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BALAGUE EXCLUSIVE: Ivan Rakitic talks about how he met his wife, and being an architect

Ivan Rakitic is a man whose dedication to hard work has catapulted him to one of the biggest sides in world football. From humble beginnings as his family were forced to move from war-torn Croatia, he’s arrived to the top of the footballing ladder but doesn’t forget his roots and takes nothing for granted.

Ivan Rakitic
Ivan Rakitic

This is a man that approaches everything with a huge smile on his face. He’s doing the very thing he loves, every day, and knows that. “I think the most important thing is to live your life now so I don’t want to say where I want to be or what will happen in some days or some years, I’m happy to be here. You never know what could happen tomorrow so you have to enjoy the life.”

His parents were forced to move from their home of Croatia as war broke out and they sought refugee in Switzerland, where Rakitic himself was born. He studied to be an architect but his main passion was always football. He was noticed by a lot of European team’s scouts but his family decided it would be better both academically and in a sporting sense to remain in Basel so he could gain more playing time.

The first people he wanted to impress were his father and older brother, both footballers and later Croatian legend Robert Prosinečki, who he had an opportunity to work with for Croatia national side. And it’s that family lineage, which made a difference in his career; “I think the most important thing with football is that you have to do it since you’re a baby. You have to like it, you can’t say at 15 ‘now I want to be a footballer’ - it isn’t as easy as maybe other sports (to start late). Some days when I was 14-15, when you want to go out with your friends, my father would tell me I needed to go to train. Family is the most important thing.”

He acknowledges how hard it can be for his family due to their life being dominated by football. “When you go home it’s sometimes important not to talk about football, but to speak about what happened your children’s school.” But he admits it’s hard as a ‘crazy’ fan of football to do that all the time. “I arrive home and I like to see the games in the Premier League, or Serie A – I like football! Sometimes my wife has to tell me let’s go out, no more television.”

He met his wife after persistently asking her out for dinner over the course of seven months. When he first met her he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and her English wasn’t great either, so conversation was difficult. “I had to learn Spanish in two months!” He had a coffee in the same bar just so he could talk with her. “I arrived in Seville and everything was strange. “I was just happy to go into the bar to see her.” One day she was on her day off and finally accepted his invitation to go out with him. When asked if she said yes just to shut him up or because she really liked him by that point he jokingly answered, “It’s maybe better to ask her!”

He doesn’t feel guilty about the impact football has had on his family and social life as he sees the career of a footballer to be relatively short. “My work is different to other people’s work. Tomorrow I could make a bad step and it’s finished. The career (of a footballer) is maybe 10-15 years and then it stops. You never know what happens after that.” Rakitic’s current plan is to give back all the time his family have afforded to him once his playing career is over. It’s easy to see how important family is to the Croatian international.

On the back of a bad result, he prefers to spend time with his daughter as opposed to over analyse every detail or what went wrong. “I put football to the side, pick up my daughter and play with her Barbie or something.” Rakitic is a keen believer that if you don’t have everything in order off the pitch, it’ll affect your game. “You’re much, much better on the pitch if everything is okay at home. You’re only here for three or four hours and spend the other twenty at home. If you’re angry in those twenty hours at home, (when you go to training) there isn’t a button that you can press and say now I’m happy.”

He also likes to be just one extra member of the community in Barcelona as well, living in the centre of the city. “I like to be with the people. I like to have a normal life like everybody: I go to buy bread, go to the park with my daughter out my dog.” Unlike other footballers that prefer to live outside the inner city bubble, it’s Raktic’s basic humanness which endears him to both the Barcelona fans, but also fans of other teams.