This is Aleksandar Mitrovic, the boy who liked to fight but now unites a nation

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The old changing room looks run down now. The windows are boarded up, and the walls have graffiti on them. On the roof, an old blue corner flag hangs over the edge, a peculiar discarded relic but now a symbol of the building’s past as a home to nurture footballers.

On the front, off the gravel path, a silver door has “FK Jezava” scribbled onto it, the team name that is taken from one of two rivers that bisect the city of Smederevo. Its printed letters are crossed out, but below it is handwritten the word “Partizan”, a first reference, and indication, of this venue’s sacred history.

It is the beginning of November and the early morning light is slowly building in this otherwise unremarkable corner of Radinac, a village just south of Smederevo, 60 kilometres east of Belgrade. The light is thwarted by a grey curtain that hangs over the day, which is not uncommon in this part of the world. The city often wears this grey overcoat, a mix of low cloud and lingering fog that rises off the river Danube.

The river influences the world here. Beyond the lumbering coal boats that carry their cargo to the steel mill — an imposing structure and the lifeblood of the area — there is the water’s impact on the day-to-day.

To the left of the old changing room sits an airfield, complete with a few ageing propeller planes. One of their tasks, in the uncomfortable moments of summer, is to rise above the city and dowse the area in pesticide to kill off mosquitoes.

Today, the planes are still, so it is the rugged football pitch next door that catches the eye.

The grass is tinged red in patches, a by-product perhaps of the steel mill. Most of the pitch has been freshly cleared of molehills but a few have popped up again during the night.

Vojkan Rakic walks onto the pitch and looks across to the airfield. He is wearing a blue sports jacket with his name emblazoned on it in white letters. He is 61, but as The Athletic will quickly learn, he has the energy and enthusiasm of the children he has coached over the past 25 years.

“He missed his first training session and went up to the airfield,” he recalls, speaking with the help of a translator, Nikola Lalovic.

“He and four kids went there. He was the smallest. They were late and so I asked, ‘Why are you late and who is this little kid?’.

“‘This is Aleksandar, he’s our friend’,” they said.

“Please, coach, let him try.”

Aleksandar Mitrovic started playing football here in 1999. He grew up a stone’s throw away, behind a row of red-tile roofed homes in a neighbourhood that is separated from the fields by a busy road and a railway line — an important link to the steel mill. To attend training, Mitrovic would have to cross those tracks, with a little help from Rakic.

“He was so small that I used to grab him like this,” says Rakic, who then grabs the scruff of his own neck, “to get him across the railway. I had to go to the kids’ houses to take them to training. It isn’t safe to cross for five-year-olds.”

Mitrovic, in those days, was not the imposing target man football fans know today. In fact, Rakic would initially play young Mitrovic out wide due to his speed and small size. But Rakic knew of his potential — his mother, Natasa, and his father, Ivica, were both tall and there was footballing pedigree in the family.

“His father and his uncle, Boban, trained here,” he explains. “His close relatives trained here. His father and his uncle were really good footballers. When I found out they are Aleksandar’s father and uncle, I knew there would be something there. His whole family played football.

“They were a working-class family. His mother sold bus tickets on the bus, his father also drove buses. It was really tough for a big family. All of them were included in that. His grandfather helped and his grandmother cooked for him, especially when he would later travel to Belgrade for training (with Partizan Belgrade). It was a collective effort. They are a good family, good people.”

Mitrovic grew up with his brother, Milan, who was a goalkeeper in his early years. But success would not come easily and the family, especially his parents, had to make a lot of sacrifices. “They gave up everything so that I could achieve my dreams, so that I could do what I love,” Mitrovic said in an interview with Serbian outlet Informer last year. “My brother also had to sacrifice himself many times. For example, when we didn’t have the money, he didn’t get new sneakers or t-shirts, just so that they would have money to buy football boots or shin guards (for me). I’m glad I can give back now.”

The concrete and gravel of the local streets were Mitrovic’s first football arena, and later, like many young footballers in Serbia, he would play futsal too.

Football was a means of channelling his restless energy and keeping him out of trouble. When Mitrovic was at Newcastle, he said in an interview that his father had told him that he would either grow up to be a footballer or a criminal. He recalled that the most trouble he found himself in was for throwing rocks at a train, smashing a window and causing it to stop. He was not the most docile kid, and that fiery side has been evident in the early years of his football career.

“He was always very competitive,” says Rakic with a wry smile. “He liked to play basketball. He liked to climb the biggest tree in the street. And… he liked to fight.

“When there was a fight among the kids, he was there. One time, when training was finished, I was going to my house and I saw him on top of one kid like this…” Rakic puts his hands around his throat.

“I asked him: ‘Aleksandar, what are you doing?’. He said: ‘No, no, he punched my brother!’, so I said to him: ‘Leave that kid alone!’.”

