This Croatia, right now
What Dalić takes to North America is a side caught at the very end of one cycle and the awkward, hopeful opening of another, a transition managed and deferred rather than cleanly made. The spine of the 2018 finalists has almost wholly turned over: of that squad only Modrić, Perišić, Kramarić, Kovačić and Duje Ćaleta-Car remain. The deepest loss is the quietest one. Marcelo Brozović retired from international football in August 2024 on ninety-nine caps, the screen who sat in front of the back four and let the two playmakers roam, and there is no like-for-like heir to him in this squad — a structural hole the home press has named and worried at all spring.
The rebuild has run through the centre of the pitch and, more successfully, through the back of it. Around the veterans Dalić has installed Joško Gvardiol as the defensive leader, fast-tracked the nineteen-year-old centre-back Luka Vušković as a decade-long bet, and brought a wave of young midfield engines into the fold — the cousins Petar and Luka Sučić, Martin Baturina, the breakout domestic story Toni Fruk — plus forwards Petar Musa and Igor Matanović who have leapfrogged more familiar names. Dalić's own line for it is the one the Croatian press repeats: Croatia 'previously had possibly the world's strongest midfield' and 'now have an excellent defence with strong centre-backs.' The engine is ageing out; the back line has quietly become the youngest and most future-proof unit in the team. The squad's average age, a shade under twenty-eight, leaves it in the older half of the forty-eight finalists without being among the oldest, and Croatia are one of only five teams here carrying both a player past forty and a teenager — the two-generations-in-one character made literal on the team sheet.
Set against Qatar, the captain, the metronome and the wide delivery are unchanged, and almost everything else has shifted beneath them. The deep-lying screen is gone, the strike force is unsettled, and a bench once staffed by veterans of two finals is now learning the international game in real time. It remains recognisably Croatia — the same brain, the same nerve, the same forty-year-old setting the tempo — asked to reproduce a decade of overachievement with legs that no longer answer the way they once did.
The manager
Dalić is, by a distance no rival can argue, the most successful coach in Croatian history — and one of the least likely. Born in Livno in 1966, in the Bosnian-Croat heartland of what was then Yugoslavia, a devout Roman Catholic widely reported to pray the rosary through his matches, he was a disciplined, journeyman defensive midfielder for Hajduk Split and especially Varteks who never won a senior cap for his country. He built his reputation not in Europe's elite but in the Gulf: Saudi Pro League Coach of the Year in 2010-11 with Al-Faisaly, then a UAE league title and a run to the 2016 Asian Champions League final with Al-Ain. When the federation handed him the national team in October 2017, with qualification for the 2018 World Cup hanging by a thread, he was widely read as a left-field, under-credentialled appointment. He won 2-0 away to Ukraine in his first match, came through the Greece play-off, and then took Croatia to the final itself.
What followed — silver in 2018, bronze in 2022, a 2023 Nations League final — makes him the federation's greatest hire, and the consistent theme of every Croatian account is that his gift is human before it is systemic. He runs a 'family' dressing room built on trust and calm, no shouting, no theatre, and a famous knack for the composure that decides shoot-outs and extra time; he surrounds himself with men from the 2018 generation, with Ćorluka and Ladić assisting and Subašić on the goalkeepers, and pointedly recalled Ivica Olić from the under-21s for this tournament, a deliberate reach back toward a winning formula. He arrives, even so, under real cloud. He renounced the back three on the record in late 2025 and then revived it for England, contradicting himself inside a single winter; he declined a federation extension through Euro 2028 in December 2025, calling the contract 'a formality' and saying results would decide, having a year earlier turned down a far richer Qatar offer to stay out of loyalty. And behind the warm public image runs a hard edge: he sent Nikola Kalinić home from the 2018 World Cup for declining to play, and later froze out Marko Livaja and Ante Rebić. His verdict on this squad doubles as a statement of authority — 'This is the list I stand behind,' he said; 'the national team is not a moment.'
How they play
Croatia are a control side built on midfield possession, emotional calm and defensive caution rather than pressing — Dalić's tournament grammar of slowing the game, keeping the ball, and dragging a stronger opponent into uncomfortable decisions late on, with Modrić still the one who chooses when they accelerate. The wrinkle for 2026 is that the shape itself is unsettled: a cautious back three for the heavyweights, a more offensive back four for everyone else.
