The best decision

I found my love of football again through coaching.

My playing career had been as frustrating as it was painful. I had five very serious injuries: four in my left knee and one in the right.

All of these injuries prevented me from fulfilling my expectations as a player.

I first played in Dinamo Zagreb’s youth academy, in the city where I was born. At the age of 17, I signed for Real Madrid’s second team. The idea was to reach the top, but my progress was impeded by all the time I was out injured.

At the age of 31, the end point came. Playing for FC Zhuhai in China, I had another serious knee injury. That’s when I said “enough” – not only to my playing career, but also to football completely.

I went to live with my family in Marbella, where I set up a couple of businesses. I felt very comfortable with that new life. If you have a passion, though, no matter how much you want to run away from it, it always comes back. It’s inside you.

My father, Cedomir Jovicevic, was a Dinamo Zagreb player in the 1970s. I used to go with him to every training session I could, so I grew up with football every day.

It was also because of my father that I came to football for the second time in my life. This time as a coach.

"I started joking with him that his methodology with the kids was old hat"

After he finished his playing career, he became a coach. In fact, he was my coach when I played in the Real Madrid reserve team. He was Rafa Benítez’s assistant. Then he went with Rafa to Real Valladolid, and stayed there to work as an assistant to the next coaches who passed through that club.

Having retired to a quiet life in Marbella, my father devoted himself to coaching a team of 12-year-olds. In the meantime, I started doing my badges after six years away from football. But I had no interest in training, I only did it because I am a person who likes continuing education and learning new things.

One afternoon, in Marbella, I decided to go and watch one of my father’s training sessions. There, I started joking with him that his methodology with the kids was old hat. He turned to me and told me to lead the team. My father felt that I liked coaching and, more importantly, that I really wanted to do it.

It was really enriching to work with those 12-year-olds. Thanks to them, I was able to transform all the bad things I went through as a player into positive energy.

With all that energy, and after two years training in Marbella, Karpaty Lviv in Ukraine called to offer me the position of sporting director. I had played for Karpaty in 2003, and at that time I formed a very good relationship with the president and the fans. That same president was still at the club in 2010, when they called me.

I understood that it was a good place to take the first step back into professional football. My job was to put the club in contact with the main sporting directors of European teams, so that they could discover how things worked elsewhere.

"Dinamo’s youth team always has rough diamonds that you have to polish"

Then, in 2012, there was a revolution at the academy. A lot of jobs were created, and the club thought of me as a coach for the Under-21s. They saw me as a person with authority to lead the group. The idea was a long-term project, with two objectives: to create good players, and for me to have time to gain experience as a coach.

However, things moved quickly and I became the first-team coach in 2014. It was a complicated role. There were many institutional and financial problems, and the team had a lot of young players. We managed to avoid relegation, with players I’d coached in the Under-21s.

I went on to work with young players at NK Celje in Slovenia, in 2016/17. Then, in the summer of 2017, Dinamo Zagreb’s president asked me to lead a project to develop the second team’s players. It was a tempting offer, because Dinamo’s youth team always has rough diamonds that you have to polish.

I worked with Dinamo’s Under-21 team for three years, combining it with the Under-19s and involvement with the Under-23s. It was difficult to do it all at the same time, because of work and travel. That is something they don’t teach you on courses; you have to experience it. It’s about putting on your helmet, turning on the light and starting to dig. It went on like that for a long time.

Then the pandemic hit Dinamo hard. The management decided to cut the salaries of the first team and the academy.  As you would expect, the players from the first team did not agree. A few days after that, the club fired coach Nenad Bjelica. So that’s when I came in.

I walked into an unnatural situation. It would've been better to continue for another year or two in the second team, but the plan turned out differently. In the end, it turned out to be a bad project. I couldn’t get the players to connect with me, and even less so without being able to train together because of Covid. After two months, Dinamo sacked me. I left my old club, and the one where my father had been successful.

"I thought people were pointing their fingers at me to badmouth my coaching work"

When faced with a blow like that, you only have two options: go down and never go up again, or carry on with the same enthusiasm. I did the latter.

I signed for Ukrainian club Dnipro-1 in September 2020. For me, it was very important to get back on my feet. But at the beginning, it was almost even worse than Dinamo. We finished last in the first half of the season.

I returned to Zagreb on holiday before the start of the second half of the season. I remember that, when I went out on the street, I felt that I was being watched. I thought people were pointing their fingers at me to badmouth my coaching work. But it wasn’t like that. It was just my imagination, because of all the pressure I was under.

In the winter pre-season, we made some corrections to the squad. We brought in some players I couldn’t sign at the beginning of the season, and we finished seventh in the standings. We were the third-best team in the second half of the season.

