It’s Slovenia training, a few days before their opening match of Euro 2024 against Denmark.
Josip Ilicic is taking part in a rondo drill with a few of his colleagues. His touch is immaculate, and he is casually chatting away as he shifts the ball around the circle. At one stage, he stops and juggles the ball on his own: usually, that’s pretty poor form in an exercise designed to enhance team cohesion and collective control, but his team-mates don’t seem to mind, and just watch him do it.
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They’re just glad to have him here. Because the very idea of that was ludicrous four years ago, when Ilicic first took a break from football because of mental health concerns. It was ludicrous around 18 months after that, when he took another break for similar reasons. It was even ludicrous at the start of this past season, when he wasn’t even getting in the team at Maribor, his club in Slovenia, and had been forced to train alone.
But he is here, and at a tournament that will produce plenty of remarkable stories, Ilicic’s presence is perhaps the most remarkable.
While not an unknown player, the Josip Ilicic appreciation society has been generally confined to Slovenia, those that followed his career in Italy with Palermo, Fiorentina and Atalanta, and a select few others. But what the love given to this slightly hunched, rather unlikely looking playmaker lacks in breadth, it more than makes up for in depth.
Ilicic has spent most of his career in Italy, having been signed from Maribor at age 22 almost by accident: Palermo sent a scout to watch the Slovenian side ahead of a Europa League qualifying play-off, but rather than returning with a detailed tactical appraisal, the guy raved about their star player. The Sicilians bought him after he scored against them in that tie, only a few months after he had joined Maribor in the first place following his previous club Interblock’s relegation to the Slovenian second division.
Over the next few years, there was a sense in Italy that he didn’t fulfil his potential. More than one coach questioned his work ethic. But he came alive under Gian Piero Gasperini, first at Palermo in 2012-13 and most prominently when they were reunited with Atalanta, who gazumped Sampdoria to sign him after Fiorentina made him available in the summer of 2017.
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Ilicic was a key player in the brilliant Atalanta side that Gasperini took to a third-place finish in Serie A and into the Champions League in 2019. And not just a key player, but one who did things that made you laugh out loud at their brilliance and audacity. He scored with backheels. He scored from the halfway line. He scored five hat-tricks in his first three seasons at the Bergamo club, including a four-goal performance in one game against Valencia. Which isn’t bad for someone who isn’t even a striker.
But his health, both physical and mental, suffered. First, he was hospitalised with what turned out to be an infection in his lymph nodes. Eventually, antibiotics solved the problem, but it impacted him mentally too. He was severely affected by the sudden death of Davide Astori, a team-mate at Fiorentina, in 2018, and became consumed by the thought it could happen to him too.
“I was afraid to go to sleep,” he told Sky Sports Italia. “I thought I would never wake up in the morning and see my family again. It was hard to recover — you start from below zero and you have to get used to moving and running again, as if I were a child.”
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He returned to the Atalanta side and over the next few seasons produced his best football. Gasperini advocated for him to win the Ballon d’Or. His team-mates bowed down to his talent, sometimes literally. He earned the nickname ‘the Grand Master of Kranj’ (his hometown in Slovenia).
But then in the spring of 2020, Bergamo became the European epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic. The sirens that would sound in the city started to remind him of the war in the former Yugoslavia when he was a young boy. Ilicic was actually born in Bosnia to a Croatian family; after his father was killed when he was only a year old, his mother took him and his brother to Kranj.
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The thoughts that consumed him around his lymph node illness a couple of years earlier returned. He missed the final month of the panemic-delayed 2019-20 season because of mental health problems.
He returned to the team again, but in January 2022 the issues returned. He missed virtually all of the rest of that season, making one last appearance off the bench in Atalanta’s final Serie A game that May, but his contract was terminated by mutual consent in the August.
But the adoration from Bergamo continued. When Atalanta visited Sturm Graz in the Europa League in October last year, a coachload of their Austria-bound fans stopped off in Maribor en route to surprise their hero. Shortly after that, Gasperini broke down during an interview as he recalled that first spell Ilicic had away from football in the summer of 2020.
“A week before the PSG game (in the quarter-finals, in the one-off, single-leg, eight-team tournament held in Portugal that August to complete the 2019-20 competition), I went to see him in hospital,” Gasperini said. “He had lost about 10-12 kilograms (over 20lb)… I picked him up like a puppet and said to him, ‘Come, Josip, come with us…’”
After leaving Atalanta, he re-signed in the October for Maribor and was greeted like the returning hero he was. But he was also, to put things kindly, visibly not exactly in prime athletic shape. He scored on his second debut for the club in the November, converting a penalty just 12 minutes after coming off the bench but, by the start of last season, at age 35, he was out of the picture.
His form had nosedived and he fell out with Maribor’s then-manager Damir Krznar, who banished Ilicic and made him train on his own.
