#croatiantedit

The Best Shirt in the World - Ivan Rakitic for the Players Tribune

The moment my dad took them out of the box, my brother and I knew.…

We were never going to take them off.

Of course, when the box first arrived at our house in Switzerland, we didn’t know what was inside. Scribbled on the top was a return address in Croatia. It was a place we called home, but it was also a place that neither my brother nor I had ever been to before.  

We spoke Croatian in the house, and there were plenty of Croatians in our town in Switzerland. But Croatia was still something remote to me. My parents had left when the war broke out in 1991 and we hadn’t ever gone back. My brother, Dejan, and I were born in Switzerland. The Croatia we knew was the one that we saw on on the TV, and in the photos that my parents showed us.

And the phone conversations we’d over hear them having on the telephone.

We slept in those shirts. We wore them to school the next day. And the day after that. We didn’t want to take them off. Wow, we have the Croatian shirt. The white-and-red checkers, but no name on the back. We wanted 10 of them because we didn’t want to wear anything else. They were so special to us.

When I started playing myself, I wasn’t wearing the Croatian shirt. I was wearing the jersey of my other home, Switzerland. I have to be honest … I tell people, “I’m a Swiss guy.” And that always gets strange looks. “Swiss? Ivan Rakitic?” But I was born in Switzerland, I grew up in Switzerland, I went to school in Switzerland, my friends are from Switzerland.

And so I was really proud to wear the Switzerland shirt for five years when I was playing with the youth teams.

But the biggest part of my heart belongs to Croatia. It always has.

To be honest, there was a time when I thought I’d never play for anybody else but Switzerland. I never thought it was a possibility. I came up playing for Switzerland. That was my team. But 10 years ago Slaven Bilić and the president of the Croatian football federation came to watch me play in Basel. We met afterwards to talk.

Sitting in my room, I still didn’t know what I was going to do. I kept going back and forth and thinking about all the people who had gotten me to where I was. And then I just thought about what was in my heart. 

It’s funny, I’m a lot older now than I was when that box arrived at our house. But I still never want to take the shirt off. There’s a pressure that comes with wearing that shirt. But it’s a good pressure, I think. You want to show the world what Croatia can do. You want to carry on the work of players like Slaven and Davor Šuker.

As you may have read before, my own family has grown in different countries as well. My wife is Spanish, and we’ve been raising our two daughters in Barcelona. It’s special because my daughters have the same experience that I did — of being from a different country and seeing life in different ways. And my little girls are my biggest fans, for sure.

So before the tournament started, I had a very special order I needed to make…

And I came home one day with a box for them. Two new Croatian shirts.

They told me that they never want to take them off. 

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                                              world cup 2018 ›› teams 7/32

(international friendly - march 27, 2018)