The following year, we finished third and qualified for Europe. Everything was going well. But in February 2022, the war started.

I experienced the first day of the war in Dnipro. At 5am we were woken up by bombs. We could see them close to us. So we looked for a way to get out of Ukraine to return home.

"Seeing my family was the only thing on my mind during that whole trip"

The idea at first was to go through Poland, but we were told that many bridges had been destroyed on the first day. Hungary was another option. However, it was a territory with a lot of traffic jams, which made it almost impossible to get through.

Then there was Moldova, which was closer to Dnipro, but there was a part of it occupied by the Russians. If you made a mistake and entered that territory, it was over.

All of that without being able to drive between 7pm and 7am. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, declared a curfew for those hours. You couldn’t move, you couldn’t go out on the street. You could only listen to the news. A lot of it was disinformation, saying that the Russians were just over an hour away from where we were at that moment. The fear was terrible, because we didn’t know if it was true or not.

In the end we left Ukraine through the Romanian border, after more than 60 hours of driving. We arrived in Bucharest, and those of us who had left Dnipro said goodbye and went home.

Seeing my family was the only thing on my mind during that whole trip. My children, my wife and my mother. To hug them, because what I lived through those days I will take with me forever.

Five months after the start of the war, the Ukrainian government took the decision to restart the league. At that time, I still had a relationship with Dnipro. I had signed for two years, which had already been completed, and I had the option to continue for one more. That depended on my decision.

"there is always someone waiting for your downfall, to take the job"

It was then that Shakhtar contacted me. They believed I was the best option among the many candidates for the club's new project, without foreign players.

When that offer came, my feeling was that I couldn’t say no. I wanted to progress and play in the Champions League. I wanted to see if I was ready to lead a top club like Shakhtar. Even more so in the conditions the team was in.

On the first day of pre-season in the Netherlands, I found a squad without any of the Brazilian players, who had been the majority at the club in recent years. Neither was the Israeli, Manor Solomon.

A large part of the team was made up of players who had been on loan at Mariupol, and others with no experience at the highest level. With them we had to play in the Champions League, in the same group as Real Madrid, RB Leipzig and Celtic.

All this raised a lot of doubts. A lot of pressure, too. At a club of Shakhtar’s level, there are always a lot of sceptics about the coach. Also, there is always someone waiting for your downfall, to take the job. You have to live with that. If you can’t live with that, go work at McDonald’s and, at best, you’ll be employee of the month. This is football, and this is Shakhtar. It’s the top level, and you have to live up to it.

I can’t say I wasn’t afraid that it wouldn’t go well. I would be lying if I did. But it’s good to be afraid. I tell footballers: “You can’t get the adrenaline going if there’s no fear.”

"you stop and go into the shelter, not knowing how long you’re going to be there"

That adrenaline carries you forward. Even if one of your first pre-season games, with only a few days of work and a team to be formed, is against Ajax at the Johan Cruijff Arena. Or later, against Roma at the Estadio Olímpico. We went there and lost 5-0. It was as if we had been hit with a golf club.

Despite all the difficulties, no one took a step back. Nor when we found out that we would play the league on Ukrainian territory. It was a complicated and risky decision, but the right one. Football is the best ambassador there is, along with music. The two are the only social phenomena that move the masses in a positive way.

It was a way of sending a message to the world: “There is football in a country at war.”

It is true that it is very difficult to compete under conditions that no one had ever imagined before. We had to stop some training sessions and matches because the bomb sirens went off.

And when they go off, you have to listen, because there is indiscriminate bombing. You stop and go into the shelter, not knowing how long you’re going to be there.

It is also very hard to talk about football and tactics to the players at a time like this. Some of them have lost family and friends fighting in the war. But we fought very hard to overcome all the challenges.

"When things go wrong, that's when you have to show yourself most as a human being"

It was difficult to make the decision to go back to Ukraine to train. To a country at war. But coaching Shakhtar was the best decision I have ever made. Very important for me professionally but, above all, personally.

I wanted to give love back to a country that has always treated me very well. I feel part-Ukrainian. When things go wrong, that’s when you have to show yourself most as a human being.

I would also like to thank the Armed Forces of Ukraine for allowing us to play football and making it possible for the team and me to fulfil our dream. The home match against Dnipro-1, when we became league champions, was the icing on the cake of a historic season in Ukrainian football. A season with war in the background.

Not only all Shakhtar fans can be proud of this, but also all Ukrainian fans. In one year, they saw a team become champions that no one was betting on at the beginning of the season. We made the impossible possible.

That is why I was proud of the players. For me, they are heroes. 

Hopefully they can do it again, in a country without war. In a Ukraine where people can live and play football in peace again.