Manchester City star Josko Gvardiol experienced the greatest sliding door moment of all time as a teenager.
The Croatian defender had enough of the lack of opportunities in Dinamo Zagreb’s youth team.
3
The path to becoming a professional footballer became increasingly unclear – and another career tempted him.
Gvardiol’s father is a fishmonger and the central defender helped him at the market as a child.
Less than six years ago, the 22-year-old was thinking about spending his life selling fish at four in the morning in Zagreb.
Today he is the most expensive defender in football history and a Premier League champion.
Manchester City signed Gvardiol from RB Leipzig for £77 million in the summer of 2023.
The additional services are expected to push the value of the deal to over £80 million, surpassing the record amount Manchester United paid for a defender when they signed Harry Maguire in 2019.
As life-changing decisions go, Gvardiol was a pretty good one.
In February 2023, he told The Times: “I was 16 or 17 and still sitting on the bench in the youth teams. I was frustrated and for a moment I considered giving up football.
“By the way, I hate fish. Imagine you’re 16 years old and all you eat at home is fish every day. I want to try something different.
3
“I don’t know what happened, but after that I started playing and they finally recognized my quality and after a year I moved to the second team of Dinamo Zagreb.
“In six months I was in the first team with [now-RB Leipzig team-mate] “Dani Olmo.”
For Gvardiol, too, the situation escalated quite quickly.
After one season in Zagreb’s first team, RB Leipzig snapped him up for a transfer fee and signed him ahead of Leeds, who had just been promoted to the Premier League.
Gvardiol said: “I had two options, Leeds and Leipzig. Bielsa was the coach and my career goal is to play in the Premier League.”
“[But] I knew I had a few more steps to go before I would get there one day.”
Leeds were not the only Premier League side to fail in their attempt to bring the Croatian to England ahead of City.
Gvardiol rose to fame at the 2022 World Cup when he reached the semifinals as Croatia’s star player.
Lionel Messi kept him busy in Argentina’s 3-0 win – but that did nothing to diminish his ever-growing reputation.
Chelsea made a £70 million offer as part of their shopping spree in January – and Gvardiol wanted the move.
He recalled: “My agent called me and saw that Chelsea were very interested. Of course, you definitely think about a serious offer from a big club like Chelsea.”
3
“Leipzig said they didn’t want to sell me. In the end, I really struggled with this decision, but we didn’t reach an agreement.”
At the moment it seems as if the decision to choose Chelsea was as much luck as the decision to choose football over the fish trade.
Gvardiol immediately established himself as a regular starter under Pep Guardiola in the 2023/24 season, often filling in at full-back as City won the Premier League title.