a travel manual tested by the groups. For Milan it is more calmly to think that, without cups, those 77 minutes weigh less. Luka does not have to play 77 minutes twice a week – it would be impossible – but it can manage from weekends to weekend. Calculate what is on average on average in a week helps to understand. Modric this season played 539 minutes with Milan and 107 with Croatia: calculated that the season has started for seven weeks, we are 92 minutes on average per week. The last seasons are on similar levels: 70 and 82 minutes every seven days in the last two vintages with Madrid, 100 minutes in 2022-23, 95 minutes in 2021-22. The cups, of course, weigh on the calculation.

Andreini’s opinion

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Giovanni Andreini, former athletic trainer of the national team with Donadoni and Head of Juventus performance until September, helps us to understand why Luka can afford to play so much at 40 years old. “Modric has never had serious injuries, she is serious and Madrid had a phenomenal trainer like Antonio Pintus, who will surely have been very good at privileging the individual aspect of the player”. As for the management of the season and the risk of a drop, the optimism of the Milan players is justified: “I believe it is above all a mental, stimuli and request issue that a coach makes -says Andreini -. If a 40 -year -old like Modric ask to play 90 minutes Box to box, they can be born difficulties. From playmaker instead it is everything different: if you manage sleep and nutrition, you are halfway through the work. As he managed in his career I would not invent anything.

Modric’s secret

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So, forward. In recent years Modric has always worked with a personal trainer and a phrase from Pintus returns to mind, in an interview with the Gazzetta: “Luka has a desire to work, a predisposition to the effort and a hunger for victories that never end. These, even more than the physical part, are the engine of its longevity”. Between the lines, there is a message for everyone: it matters what you don’t see. Modric has an apparently normal but actually out of the ordinary physique: who else has played twenty years without large drops and with very few injuries? With the field, it is the same: to make a good impression on Sunday evening on TV, it matters what you do from Monday to Friday, when nobody watches you.