VIDEO: Rare Footage of a 5-Year-Old Luka Modric Herding Goats on Velebit Mountain

Luka Modric as a 5-year-old (Pavle Balenovic/Screenshot)

Some rare footage of Croatian captain Luka Modric when he was a 5-year-old boy.

Modric will captain Croatia in the nation’s historic first ever World Cup Final against France where he will be organising Croatia’s midfield, but 28 years ago organising goats on Velebit mountain was his biggest task.

Pavle Balenovic captured Modric whilst filming a wildlife documentary but only recently realised that the boy in his video was the Real Madrid superstar.

Luka Modric (HNS)

“The Modric family, they used to be quite decent, nice people. I visited them whenever I went filming the wildlife in the mountains. So I took the shots of my friend and his son collecting their herd of goats, closing the pen and some scenes directed as It was planned for editing a wolf documentary. It was back in 1990 just a while before the war destroyed their home. The war changed everything and I haven’t seen anymore. They moved away. Then just a few years ago I got some information on who the small boy collecting his father’s herd in my episode is. That boy became a famous Croatian soccer player – Luka Modric,” Pavle writes.

“He hasn’t seen these shots (taken back in 1989-1990) because this is the first time they are published. After the war, a lot of mines were left what destroyed the image of whole the mountain area. Today the area changed even more.

The construction of the new highway lasted a few years what ruined the peace the local wildlife needed to live in,” he said in 2017.

Check out the footage below from the 2:30 mark.