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Miralem Pjanic: ’We Were in Danger. Football Wasn’t the Most Important Thing’

Miralem Pjanic chats with Paolo Bandini in Turin. Photograph: Daniele Badolato - Juventus FC/Getty Images
Miralem Pjanic chats with Paolo Bandini in Turin. Photograph: Daniele Badolato - Juventus FC/Getty Images
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Miralem Pjanic: ’We Were in Danger. Football Wasn’t the Most Important Thing’

Miralem Pjanic chats with Paolo Bandini in Turin. Photograph: Daniele Badolato - Juventus FC/Getty Images
Miralem Pjanic chats with Paolo Bandini in Turin. Photograph: Daniele Badolato - Juventus FC/Getty Images

Fahrudin Pjanic knew war was coming. As a footballer for FK Drina Zvornik in the Yugoslavian third division, he travelled around the country enough to see the social and political tensions that were building in the early 1990s. As the father of a newborn son, Miralem, his instinct was to get his family out before the worst happened.

Friends in Luxembourg put him in touch with a semi-professional club, Schifflange, who offered him a part-time contract and help finding a job to pay the bills. To take up that opportunity, however, Fahrudin would need Zvornik to release him and provide the paperwork required to travel.

Twice he went to speak with the club secretary and twice he came away empty-handed. Desperate, his wife Fatima went to try for herself, carrying their baby in her arms.

Miralem Pjanic was too young to know what was going on, but the story has become family lore. “My mother wanted us to leave, absolutely, but still the club said no,” he recalls. “Then I started to cry. It upset the secretary so much that finally they said, ‘OK, I’ll do it just for this little kid’.”

That kid is now 28 years old and a key component of a Juventus side preparing for Tuesday’s Champions League visit to Old Trafford. Those unknowing tears changed his life forever, freeing his parents to take him to Luxembourg, where he grew up in safety while hundreds of his fellow Bosniaks were being killed in Zvornik, and thousands more driven from their homes.

Sitting across the table in a meeting room at Juventus’s new team headquarters in the Continassa neighbourhood of Turin, Pjanic’s eyes widen as he contemplates what his parents went through. “They were still very young, 20, 22 years old, and they went to this new country where they didn’t speak the language with nothing: two or three suitcases.

“They started from zero and managed to make a lovely family, still all together after 27 years together living there. It’s a beautiful thing. Today they live really well in Luxembourg, I have a sister and a brother who are growing up really well. My parents are an example to me, what they managed to achieve without anything to begin.”

Fahrudin worked days and Fatima nights, so one would always be free to look after their son. For Miralem, that meant going along to Schifflange’s training sessions every evening. He beams as he talks about helping dad fill his kit bag – a task that might well be imagined by some children as a chore, but which in his telling sounds like the greatest privilege in the world.

“My dad was a midfielder, like I am, and he was good too,” he says. “When I saw him playing as I got older, I could see he really knew how to play. He didn’t have all the chances to grow and have a great career that I got but he did what he could. His objective after that was above all to leave a country where his family were in danger. Football was no longer the most important thing.”

Pjanic has made good on his own potential, progressing from Schifflange’s youth team to Metz, Lyon, Roma and now Juventus. In Italy, he is nicknamed Il Pianista – the Pianist – though his presence on the pitch is more like that of a conductor, arranging play from the middle of the park to help the soloists around him achieve brilliance.

“I’m not someone who can do 10 stepovers or backheels – I’m not very interested in that. I’m more fascinated by the simplicity of play, because the thing that makes this sport so beautiful. The simplest things are often the hardest. Not everyone can do them.

“I had the good fortune to see players like [Zinedine] Zidane, Xavi, [Andrés] Iniesta, [Andrea] Pirlo up close. They all make things simple for their team. They make their whole team play well with little things that don’t always get noticed. They reflect on what’s happening and take action to make life easier for guys around them.”

The mention of stepovers calls to mind Cristiano Ronaldo, newly arrived at Juventus this summer. “But if you look at Ronaldo when he was in Manchester and then at the Ronaldo who became the best player in the world, you can see his game has changed. His game became more concrete.

“I’ve read a lot of things [Ronaldo] has said about Paul Scholes and how he trained. Everyone talked about Scholes as being extraordinary, but not because he was out there doing dummies. By keeping things simple, he made himself special. I think Ronaldo learned from players like that.”