In possession. Against England the plan is a 3-4-2-1. Gvardiol, a left-footer, drops to left centre-back and becomes the first creator, carrying the ball out from the back rather than merely clearing his lines; Vušković anchors the centre, Šutalo holds the right. The width is left to the wing-backs — Perišić high on the left with his trademark delivery, Stanišić overlapping on the right — so the front trio can stay narrow and central. Modrić sits deepest and conducts the tempo; Kovačić, when fit, carries the ball through pressure ahead of him, the one player who makes Croatia genuinely hard to press. Kramarić drifts off the lone striker as a connector, a false-nine slide into the pocket between the lines, while the runner from the right half-space attacks the space he opens and Budimir holds as the single reference point for the crosses. Against Panama and Ghana, Dalić unfastens it into a 4-2-3-1 with more attackers and the full-backs tucking inside to free the wide forwards.
Out of possession. There is no relentless high press here, and the omission is doctrine rather than oversight. Croatia defend in a compact, concentrated block that slows the game instead of hunting it, and they keep the ball partly to spare themselves the chasing — the old midfield can still dictate tempo, but the recovery runs cost more than they did in 2018. Against Belgium the block sat very deep, drew praise from the visitors' press for its discipline and still lost 0-2, conceding once from a deflected cross and once from a late counter off a midfield turnover. The standing worry, voiced loudly at home, is a defence that has looked exposed and a side that can sit too passively when a younger, faster opponent lifts the pace.
The wrinkle. The defining wrinkle is the system saga itself. Dalić emphatically renounced the back three in November 2025 — every medal, he insisted, had come with a back four — then reversed in the spring to build a 3-4-2-1 specifically for England, then switched again to a 4-2-3-1 for the Slovenia send-off, drawing a withering Index column under the headline that it was impossible to explain what had changed with Dalić in four months. He has since reaffirmed the plan: the back three is the shape prepared for England, the back four reserved for the weaker group games. The deeper question is structural, and the home press has named it plainly. With Brozović gone there is no natural screen in front of the two playmakers, and against Belgium both Modrić and Kovačić dropped so deep toward the centre-backs in build-up that it muddled who was actually collecting the ball and left the young attackers stranded ahead of them. The whole construction leans on a forty-year-old setting the rhythm and a teenager anchoring the defence — two beautiful, fragile bets, made by a manager who trusts his own eye over the noise.
On the projected XI — A consensus projection for the England opener, not an official sheet — Dalić names his XI on the eve of the game and has changed system twice in a fortnight, so treat the shape as his stated plan rather than a certainty. The 3-4-2-1 is the system he explicitly built for England and started against Belgium, his named dress rehearsal; the 4-2-3-1 used against Slovenia is reserved for Panama and Ghana. Four calls are genuinely live. Gvardiol on the left, Vušković in the centre and the two wing-backs look fixed, but the third centre-back is contested — Šutalo started the back three against Belgium, with Ćaleta-Car, just back from a back problem and rested as a precaution against Slovenia, the experienced challenger. The lone striker is a near-even call between Budimir, the Osasuna target man who started against Slovenia, and the in-form Petar Musa of FC Dallas, with Matanović third. The second No. 10 is the real toss-up: the lean is Kramarić's experience for a game this size, but Petar Sučić started there against Belgium and offers more legs. And Kovačić's fitness to start is the ring on the map — back from two Achilles operations and barely any club football, withdrawn at half-time against Slovenia after being managed against Belgium, with Petar Sučić the like-for-like cover in the pivot.
The ceiling
The bull case rests on the one thing Croatia have done better than almost anyone over the past decade: arriving at a tournament with the brain and the nerve to outlast better-resourced teams. Get the three returning mainstays right — Gvardiol fit and sharp, Kovačić carrying pressure away from Modrić, Modrić himself managing games rather than chasing them — and Croatia can take a result off England in the opener, in the air-conditioned bowl of AT&T Stadium where the heat will trouble nobody. Drawing the strongest side in the group first is, perversely, the gift of the schedule: a chance to turn scepticism into leverage in the very first ninety minutes, to prove the old tournament control can still slow a faster, deeper team before the doubters have warmed their pens.
The draw past that is kind by the standards of a side ranked outside the elite. Croatia are clear second favourites to escape Group L, and the round-of-32 cross is against Group K — Portugal, Colombia, DR Congo and Uzbekistan. Top the group and they would meet a third-placed side; finish second and a Group K runner-up awaits. There is a knockout path here that need not run through a Spain or an Argentina until very deep into the tournament, and this is a team that has already won three consecutive knockout shoot-outs inside a single World Cup. Nobody, anywhere, volunteers to play Croatia in a tie that goes the distance.
The genuine summit, then, is the one this generation has touched twice already: the latter stages back in range, a quarter-final and a semi-final not fantasy but precedent, a country daring to imagine a third medal in three World Cups as a long goodbye stretched to its limit. For that to hold, the veterans must survive a punishing North American summer, one of the striker options must give Croatia reliable presence in the penalty box, and the defence must do what it could not against Belgium. It is asking a great deal of ageing legs. It is also, almost to the word, what they were asking in 2018 and 2022, and on both occasions the answer came back yes.