“Ilicic is not physically fit to help the team at the moment,” Krznar said. “That is the main reason he is not with us. There are other factors, but they are not decisive. My intention was not to send a message to the other players, but I simply want Josip to get to a level where he can help us on the pitch.”
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But the ultimatum didn’t last long, and neither did Krznar. He was sacked last October and replaced by Ante Simundza, who had been on the Maribor coaching staff during Ilicic’s initial (admittedly brief) spell at the club over a decade earlier. One of the first things Simundza did was bring him back into the fold, cautiously at first but by this February he was an automatic starter again, scoring goals, providing assists. Ilicic was reborn. Simundza even made him captain for one game.
Surely though, this was just a nice coda to his career, a way for him to end on a slightly happier note…
“People in Slovenia are interested in two players: (German club RB Leipzig’s striker) Benjamin Sesko and Josip Ilicic,” says Slovenian journalist Miran Zore.
Ilicic — ‘Jojo’, as he is known in Slovenia — had not played for the national team since October 2021, a World Cup qualifier against Cyprus. But among his fellow players, and even to coach Matjaz Kek (who gave Ilicic his international debut during a previous spell in charge, in 2010), he has always been part of the squad in spirit.
Kek largely left him alone during the time he was away, allowing him to recover physically and mentally at his own pace. But conversations about him returning to the national team started in earnest earlier this year, resulting in his eventual call-up for their 30-man pre-Euros preliminary squad in May.
In a friendly against Armenia in Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana on June 4, Ilicic came off the bench in the 59th minute to win his first cap in almost three years. In the 62nd, he got the ball in space on the right side of the area, cut inside and hammered a shot into the roof of the net.
The scenario was almost too perfect.
Ilicic’s inclusion in the final 26-man squad for the tournament was the culmination of an extraordinary comeback story. But there was a recognition from both him and Kek that he hadn’t been involved in qualifying, that other players had got Slovenia to this stage and, as such, their feelings had to be taken into account. As a nod to that, he symbolically took the No 26 as his squad number, recognising that others had done the heavy lifting.
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“It’s not about past achievements,” said Kek, responding to questions about how wise Ilicic’s inclusion was, and whether it would cause problems in the squad. “We know what we expect from him and all other players in the national team. Disrupt the atmosphere? If I were afraid of that, I wouldn’t be here. The important thing is that he is healthy. Slovenia cannot afford to exclude players who can and want to play.”
Others weren’t quite so sure. Zlatko Zahovic, the previous holder of the ‘Greatest Slovenian player ever’ belt and the man who, as director of football, brought a young Ilicic to Maribor that first time 14 years ago, expressed his doubts when the squad was announced.
“I was surprised, because this is anything but an easy decision,” Zahovic told the Slovenian newspaper EkipaSN. “Because we must know that Josip had nothing to do with (Slovenia’s team) going to the European Championship. Cameras will now inevitably turn more towards him (and away) from other players. Despite everything, I don’t believe everyone will like it.
“As for his talent, we all believe he can help us. But what happens in the locker room is very important… we mustn’t forget that everything can always backfire.”
But those fears don’t seem to have been realised, according to his colleagues at least. “He’s a good guy for the atmosphere,” said defender Vanja Drkusic. “He’s still showing his magic on the field.”
Fellow forward Jan Mlakar was particularly glad to see Ilicic return. Mlakar signed for Fiorentina as a teenager in 2015 and made his breakthrough a couple of years later when Ilicic was also at the club — in fact, he made his first-team debut for them by coming on for Ilicic — and the older Slovenian took him under his wing.
“He helped me out very much at the beginning of my career,” Mlakar tells The Athletic. “I came to Fiorentina when I was 16, I was there alone. He helped me in the first months I was there. We went to dinner, and he just did the simple things to make me comfortable.
“It’s incredible (to have him in the Euros squad). The amount of experience he has is really important. I believe he will get a chance to give us that extra kick.”
You could argue it was a sentimental selection, a ‘reward’ for essentially carrying Slovenia during the years when they were broadly terrible and couldn’t qualify for a major tournament — these Euros are their first since the 2010 World Cup. Now, with a stronger overall team and a bigger star (if not necessarily a better player) in Sesko to take the heat off him, Ilicic’s years of excellence could be recognised without negatively impacting the team.
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The fact he didn’t feature in either of Slovenia’s first two games would seem to back that assertion up. But even if he doesn’t get on the pitch at Euro 2024 — their final group game is against England today (Tuesday), but they can reach the knockout stage with a win — that doesn’t make the story much less remarkable.
It’s extraordinary that he’s playing top-division football anywhere again, never mind getting selected for a major international tournament. Maybe it’s just enough that he’s there at all.
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(Top photo: Jurij Kodrun/Getty Images)