Pjanic has had some extraordinary teammates of his own to study. Perhaps most influential was Juninho Pernambucano, considered by many to be the greatest free-kick taker of all time. Pjanic played with him for one year at Lyon, as a teenager, inherited his No 8 shirt and even now they remain in regular contact.

“Honestly, the difference between Juninho and other players is not that he could hit the maledetta, but that when Juninho did it, the ball usually went in. That’s why Juninho was the No1 at free-kicks, because he was concrete. His free-kicks always finished up as a goal or an assist.”

Pjanic has 15 Serie A goals from direct free-kicks since he joined Roma in 2011. His opportunities have been limited, however, since Ronaldo joined him in Turin. The informal rule is apparently that “whoever is feeling it takes the ball”, but the Portuguese seems to be in the mood an awful lot so far.

If Pjanic is unhappy with this arrangement, he does a good job of hiding it. He is enjoying his football, and enjoying success. He had never raised a major trophy before joining Juventus in 2016, but has won consecutive domestic doubles in Turin.

“I like to watch teams who play well, ball on the floor, ball to feet, playing well as a collective,” he says. “Napoli, in recent years, have played beautiful football. But a title, a cup, celebrating with your team, making the fans happy, that’s the reward for all the hard work you put in. Something you get to keep.

“When you play well and you don’t win, in the end, you get tired. You’ve lost something. You’ve lost time.”

The Champions League is the one trophy that has eluded Juventus in this era, with two finals lost in the past four years. Pjanic was part of the team that lost 4-1 to Real Madrid in Cardiff in 2017. Ronaldo scored twice that day, and his arrival in Turin has bred optimism that the Bianconeri might get over the hump at last.

“The Champions League has always been important for Juventus,” says Pjanic. “It is an objective for us to reach the end, to win the whole thing. We have a lot of quality and we believe in this group. One step at a time, though. Our objective right now is to finish first in the group.”

The Guardian Sport

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Jesús Navas: ‘I’m Stopping because I Have To. I’m Happy with What I’ve Achieved’

Jesús Navas celebrates with the trophy in Berlin after Spain beat England to win Euro 2024. Photograph: Matt McNulty/Uefa/Getty Images via The Guardian Sport
Jesús Navas celebrates with the trophy in Berlin after Spain beat England to win Euro 2024. Photograph: Matt McNulty/Uefa/Getty Images via The Guardian Sport
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Jesús Navas: ‘I’m Stopping because I Have To. I’m Happy with What I’ve Achieved’

Jesús Navas celebrates with the trophy in Berlin after Spain beat England to win Euro 2024. Photograph: Matt McNulty/Uefa/Getty Images via The Guardian Sport
Jesús Navas celebrates with the trophy in Berlin after Spain beat England to win Euro 2024. Photograph: Matt McNulty/Uefa/Getty Images via The Guardian Sport

A little after 9am in Montequinto, Seville, and Jesús Navas walks past the Jesús Navas Stadium and up the little slope in the sunshine, gym to the left, training pitch to the right. The first to arrive and he’s moving OK this morning, which isn’t something he can say every day, but still he comes. Soon, too soon, he won’t. “It’s my life,” he says, “what I’ve always done, who I am.” The stand bearing his name wasn’t here when he first turned up, a quarter of a century ago. Most of this wasn’t; the trophies at the Estadio Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán, three miles north, certainly weren’t. Everything changes, except him. “I’m the same as the first day,” he says.

That day, Navas was 15, a small, skinny, shy boy from Los Palacios, 15 minutes south. It was 2000 and he has been coming almost every morning since, apart from four seasons in Manchester which he enjoyed more even than you might imagine. He is still small, slight: 5ft 7in and 67kg. Still quiet, too: warm company, but not a man with any desire for the spotlight, any delusions of grandeur. Only he is the grandest footballer of all here at Sevilla Fútbol Club.