The floor
The case for dread is every bit as real, and it begins in the one place Croatia have always been richest. With Brozović gone there is no natural screen, and against Belgium the two playmakers dropped so deep that the structure blurred and the forwards were cut adrift; England, with their athletes and their runners, are built to punish precisely that — to attack the channel behind midfield the instant a Modrić or a Kovačić is caught too high. Lose the opener and the whole temperature of the group changes. Panama, the middle fixture in Toronto, turns from a game to be controlled into a game that must be won; and Ghana, weakened by injuries but athletic and direct under Carlos Queiroz, becomes a treacherous decider in Philadelphia rather than a tidying-up exercise.
Then there is the body, which is where the home press keeps returning. Kovačić arrives having barely played for a year after two Achilles operations, picked on what he has been rather than what he is; Modrić is forty and being eased through part-games; Gvardiol is only weeks back from a broken leg. Dalić named his own greatest fear out loud — the fitness of those three returning from injury. The strike force is the other fault line. The omission of the domestic league's top scorer, Beljo, and the absence of any Mandžukić-type focal point leave Croatia rich in connective attackers and thin on guaranteed goals; if the audition between Budimir, Musa and Matanović never resolves, the striker debate stops being selection theory and becomes a matter of the scoreboard. Add a summer that taxes old legs hardest of all, and the warning lights were already on in the warm-ups — a flat 0-2 to Belgium, a laboured 2-1 over Slovenia rescued in stoppage time after a defensive error gifted the equaliser.
The deflating outcome, the one that haunts the camp, is not an abstract group exit — Croatia are too good and too streetwise for that to be the expectation. It is the specific version: a heavy night against England that drains the group of all margin, a nervy scramble through Panama and Ghana, and then a tired, blunt elimination in the first knockout round. Measured against a two-time medallist's standards, anything short of the last sixteen would register as failure, and a second straight major tournament without a knockout win would say, at last and without appeal, that the era is over.
Realistic aim
The honest middle is the one the dressing room and the analysts keep settling on. Dalić and Darijo Srna have publicly set the bar at simply escaping the group — 'when we pass the group, we are dangerous,' as Srna puts it, leaning on the history — while the broader Croatian consensus treats advancing as the minimum and a quarter-final as the realistic target, with a semi-final the kind of overachievement that would rank this run alongside 2018 and 2022. That is the right frame: come through a winnable group behind England, then discover whether veteran know-how can grind out one more knockout tie in the heat. The single thing that will tell us most is the opener, where ninety minutes against England's pace and power will reveal whether this is a last deep run or simply a last, fond goodbye.
Where it's won and lost
Strengths. Where Croatia win their games: a midfield brain that remains one of the most game-literate in the tournament, able to slow a match and dictate its tempo through Modrić; the deepest reservoir of big-moment composure in the competition, forged in three consecutive knockout shoot-outs across a single World Cup; the wide delivery and set-piece supply of Perišić and Kramarić into aerial targets such as Budimir; and the streetwise nerve in tight, late, attritional games that has turned better-looking opponents into beaten ones twice running.
Weaknesses. Where they come unstuck: the absence of a natural defensive midfielder to screen the two deep-dropping playmakers, which leaves the ground behind midfield open to athletic, direct transitions; a defence that has looked vulnerable and a block that can sit too passively against a faster side; the want of a guaranteed scorer once the striker audition and the Beljo omission are accounted for; and the plain arithmetic of age — veterans whose repeat-sprint and recovery, across a hot summer and three group games, are the project's largest unknown.
The squad
Goalkeepers
The undisputed No. 1, and the man whose name still carries the warmest memory of the last cycle: the goalkeeper-hero of Qatar 2022, who saved his way through the Japan and Brazil shoot-outs and turned a quarter-final into folklore. He is 31 now and at his peak years for the position, but the club arc has bent downward rather than up. Having lost his place at Fenerbahçe and spent an unhappy spell on the bench at Girona, he returned on loan to Dinamo Zagreb in the spring on Dalić's express condition that he play regularly — a clear step down in level for a keeper who not long ago was first-choice in a Champions League side. None of that has dislodged him: Dalić named him one of his four pillars alongside Modrić, Gvardiol and Kovačić, and he started both June friendlies. For a third straight tournament he is Croatia's last line, the calm in the box his more nervous defence sometimes needs, and very plausibly the man the country will be asking, once more, to win a shoot-out in the heat of a North American knockout night.
The second goalkeeper, on the squad more for the cycle than for any imminent claim on the gloves. At 26 he is in the years a keeper usually settles into a first-choice club role, but his is a journeyman's path — minutes at Hull City in the English Championship rather than a Champions League stage — and he arrives without a senior cap to his name. Barring injury he will watch from the bench, his World Cup the experience of being inside the camp rather than on the pitch.
