Luka Modrić

Modrić's 2018 Ballon d'Or was the first in a decade not inscribed Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo — ten uninterrupted years of the two greatest careers in history, ended by a midfield general of 1.72m from a country of four million. The résumé: a third consecutive Champions League with Real Madrid, the tournament's engine, and then the World Cup in Russia, where Croatia — population smaller than Berlin's — reached the final through three consecutive extra-time wars, Modrić pulling every string and named the tournament's best player.

His game is time manipulation: receiving in crowds as if they were rumours, releasing before the press arrives, the outside-of-the-boot pass as signature. The childhood is the ballast — a refugee childhood in the war that broke his country, his grandfather dead in it, football resumed on car-park gravel. The award's modern chapter will list the duopoly as its weather; Modrić is remembered as the man who, for one year, changed it.