Navas is the Spanish national team’s most-decorated player and there is a reason his name is written large where he used to train and the B team play, however strange it feels to him passing each morning: because it is written all over Sevilla’s history too. The most significant player in their 119 years, symbol of their academy and their success, their entire model. Navas played a record 393 games for Sevilla – my Sevilla, he calls them every time – left because they needed him to, came back and played 311 more. He has just one left.
On Sunday at the Santiago Bernabéu, Navas will play his 982nd professional game; aged 39, it will be his last. There has been something comfortingly familiar about him, always there, but he will depart for the last time and on Monday morning he won’t be back at Montequino. “It’s hard,” he says sitting in the players’ area, which hadn’t been built back then either. “It’s difficult for me. I still can’t imagine it. My whole life has been spent doing what I most love. And now ...” There is a pause, a look. “But in the end, it’s a question of health.”

Over four years, Navas has suffered. He has an arthritic hip which hurts when he plays, when he trains and when he walks, which some days he can’t. He continued in silence, playing longer than anyone imagined and than he should have done, but can resist no more. “I’ve put up with the pain for four years and this season has been even harder, madness,” he says. “These last six months have been very, very hard. After games it’s difficult to walk. It’s purely physical: I’m stopping because I have to. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved.”

What he has achieved is everything, nostalgia and melancholy in the memories, gratitude in the long goodbye, announced last summer and concluding this weekend. Navas says his best battles were with Roberto Carlos and it’s not that the Brazilian has long since departed; it’s that his successor, Marcelo, has been and gone too. He says the footballer he most enjoyed playing with, his best friend, is Fredi Kanouté, and Kanouté retired 11 years ago.

Asked for a moment from the many he has made, he chooses someone else’s goal, which is like him: with the clock showing 100.07 in the semi-final of the 2006 Uefa Cup against Schalke, his cross reached Antonio Puerta, who scored the winner, changing their history and their future. Puerta, whose shirt number Navas wears, collapsed on the Pizjuán pitch in August 2007, dying three days later.

When Navas made his Sevilla debut against Espanyol two days after his 19th birthday in November 2003, they had not won a trophy for 55 years; he has won eight of them. By the time he left for Manchester City in 2013, he had already played more games than anyone in the club’s history, had scored in a Copa del Rey final and lifted two Uefa Cups, the competition around which Sevilla’s entire identity became built. And still he wasn’t finished.

He returned from Manchester with a new position at full-back – “ideal”, he calls it – a Premier League title and two League Cups. He had scored in the 2014 final and in the shootout two years later. He returned with a fondness that’s clear too, continuing when the tape stops. Yet for Navas more than anyone, there was nowhere like home. “The Pizjuán,” he says. Apart from the Pizjuán? “I, er ... I wouldn’t know what to say.”

So he came back and carried on doing what he always had; different position, same Navas. He lifted two more Uefa Cups, his crosses creating goals in the 2020 and 2023 Europa League finals. Captain in Cologne and Budapest, when he lifted the trophy for the last time it was 17 years since the first.

Fourteen passed between his first and last with Spain. He won the Euros in 2012 and 2024, and the World Cup in 2010, the greatest moment in the country’s history beginning at his feet. It is one he admits watching every two or three days but couldn’t imagine even then. “All I was thinking was getting to the other end as fast as I could.” That’s it? “That’s it.” He smiles. “It’s what the manager asked,” he says; it is what he does too. Three opponents trail behind, defenders appear either side like a sequence from Captain Tsubasa, cartoonish and comic, and he just keeps running. “And then ... well, it’s the greatest thing that can happen to a kid who loves football.”

The boy who had anxiety attacks, who literally couldn’t leave home, went round the world and won it all. That he even set off was something; that he went to Manchester seemed impossible, it might as well have been Mars; that he was there in South Africa had taken care and conviction, support and strength. Navas had missed the Under-20 World Cup in 2005, had to abandon his first pre-season with Sevilla, coming and going to Huelva from home while the rest stayed in the hotel, and his full international debut was delayed until November 2009, when he had fought his way through and the conditions had been created for him to feel able to join them.

I’m proud of the trophies but the nicest thing is to take their love with me
“That first big leap came so fast,” he says. “I arrived at Sevilla at 15 and in two years I was playing in primera. For a simple kid from a small town, it was a drastic change. We’re people. On the pitch, everything was OK. But I assimilated it all bit by bit. And I have been able to enjoy football: it has given me life.”

There’s a toughness in the timidity. You’re a hard man. Navas’s response is swift, definitive: “Yes.” “It’s mental. Physical, too,” he says. “To put up with all this pain. After games it is hard to walk but here I am.