The third goalkeeper, a developmental pick at 26 who has built a steady career abroad at FC Copenhagen in the Danish top flight after coming through the Dinamo academy. Four caps is the measure of how far he sits behind Livaković in the pecking order; this is squad depth and tournament education rather than a genuine selection battle. If he plays at this World Cup, something will have gone badly wrong elsewhere.
Defenders
The defensive leader of the post-golden-generation side, and the hinge on which the whole back-three plan turns. At 24 he is squarely in his peak, the most valuable player in the squad and the one Dalić has installed as the heir to the old guard's authority — a left-footer who, against England, drops to left centre-back and becomes the first creator, carrying the ball out of defence rather than merely clearing his lines. His Manchester City season was shortened by a broken leg suffered in January that cost him four months (18 Premier League appearances, two goals, two assists), but he returned for the run-in and came through both June friendlies, the full ninety against Slovenia — the most reassuring fitness read of Dalić's three returnees, and a relief to a manager who admitted their condition was the thing he feared most. If Gvardiol is sharp, Croatia can defend the wide channels England are built to attack; if he is not, that is the first ground to give way. Dalić has spoken openly of him and Vušković anchoring the national team's defence for the next decade — which makes this less a farewell than a passing of the torch, the future already on the pitch while the past still sets the tempo around him.
The settled right wing-back in the back three and the orthodox right-back in the back four — first-choice either way, and a useful kind of player to have, the versatile defender who can cover centre-back and left-back at need without complaint. At 26 and at Bayern Munich, where he has carved out a real role rather than merely a squad number, he is in his prime and a fixture of the present rather than a question for the future. His job for Croatia is to overlap on the right and give the front trio licence to stay narrow; the one knock against him is that his crossing is a weaker link than Dalić's wide-delivery scheme would ideally want. A quietly reliable defender at the start of what should be his best years in the side.
The boldest bet on the pitch and the clearest sign that the post-Modrić era is arriving before the old one has finished leaving. Nineteen years old, a Hajduk Split academy product owned by Tottenham and loaned to Hamburger SV, he announced himself with a remarkable debut season in the Bundesliga — 28 appearances, six goals from centre-back, dominant in the air and in his defensive numbers for a teenager playing men's football week in, week out. Dalić has fast-tracked him as a decade-long investment, building the back three specifically around him: he was the only outfield player to last the full ninety against Belgium, the central anchor of the defence in a system designed for him. The caveat, raised pointedly at home, is that he carries barely any senior international minutes into a World Cup — a steep place to begin proving Dalić's conviction that he and Gvardiol will carry the country's defence for the next ten to fifteen years. This is his first tournament, and a breakout stage in the most literal sense: the future, handed the present's most exposed job.
The likeliest third centre-back in the back three, the one who held the right side against Belgium in Dalić's named dress rehearsal for England. At 26 and at Ajax, he is in his prime years and has the international grounding the system asks of the role, though the slot is genuinely contested — Ćaleta-Car, when fit, is the experienced challenger, and Pongračić and Erlić rotated through it in the friendlies. His job is the unglamorous one: hold the right, let Gvardiol step out from the left, and keep the structure honest while a forty-year-old and a teenager handle the more conspicuous parts of the plan. A solid, present-tense defender rather than a headline, but first-choice as the projection stands.
One of only five survivors of the 2018 finalists still in the squad, and the experienced challenger for the third centre-back berth. At 29 he is a veteran in tournament terms rather than years, the kind of unfussy, physical defender a cautious back three values in a knockout. His preparation was interrupted by a back problem in the Rijeka camp that had him training apart from the group and ruled him out of the Belgium friendly; he returned to full training before Slovenia but was rested as a precaution, leaving his sharpness for the England opener the open question. Now at Real Sociedad, he is rotation depth with a real path into the team should Šutalo falter or the plan tilt toward experience — a bridge figure between the golden core and the new defence rising around it.
Centre-back depth who pushed into the picture through the warm-ups, starting in the back four against Slovenia. At 28 and at Fiorentina in Serie A, he is in his peak years and a credible squad option without being a settled starter — a tall, left-footed defender useful precisely because he offers a different profile to the right-footers around him. His tournament is most likely to be played in the back-four games against Panama and Ghana, or as cover if the injuries among the senior defenders bite. Rotation, with a clearer role in the more offensive system than in the cautious one built for England.
Squad depth at centre-back who, like Pongračić, edged into view by starting the back four against Slovenia. At 28 and now at Midtjylland in Denmark after his Serie A years, he is a steady, no-frills defender whose dozen caps mark him out as a fringe rather than a fixture. His World Cup is most plausibly spent as a rotation option for the weaker group games or as insurance against the fitness doubts that shadow the older defenders. Honest depth, on the cycle's strength rather than any clamour to start.
