The midfielder is grateful for his opportunity at Sevilla, which led to a chance meeting with his now wife, but is desperate to build on last season’s treble win at Camp Nou
It was love at first sight. Late January 2011 and Ivan Rakitic had just arrived at the Hotel Lebreros, 50 metres from the Sánchez Pizjuán stadium. He was 22, had been in Spain two hours and the next morning was due to have a medical, meet the president and, if all went well, sign for Sevilla. Other suitors had not given up though. Rakitic was nervous, it was gone midnight and he could not sleep, so he headed down to the bar for a coffee, “like that was going to help”. And that was when he saw Raquel.
“She brought me my coffee,” Rakitic remembers, sitting on a sofa at Barcelona’s Sant Joan Despí training ground. He has been talking for almost an hour, looking forward and looking back, when the story comes up. “It was 27 January, there were still four days of the transfer window left and there were lots of calls, movement. Another team phoned. They were prepared to lay on a private plane for me to go and sign for them. But I said to my brother: ‘No, I’ve given my word to Sevilla’s president … and I’m going to marry that waitress’.”
Did you tell her that? “I did later,” he grins, raising his wedding ring finger. Ivan and Raquel married at a civil ceremony 2013 and held their celebration this summer, a month after the Champions League final, heading to the Maldives on honeymoon immediately after. It had been quite a year. And it all began in Seville. “Hollywood,” Rakitic says. “The very first night.”
“I lived at the hotel for three months and I’d go for a coffee every day: ‘Un café con leche y una Fanta naranja, por favor.’” Rakitic already spoke Croatian, German and English, plus some French and Italian, but he says that was all he knew how to say in Spanish. Now, he speaks the language with a Seville accent. He picked it up quickly, he had to. “I started talking to her but she never wanted to go out with me. ‘I can’t, I have to work.’ She was wary of footballers: here one day, gone the next but I kept trying and in August a friend tipped me off. She was in the hotel bar but not on duty. I jumped in the car and drove straight there: ‘You’re not working now’.”
Raquel watched Rakitic take his first steps off the pitch – “this guy who didn’t understand anything and could barely say buenos días” – while her family watched him take his first steps on it. “They’re very Sevillista,” he explains. “When my wife’s grandfather was dying, he was seriously ill in hospital, they undressed him but when they got to his Sevilla watch he insisted: ‘No, no, the watch stays on.’ He died wearing it.”
Rakitic signed from Schalke for €2.5m and scored an own goal in his second match. Three years later, he was the club’s first overseas captain since Diego Maradona and had scored 34 goals in 149 games. In 2013-14, his final season, he racked up 15 goals and 17 assists and led his team to the Europa League, and was man of the match in the final. His daughter, Althea, was born in the city. One Sevilla team-mate claimed Rakitic sang her to sleep with the club’s anthem.
Last summer, though, he left. Things have not gone badly since – for either player or club. Rakitic was their most significant player, as an attacking midfielder and a defensive one, but Sevilla defended the Europa League without him and qualified for the Champions League. Rakitic joined Barcelona for €22m (£15.5m) and won the treble, scoring the opener in the European Cup final. And so it is that they meet again in the European Super Cup in Tbilisi on Tuesday night.
The reception will be good. Sevilla sell well and sell happily, a model led by the sporting director Monchi – “he’s crazy, he knows everything,” Rakitic says – and the Croat left the right way. “I was honest with Sevilla, very open. I told them that I wanted to join Barcelona but only if they were happy. I wanted Sevilla to say yes.”
And if they had said no? “I’d have renewed. But it was Barcelona – not just recognition for me, recognition for Sevilla. They’d given me so much. I was the blond kid from Germany who ended up captain, the first foreigner since Maradona. Imagine that. I wanted to treat them like they’d treated me. ‘Let’s do it, but together’. They used the money to strengthen and that pleases me. Sevilla are so important in my life: I met my wife there, our daughter was born there, we have a home there and we’ll go back. It was important the president could say: ‘Ivan, we’re happy’.”
When Rakitic returned to the Sánchez Pizjuán in April, a banner declared: “This will always be your home. Thank you, captain.” He was handed a standing ovation, eventually heading down the tunnel in a state of undress, Barcelona kit thrown to the Sevilla fans.
Changing teams has not always been so nice, Rakitic knows. Born and raised in Switzerland, he played for his home country at under-17, under-19 and under-21 level but then choose to represent Croatia, a country he had never lived in and one that did not exist when he was born.
“When my dad was 20 he was an amateur footballer and he had the opportunity to get out of a dangerous area [of Yugoslavia],” Rakitic says. “My father is Croatian but went to school in Bosnia and my mother’s also Croatian but lived in Bosnia. The war hadn’t started – this was 1985 and the war didn’t begin until 1992 – but the tension was growing and anyone who could build a life elsewhere did.”
Rakitic’s father headed for Switzerland, where he met a police chief who was the president of the football club in the small town of Mohlin, near the border. He got a job on a building site and Rakitic’s mother and older brother joined him soon afterwards. Rakitic was born there in 1988. “The war was getting closer and my parents didn’t return home, which was now really dangerous,” he says.
