Eintracht Frankfurt had just beaten Schalke 3-0 and, among the smiling faces inside Commerzbank Arena, Fredi Bobic had particular cause to feel satisfied. Their young loanee striker, Luka Jovic, had scored two of the goals; he now had a dozen for the season and it was not even mid-November. “Luka has found his way here,” said Bobic, the club’s sporting director. “He disappeared at Benfica, but we remembered him.”
That was a little modest, because Bobic knew he was witnessing the fruits of a personal pursuit that began at the start of the decade. Back then he held a similar position at Stuttgart and travelled to Jovic’s family home near Bijeljina in Republika Srpska, an ethnically-Serbian political entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He hoped to persuade Jovic to reject a professional contract at Red Star Belgrade and move to Germany; he was, as it happened, far from the only visitor to arrive with that intention.
In the end Jovic stayed put, but Bobic never really went away. He got his man eventually and, as Chelsea may find in Thursday night’s Europa League semi-final first leg, his persistence is being repaid in spades.
“Jovic will become the best striker in Europe,” the Red Star general director, Zvezdan Terzic, said when the player had not yet turned 18. It does not look a fanciful claim; not when the 21-year-old Jovic has scored 25 times this season for Eintracht, helping them to within touching distance of a first European trophy since the 1980 Uefa Cup, and when clubs such as Barcelona, Real Madrid and Liverpool are being linked with him routinely.
The player who arrived at Eintracht in June 2017, loaned for two years by Benfica, was low on confidence. He had never really wanted the move to Portugal, which came at a time when he was still breaking records at Red Star, his boyhood club. Football Leaks would later reveal Jovic was technically purchased from the Cypriot club Apollon Limassol, who paid €2m to Red Star and then profited handsomely when he was shuttled straight to Benfica. He would later admit he “wasn’t professional” and had “a problem in my head” during his time there; he only played four first-team games in a season and a half, squandering one opportunity when he was caught in a nightclub before a game.
Enter Bobic, Eintracht, and a stunning turnaround. “He is the best finisher I ever played with,” Alexander Meier, who trained with Jovic every day last season, tells the Guardian. The 36-year-old Meier, who now plays for St Pauli, spent 14 years at Eintracht and was the Bundesliga’s top scorer in 2014-15.
“Nobody from our team really knew him when he arrived,” he adds. “But in training you could see immediately that he’s just amazing in front of goal. He has everything. Heading, shooting, left foot, right foot. Inside the box he knows exactly where the ball will fall down. He was so young but already so cool and confident; you could tell he would score many times.”
Jovic mustered a goal every three games last season, a widely-shared backheeled winner against Schalke in the DFB Pokal semi-finals giving his rise a global audience. He credits Eintracht’s then-coach Niko Kovac, now in charge of Bayern Munich, for making him run “more in one month than I did in a year in Lisbon”. In 2018-19 his form has been sensational, peaking in October when he scored five times against Fortuna Düsseldorf. Last month he returned to Estadio da Luz and scored against Benfica in the Europa League quarter-finals. It has been some run; no centre-forward of his age in the continent’s top leagues is performing comparably.
“Sometimes you’ll see someone score a great goal and think: ‘Yeah, it’s a little bit of luck,” Meier says. “But with Luka you saw it in training 10 times a week and you’d just say, ‘OK, that’s his style.’
“He’s made a big step but he’s far from being finished yet. He has so much development in him because he’s such a big talent. The older he gets, the more consistent and physically strong he will be, although he’s already really strong for his age. There’s no limit to where he can go.”
Terzic once compared Jovic to Radamel Falcao. Neither player has a standout attribute in general play but both are all-rounders with a rare, devastating instinct to sniff out chances. “He meant well, but people reasoned that whenever I went on to the field I had to score goals,” Jovic said last year.
In Serbia it had simply been a question of when he would break through; his potential had been trailed long before, at 16 years, five months and five days, he scored two minutes into his debut against Vojvodina. Three months later he started the 2014-15 season against Radnicki Nis wearing the No 9 shirt. A dozen more goals would follow before his departure; the pressure was intense but now Jovic plays as if carefree. “I hope and want him to stay here at Eintracht, but I’m also realistic and know that if a big club like Real Madrid want him then we haven’t got a chance of keeping him,” Bobic said last month.
On 17 April, Eintracht activated a clause to complete Jovic’s permanent signing for under €7m. Any onward transfer could fetch as much as 10 times that. Whether he stays or goes, it looks like one of the deals of the decade; Bobic’s memory came up trumps but nobody would dare forget Jovic now.
The Guardian Sport