Midfielders
The captain, the emotional centre of the whole enterprise, and still the man who chooses the moment Croatia accelerate. At 40 this is his fifth and near-certainly final World Cup, the closing chapter of the career that gave a country of four million its proudest decade; he is the nation's all-time leader with 198 caps and 29 goals, the latest of them scored against Slovenia on 7 June in his last appearance on home soil before the squad flew west. He sits deepest in the side and conducts the tempo, the inherited brain of a team that no longer has the deep-lying screen of Brozović in front of him — a structural gap that asks him to drop ever deeper toward his own centre-backs, which is both his gift and, against England's runners, a risk. He arrives off a full final season at AC Milan — 34 Serie A appearances, two goals, three assists — that was interrupted in late April by a fractured cheekbone, which had him playing in a carbon protective mask before the campaign closed. Dalić is already rationing him: managed through part-games in both June warm-ups, withdrawn against Slovenia to a standing ovation that the local press framed as perhaps his last goal in front of his own people. The question at forty is not the talent, which endures, but the arithmetic of how many hard minutes he can give across three group games in a punishing summer. He is the last of the era that defined modern Croatian football, and the whole tournament is, at home, wrapped around the wish that the goodbye can be made to last.
The bridge between the golden generation and the young core, and the most precarious of Dalić's selections — picked, the manager all but conceded, on what Kovačić has been rather than what he is right now. At 32 he should be a veteran in his prime; instead he arrives off an Achilles-wrecked season at Manchester City of two operations and barely any football at all (six appearances, one start, 126 minutes), with no competitive rhythm to speak of for most of the year. At his best he is the player who lets Modrić sit deep, carrying the ball through pressure and feeding the transition, the one man who makes Croatia genuinely hard to press — which is exactly why Dalić has gambled on him. But he was managed off at half-time in both warm-ups while his stamina is rebuilt, and whether he can last a knockout ninety against elite opposition is among the real unknowns of the tournament. This World Cup is a redemption of sorts after a lost year, and a measure of how much faith Dalić places in reputation over recent minutes; if Kovačić cannot go the distance, Petar Sučić drops into the pivot and the whole advanced line reshuffles.
One of the last survivors of the 2018 final still doing real work in the team, and the link between a veteran midfield and the runners ahead of it — drifting into central pockets off the lone striker as a connector rather than a pure number nine. At 34 he is a veteran in the truest sense, and almost certainly at his final World Cup, but he arrives on the back of his most productive recent club season: 14 goals and six assists in 34 Bundesliga games for Hoffenheim, where he has been a one-club man for a decade, making him Croatia's top available scorer this year. He has 36 goals in 116 caps for his country, a record that argues for his inclusion as much as the form does. Dalić tends to favour his experience for a game the size of England, though Petar Sučić's younger legs are pushing hard for the same shirt, and with the centre-forward position unsettled and no guaranteed scorer beyond him, Kramarić's goals from deeper may prove among Croatia's more dependable sources of them. A quiet stalwart of the era, asked for one last contribution.
The camp's breakout attacker and, on the projection, the second of the two advanced midfielders behind the striker against England — Dalić's most concrete creative option in the back-three games. At 23 he is emerging into the side at exactly the moment the old guard begins to leave, and his first season in Serie A at Como bore that out: six goals and three assists in 29 appearances, with chance-creation numbers among the very best for attacking midfielders in the league. The flip side showed against Slovenia, where a careless short backpass gifted the equaliser — the error-prone edge of a young player still learning the international game at its sharpest. This World Cup is a genuine breakout stage for him, the chance to convert domestic promise into tournament standing, and a sign of where Croatia's creativity is meant to come from once Modrić and Kramarić have gone. One of the futures, handed real responsibility now.
The young midfielder most widely cast as Modrić's heir, and the live challenger for a starting role rather than mere depth — he started in the advanced midfield against Belgium in Dalić's England rehearsal, and is the natural man to drop into the pivot the moment Kovačić's fitness gives way. At 22 he is in the first full bloom of a career that took a significant step this year with a move to Inter Milan, where he featured regularly (34 appearances, two goals, two assists) as a progressive, duel-winning box-to-box midfielder rather than a holding screen. That distinction matters: for all the talk of succession, he is not yet the deep anchor Croatia lack, which is why Modrić still does that job. His World Cup is a shop window and a coming-of-age both, the tournament where the bridge to the next Croatia is most visibly under construction. Rotation now, with a strong case to be more, and the future the country is counting on.