“Thankfully, I didn’t experience the war but it leaves a mark; it still touches you. I was a kid, four or five years old and my parents tried to protect me. They made sure I didn’t see the news reports, or some of the footage. We were in Switzerland, that was where my home was. I was starting school, a kid who didn’t understand what was happening but as you get older you become aware; you look into it, read about it, hear stories. I don’t fully understand the politics and I’m not a specialist, nor do I want to be, but I know what happened. With the national team I’ve visited areas that suffered. It’s important to look to the future and leave the past behind. But of course you want to know more: it’s your history and your people.”
Rakitic joined his people in 2007. “A part of me feels very Swiss: I follow Swiss sports – curling, for example – and I support Swiss teams. I love Roger Federer,” he says. But his idol was Robert Prosinecki and he says: “Playing for Croatia meant following my heart. I didn’t think: ‘With this team I’ll play more’. That thought-process is for club football. The first thing I did was call the Swiss FA, and [coach] Köbi Kuhn, to tell them my decision.”
They understood; others did not. “Some supporters sent me [doctored] photos, some wished me dead, there were death threats. They called my home, knocked on the door. There was a lot of fuss which I didn’t think was necessary,” he says. Then he grins and the cheerfulness that is never far away returns. “Another way of looking at it is that they wanted me to play for them so much and that was their way of showing it.”
That would be one way of looking at it, yes. Rakitic is smiling again. Outside, through the window, the sun is shining and a lawn mower slowly traces lines on the training pitch named after Tito Vilanova.
“You’re here to enjoy yourself,” Rakitic says. “Changing from Sevilla to Barça is huge in every sense, and it’s not easy, but having a private life so full of love helps. I get strength from my two girls. And my philosophy is: enjoy it. In this profession, you do what you most like in the world and to be able to do that at the biggest club in the world … I come into work with a smile and I go home with a smile.”
Not that it has always been easy. For much of last season, debate engulfed a team who some feared were losing their religion. Javier Mascherano had talked about having to “relearn” how to play football when he arrived at Barcelona in 2010, and Rakitic would recognise that difficulty in part. More to the point, this was a different Barcelona – or was becoming one – and not everyone was enamoured.
As the man who came to replace Xavi, the captain and ideologue, Rakitic was part of that, not just a different midfielder but a different type of midfielder. Until January, results were disappointing and the debate was often pointed. Sometimes, it was pointed his way. There was a shift in focus at Camp Nou: a team recently defined by their midfield became defined by that forward line.
“People say: ‘Ah, how great that you have those three up front, they make things easy.’ But it’s not always like that, trust me,” Rakitic says. “Pick 100 coaches and you’ll have 100 ways of doing things, [although] it is true that Barcelona have a very clear idea of how to play established over years. The way we bring the ball out from the back here is very similar to Sevilla but the quality and the intensity is different, [and] the biggest difference is here you dominate every game. We made adjustments too. We started with Leo [Messi] as a false No9, then he went to the wing. We kept improving, together.
“Leo’s not the best player around at the moment, he’s the best player in history. Neymar is very young but can always make the difference, and Luis [Suárez] is the same. They’ve earned the right for the team to play for them but that doesn’t make it easy. They condition the play. We press high to win the ball 20 metres from goal, not 50, so they have one or two players in front of them, instead of five. You work towards them. But that’s fine – if we have to run 5,000 or 10,000 metres for them, then we’ll do it. There are lots of great players but you only have one Leo and you look after him. If I can help them to play a little better, perfect.”
And replacing Xavi? The pressure, the weight, must have been huge. “Quite the opposite” he says. “I wanted to make the most of my time with the greatest midfielder we have; working with him, learning from him. I’m thankful for that year we had: not just because of what you learn on the pitch but in the dressing room – respect, humility, how to work with the physios, how to prepare.”
Captain at the Sánchez Pizjuán, Rakitic was not going to lead at the Camp Nou yet and, no, he smiles, he did not vote for himself in last week’s elections to choose a fourth captain at the Camp Nou. He is quieter in the dressing room but that does not mean he is lacking confidence. “I understand hierarchy,” he says. “I don’t think there’ll be anyone like Xavi again but I also wanted to be me. With respect to Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, I’m Ivan Rakitic. I had to give what I have got. I wanted to learn but also to put my stamp on things.”
In the Berlin final, he did. It did not always look likely but Rakitic’s first campaign ultimately could not have gone better. “The season is very long and a thousand things can happen. Until December the best team was Madrid, but everything can change,” he says. A run began in January and ended with Barcelona winning the treble, Rakitic scoring the first goal against Juventus.
In the stands of the Olympic Stadium, Rakitic’s daughter fell asleep but not until her dad had scored. She woke for the celebrations. “I love the fact that whenever she sees of football she says ‘Papa’. It doesn’t matter who’s playing: the green of the pitch, the ball and it’s ‘Papa’. She follows me with her finger on the screen. After the final, I took her on to the pitch. It was very special for my first season to go like that.”
The second begins against Sevilla. “I think, and hope, that they’ll have a great year … after this game,” Rakitic says, smiling. And Barcelona? “It will be difficult in the sense that everyone is going to come after us but our idea doesn’t change and we have the opportunity to win three more trophies before the end of the year.
“I’ve got team-mates who’ve won I don’t know how many medals and I want that too. I want to enjoy it and make the most of it. You can twist your ankle coming down the stairs and, suddenly, it ends. The hunger never fades and if we relax they’ll come for us. That’s why when I went on my honeymoon, I was in the gym preparing for pre-season.”
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