“Manchester was wonderful. Going wasn’t such a hard decision [as it seems]. Sevilla were in [financial] difficulty, that appeared, and I didn’t doubt. I wanted the challenge, to be able to say: ‘I can. I’m strong.’ What I suffered back then tested me. I wanted to grow in every way. There was a human side, a tremendous growth. The Premier League is incredible: the speed is unique and I wanted to experience that. Also, the lifestyle didn’t change really: I train, I go home. It was harder for my wife; our son had just been born and she came back every so often. But football was all I was looking for and it was incredible.”
Navas returned from City in 2017 after four seasons, 183 games, and, aged 32, supposedly nearing the end. Pep Guardiola later admitted he had let him go too soon but he understands the decision and so did everyone else. He had a season left, maybe two. It has been eight. Two more Uefa Cups. A return to the Spain squad five years later, the only man from that generation playing with this new one. “That’s the way I live; every day I want more. I never settle for anything.”

There’s that edge again: there is something in Navas’s career, his style, that speaks above all of insistence, relentlessness. Quiet he may be, but he is a competitor. “A [then] 38-year-old who trains like an 18-year-old,” Spain’s captain, Álvaro Morata, said in 2023. Navas says: “When I was in Manchester I went four, five years without being called up. Every Friday the squad was named I would be watching, waiting, hanging on the announcement. That was really, really hard. But I always held on to that hope. You keep going, keep hoping. And in the end, I was there.”
Right to the end, another winner’s medal round his neck, nothing left to give. He deputised for Dani Carvajal against Georgia, playing 85 minutes with his ankle swollen out of shape. “I’m strong in that sense. With my hip, a knock wasn’t going to force me off,” he says. “And what made us win was looking out for each other.” He faced Kylian Mbappé in the semi-final at 38, no pressure. “Well, I’ve been in football a long time and played lots of good players,” he says. And then on the eve of the final he finally revealed what he had been going through, admitting this was the end with Spain. There was no announcement, no noise, it just slipped out.

He hurt, yet held on. Six more months. Why? “Because it’s my life. I wanted to be here with my Sevilla during this transition, help the younger players. And making people happy is the most important thing.”

Last Saturday he played his last game at the Sánchez Pizjuán. “The moment I hope would never arrive has arrived,” he told his teammates before the game. As it ended, he sat on the substitutes’ bench alongside Manu Bueno, a portrait of the passage of time: the 20-year-old academy product who hadn’t been born when Navas made his Sevilla debut and trained and played at the Estadio Jesús Navas with the B team scored the only goal, the pair departing together immediately after. Navas embraced everyone, knelt and kissed the turf, sobbing as the stadium stood as one. When he lifted his shirt, he folded it so the name couldn’t be seen, only the number: Puerta’s 16.
Yet the name chanted was Navas’s, a man who belongs to everyone, universally admired in part because he never tried to be anything other than himself. “It’s hard to understand so much love,” Navas says. “People thank you for everything you’ve done, the way you are: the values my family showed me and I try to show my kids. Am I an unusual footballer? Could be. That might be why there’s affection. Because I’m normal. Because despite the pain I’m here giving everything. Because I haven’t changed. That’s what I hold on to. I’m proud of the trophies but the nicest thing is to take their love with me. Every ground I go to, there’s been applause; that’s incredible.” A teammate tells me: “You will not find a single person in football who has a bad word to say about him, still less anyone that has ever argued with him.”

One more left: the Bernabéu on Sunday. And then what? Coach? “No. People say: ‘You will because what you love is football,’ but I don’t see it. There is something I would like to do, something there in my mind,” Navas says. “I always followed Miguel Indurain. I love watching Pogacar and Vingegaard. It was always about football for me as a kid, but in the summer it would be the Tour de France. I’d like to cycle, and do it properly. It will be something I try, for sure. I can’t go out there just to pass the time, no. I’m not like that. I compete, give everything. Cycling is hard and I like that. I’ve been competing all my life and I have that ‘itch’.”

It’s almost time. Navas’s teammates start arriving, the last of hundreds he has had, all of them marked by him. Outside the sun is shining, once more into the fray. “Football is everything, my life. It’s what I’ve always done, every day,” he says. “I’ll have to look for something else, keep doing sport. And the bike is non-impact, it doesn’t hurt my hip. But today, I train. To the end. That’s what brought me this far.”

 

The Guardian Sport