An experienced rotation midfielder and the man whose stoppage-time winner against Slovenia sent the send-off crowd home happy — and left him in tears, the night carrying the weight of a farewell for the whole generation around him. At 31 and a fixture at Atalanta, where he has built a long, productive career in Serie A, he is a two-way midfielder who offers balance and a knack for arriving late in the box (11 goals in 84 caps). He started the back four against Slovenia and is the kind of dependable squad man Dalić trusts to come in across three group games without disrupting the side. Not a guaranteed starter for the England plan, but a senior figure with a real role through the tournament, and part of the bronze-and-silver core now reaching its close.
A versatile attacking midfielder and rotation option who has been in and around the national team for years without ever quite nailing down a starting shirt. At 28 and at Torino in Serie A, he is in his peak years and brings a useful blend of running and end product (10 goals in 62 caps), the sort of squad player who can be thrown on to change a game or to spell the veterans through the heat. His most likely tournament is one of impact from the bench and selective starts in the back-four games rather than a settled place in the eleven. Solid depth in a unit that, for all its age, is where Croatia remain richest in numbers.
Part of the young midfield wave promoted around the veterans, and a distinct player from his cousin Petar despite the shared surname and shared billing as the future of the position. At 23 and at Real Sociedad in La Liga, where his season was a quieter one (three goals in 22 appearances, fewer minutes than he would have wanted), he is squad depth on this trip rather than a pressing claim on a start. His World Cup is most likely an education from the bench, the cycle's investment in legs that will matter more in 2028 and 2030 than in this tournament. One of the bridge generation, here to learn the international game from the inside.
A combative defensive-leaning midfielder who offers Dalić something the squad is otherwise short of — a player comfortable doing the screening, ball-winning work in front of the back line. At 29 and at Augsburg in the Bundesliga, he is in his prime and a useful tactical card precisely because of the Brozović-shaped hole at the base of midfield, though his modest cap count marks him as fringe rather than first-choice. His tournament is most plausibly spent as situational cover, the man to introduce when a lead needs protecting against a faster opponent. Honest squad depth, picked for a specific job rather than for the headlines.
Deep-midfield depth, on the squad in part because Croatia's lack of a natural holder after Brozović has them carrying several candidates for the role. At 28 and at Bologna in Serie A, he is in his peak years and a steady central midfielder, though ten caps tells the story of a player on the edge of the side rather than near its core. He came off the bench against Belgium and was caught out for one of the goals, a reminder of the gap between domestic competence and the international top end. Fringe selection, here for balance and insurance more than any expectation of meaningful minutes.
The breakout domestic story of the squad, and the rare home-based player to force his way into a side now drawn almost entirely from abroad. At 25 he is a late developer rather than a teenage prodigy, but his season at Rijeka — a leading hand in the club's domestic-double run, with goals and assists from attacking midfield — earned a call-up that local fans had pushed for. With seven caps he is still establishing himself at international level, and his most likely role is a depth attacker and an option from the bench in the back-four games. His World Cup is a shop window of the best kind: the domestic-league standout given the stage to show his form travels. A welcome thread of the home game in a heavily exported squad.
Forwards
The settled left wing-back in the back three and wide forward in the back four, and — alongside Modrić — the other great farewell wrapped into this tournament: at 37, in all likelihood his last World Cup, the closing of a partnership that has driven Croatia's attack for over a decade. He holds the most goal involvements in Croatian major-tournament history, and his trademark left-side delivery remains the single most reliable supply line into the box; his cutback set up Modrić's goal against Slovenia, one of two friendly starts that showed the old engine still turns over. The remarkable part is that this is no sentimental inclusion clinging to past standing. He has just had one of the best individual seasons of any Croatia player anywhere — seven goals and 12 assists in the Eredivisie for a PSV side that won the title, the highest club rating in the squad — proof that the veteran still earns his place on merit rather than memory. He does the wide attacking overload going forward and the unglamorous defensive shift coming back, and he is among the last of the era that gave the country its medals, asked for one more summer of the deliveries that helped win them.
The lone striker on the projection for England, the target man at the head of the attack — though the No. 9 berth is the squad's most genuinely open contest, a near-even call with the in-form Musa and Matanović a step behind. At 34 he is a late bloomer who reached the national team properly only in his thirties, and this is in all likelihood his one World Cup as a real contender to start, a redemption of a long, unfashionable career spent largely at Osasuna in La Liga, where he has been a dependable aerial focal point. His job is the single reference point for Croatia's crosses and set-pieces — he forced a sharp Oblak save with a header against Slovenia — holding the ball up to let the runners and the second striker work off him. He offers presence rather than guaranteed goals, which is precisely the squad's anxiety made flesh: with no Mandžukić-type figure and the domestic league's top scorer left at home, the striker question hangs over the whole tournament, and Budimir is the experienced answer Dalić leans toward for the biggest game.
The in-form challenger for the centre-forward role, and a near-even alternative to Budimir for the England start — he led the line in the Belgium dress rehearsal, the game built as the template for the opener. At 28 he is in his peak years and has taken an unusual route to it, a tall, mobile striker now scoring regularly in Major League Soccer at FC Dallas, with the local angle that he will be playing this World Cup in the country where he plies his club trade. His international record is still thin (one goal in 11 caps), which is why the audition has not yet resolved in his favour, but his club form is the live argument for starting him over the older man. This is a shop window and a genuine breakout chance both: the tournament where Musa can convert good domestic numbers into a settled place as Croatia's number nine. Rotation for now, with everything to play for in a position nobody has nailed down.
The third of the centre-forward options and the youngest, a tall striker who pressed his claim with a strong club season — 11 goals in the Bundesliga for Freiburg, which makes him Croatia's second-top scorer this year behind Kramarić. At 23 he is emerging at the right moment, one of the new forwards who have leapfrogged more familiar names into the squad, and he came on against Slovenia as Dalić worked through his striker auditions. With single-figure caps he sits behind Budimir and Musa in the order, his most likely tournament role an option from the bench and a longer-term bet on the position. A breakout-stage pick whose real reward may come in cycles to come, but whose form earned the seat now.
A wide attacker and rotation option who started on the flank against Slovenia, his pace giving Croatia a more direct edge than the veterans offer. At 25 and now at Orlando City in Major League Soccer, he is in his developing years and, like Musa, will play this tournament in his adopted league's backyard. Not to be confused with Mario Pašalić, the senior midfielder, he is a different and younger player whose 14 caps mark him as squad depth rather than a settled starter. His most likely role is a wide option in the back-four games against Panama and Ghana, and impact from the bench against England. Useful, energetic depth on the right of the attack, and part of the next wave rather than the departing one.
- Dalić named a 'shockingly calm' 26 on 18 May and submitted it unchanged at the 1 June FIFA deadline — no injury swaps, no late drama, the list merely 'sealed'. His three mainstays returning from injury (Modrić, Kovačić, Gvardiol) all made it, and he openly called their fitness his biggest worry.
- The most-debated omission is Dion Drena Beljo, the domestic league's top scorer during Dinamo's double-winning season, left on standby purely on striker competition — with only Livaković from a Dinamo core in the 26, a domestic-balance note the Croatian press has not let pass.
- Other notable absences: 2022 bronze-medallist Lovro Majer dropped to standby after barely starting for Wolfsburg since the March camp (Dalić admitted at announcement he had not yet told him); Bruno Petković left out through chronic injury; left-back Borna Sosa, a 2022 starter, cut entirely after a season of almost no minutes at Crystal Palace, reopening Croatia's chronic left-back problem; Dinamo captain Josip Mišić passed over for younger midfielders.
- The second No. 10 is a live battle the transition created: the lean is Kramarić's experience, but Petar Sučić — now at Inter Milan, around seventeen caps and widely cast as Modrić's heir — started there in the Belgium dress rehearsal and offers the legs the older man cannot.
- The cold-blooded bet is teenage centre-back Luka Vušković (19), fast-tracked specifically for the back-three plan despite a sliver of senior international experience — Dalić's clearest 'cycles, not current form' selection, and the one that most defines the squad's character.
The group
Where they come from
Croatia walked onto the World Cup stage for the first time in France in 1998, barely seven years after the country itself came into being out of the wreckage of Yugoslavia, and announced themselves like a side that had been waiting decades for the chance. That debut still governs the national imagination. A checkerboard-shirted team tore Germany apart 3-0 in the quarter-final, pushed the host nation to the brink in the semi before falling 2-1, and beat the Netherlands to take third place; Davor Šuker's six goals won him the Golden Boot, and a nation of four million discovered it could frighten the giants of the game. For a country still drawing its own borders, the bronze medal was never merely sport. It was a passport, a proof of existence written in a language the whole world could read.
Then came the lean years, and with them the rhythm that still defines the Croatian record: feast or famine, nothing in between. Group-stage exits in 2002, 2006 and 2014 sat alongside that founding miracle with no middle ground, a pattern Opta has framed neatly — in their first six World Cups Croatia were either knocked out at the first hurdle or reached at least the semi-final. The famine broke when a golden midfield generation came of age. In Russia in 2018 they went all the way to the final, surviving three consecutive knockout marathons — Denmark and the hosts on penalties, England in extra time in the semi — before losing 4-2 to France in Moscow. Modrić was named the player of the tournament, and a small nation came within a single half of the summit of the world game.
Four years later in Qatar they did it the stubborn way again. Japan and then Brazil were eliminated in nerve-shredding shoot-outs, Dominik Livaković the goalkeeper-hero of both, before Argentina ended the run in the semi and Morocco were beaten for a second bronze. Back-to-back podiums for a country whose entire footballing population would not fill a mid-sized European city; a 2023 Nations League final, lost again to Spain on penalties, made it three medals in five years. What runs through all of it is a refusal to be hurried — patient midfield possession, an almost monastic calm in extra time and shoot-outs, the conviction that a stronger-looking opponent can always be talked out of his advantage if you keep the ball long enough and your nerve longer still. Croatia have rarely blown a team away. They wear it down.
That is the heritage this side inherits, and equally the weight it carries. The plucky-spoiler label no longer fits a two-time medallist, and the first real dent in the legend has already been struck: a group-stage exit at Euro 2024, two points from three games, the night against Italy lost to a 98th-minute equaliser that prompted the first sustained questioning of whether the golden cycle was finally running down. Croatia arrive at a seventh World Cup as one of the most decorated teams of the past decade and, simultaneously, as a side the rest of the continent quietly suspects has reached the end of its road. The Vatreni have spent twenty-eight years making fools of that suspicion. They are asked to do it once more, with a captain about to turn forty and a body that no longer recovers as it did.
What it means back home
No small nation has trained itself to expect medals quite like Croatia, and that conditioning is the quiet pressure beneath this tournament. Two finals' worth of bronze and silver in eight years rewired the country's expectations: the plucky-spoiler story that powered 1998 no longer sells, and a generation has grown up assuming the Vatreni go deep as a matter of course. Darijo Srna spent a recent interview trying to let the air out of it — 'Croatia is a small country, we can't expect a medal at every tournament,' he insisted, putting 'zero pressure' on the team and naming merely escaping the group as the goal — which is itself a tell about how much pressure there is. Dalić works the same register, lowering the temperature, framing everything as a two-year cycle rather than a single tournament, even as the public quietly wonders whether this era has one more deep run in it.
What gives 2026 its emotional charge is the farewell. The dominant frame at home is the last dance — Modrić's fifth and almost certainly final World Cup at forty, Perišić's likely last at thirty-seven, the closing of the band that gave the country its proudest decade. The Slovenia send-off carried it openly: Modrić withdrawn to a standing ovation, Mario Pašalić in tears after his stoppage-time winner, local coverage treating the night as possibly the captain's last on Croatian soil before the squad flew to its base in Alexandria, near Washington. Srna spoke for many when he said that were Dalić managing England he would already be Sir Zlatko — that Croatia is too quick to reach for the knife the moment a result turns. The mood crossing the Atlantic is less triumphant than tender: a nation bracing to say goodbye, and hoping above everything that the goodbye can be made to last.
Team news
- monitoring Mateo Kovačić — Back from two Achilles operations and named to start both friendlies, but his stamina for a full 90 is still being rebuilt — withdrawn at half-time against Slovenia after also being managed against Belgium. Dalić is deliberately loading minutes into him before England; fit to start, the sharpness the open question, with Petar Sučić the cover if he cannot last.
- monitoring Luka Modrić — Sharpness, not fitness, at 40: eased back through part-games in both warm-ups, scoring against Slovenia (his 29th international goal) before being withdrawn around the hour. Recovered from an April cheekbone fracture that had him in a protective carbon mask; managed minutes rather than any fitness doubt.
- monitoring Duje Ćaleta-Car — A back problem in the Rijeka camp had him training separately and ruled him out of the Belgium friendly; he returned to full training before Slovenia but was deliberately rested as a precaution. Back in contention for the third-centre-back slot against England, fitness still being managed.
- monitoring Joško Gvardiol — After a long layoff with a broken leg he came through both friendlies and played the full 90 against Slovenia — the most reassuring fitness read of the three returning regulars. In the squad and tracking to start, sharpness building rather than in doubt.
- monitoring Luka Vušković — An April knee injury, reported in Germany as worse than first feared, is now behind him: the 19-year-old played the full 90 against Belgium and, though rested for the Slovenia start, is fit and central to the back-three plan. The earlier scare is resolved.
How we built this
Assembled from the outlets and analysts that cover Croatia closely, then fact-checked. The probable XI is a consensus projection — the official team is only named on matchday.
- Sportske novosti (SN) · Croatian
- Telesport (Telegram.hr) — Holiga, Vrdoljak, Ibrulj · Croatian
- Index.hr · Croatian
- gol.hr (Nova TV / Dnevnik) / HNS · Croatian
- Net.hr · Croatian
- Rijeka Danas / Germanijak · Croatian
- 24sata / tportal · Croatian
- Wikipedia (2026 WC Group L; Modrić; P. Sučić) · English
- Sky Sports / FOX Sports (Group L fixtures and venues) · English
- MLSSoccer.com (Petar Musa profile) · English
- Croatia Week · English