Rakic laughs. “He’s like that. He will always give his best to the people he cared for. But he was always a kid who was ready to share everything he owns with everyone else.”

On the grass, Mitrovic’s talent was immediately clear. He spent around three years working with Rakic, for the team that was then known as FC United but is now called FK Jezava. Back then, the team would wear yellow Brazil shirts as a kit, all with the No 10 on the back, and would play in a 3-5-2 formation, owing in part to the popularity of flying full-back Roberto Carlos.

Mitrovic stood out among his peers.

“From the start, he was so talented,” says Rakic, pacing around the penalty area and his voice rising, excitable. “He loved to train and never ever did he not obey my orders. All the other kids were much bigger than him because they were older. When they tackled him and pushed him, he would fall to the ground…”

Rakic suddenly jumps to the floor, lies prone and buries his head into his arms. He continues, his voice muffled by his coat: “… and he wouldn’t get up before I came on and said, ‘Aleksandar, get up’. But in time, he worked out how to avoid those tackles and he knew how to step over players.

“Because he was so smart — and knew his way around the box — I called him Gerd Muller. He was the best goalscorer. Always the top goalscorer. When he was seven, he played with people two years older. Sometimes with 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds. In that league of 10-year-olds, when he was seven, he scored 27 goals.”

Rakic realised Mitrovic’s potential was far beyond what he and this football arena of planes and molehills could offer. He took him to the local club FK Smederevo. But he realised that too would not be enough.

“Wherever I went with him, he was so much better than other kids,” he reflects. “In the first training session at Smederevo, he scored three goals. They were amazed — it was with kids two years older. I thought, ‘This is too small for him’.”

What happened next would have a cost for Rakic. Without third-tier Smederevo knowing, he took Mitrovic to Belgrade for a trial with Partizan, one of the biggest clubs in the country. Rakic said he scored three times again in his first training session, but Smederevo were not happy. Rakic worked there at the time, as a steward.

“I was in many fights because of him,” he recalls. “I gave around 200 players to Smederevo from here. I gave them whole teams. It was really hard back then. I took Mitro to Partizan by myself, I didn’t let them know. They gave me a hard time because of that. But I don’t regret it — it was the best thing for him. 

“I just knew I had to take him there.”

Rakic was able to point out his supply line to the club and tensions eased. Ultimately, he would be vindicated by that decision.

There is evidence of that across the road and railway, next to the community centre. On the wall, there is a mural of Mitrovic, complete with the words “Mitro’s On Fire”, the lyrics sung by supporters of Fulham and Serbia to the tune of Gala’s Freed From Desire.

He’s come a long way in a short time.

“He scored a goal very similar to the one he scored for Serbia when we beat Portugal,” reflects Rakic, referring to Mitrovic’s last-minute winner against Portugal last November that secured Serbia’s qualification for Qatar. “We couldn’t score a goal, and he was so much younger and smaller than other kids. He was just starting out and was on the bench. I said, ‘Mitro, Come on and, God help us, he came on and scored the goal. He ran to the corner flag, pulled out the flag and started waving it. When he scored the goal against Portugal, I saw that in my head. 

“He always had the passion. He always stayed after practice. He played football at home and then the older boys or senior teams would play here, and he would always be behind that goal, watching and chasing the ball.”

Rakic turns on the edge of the penalty area, and looks at the goal and the fence behind it.

“When I look, I can still see him there,” he says. “Because I loved him so much.”

It is an unseasonably warm November day in Belgrade and Vuk Rasovic, the head coach of Al-Fayha in Saudi Arabia, takes a seat outside the Amici Italian restaurant, next to Karadjordje Park in the south of the city. Rasovic owns this restaurant. In the distance, you can see the floodlights of Partizan Belgrade’s home stadium.

He is making the briefest of visits home to see friends and family but is willing to make time to talk about the player he risked his nascent coaching career for, and whose success was the catalyst for his own. He still keeps in touch after all, even about food. “Aleksandar comes here,” Rasovic says with a smile. “But he’s a little bit lazy and he loves to order, you know.”

Rasovic would meet Mitrovic after six years in the Partizan academy. It was Rakic, from Radinac, who first brought Mitrovic to Belgrade, aged 10. For the first couple of years, he would commute to training, braving a near-three-hour round trip up to six times a week. His parents, working on the buses, would go with him and sometimes Rakic went too. “It’s a really curious thing, I’m a Red Star fan, but I gave him to Partizan,” says Rakic, speaking of Partizan’s fierce Belgrade-based rivals. “Because the facilities were better at Partizan, they had the better youth system. They gave more opportunities for kids.”

Partizan opened a new training centre in 1998, in the Zemun area of Belgrade, which is upstream along the Danube from downtown Belgrade. At the time, Mitrovic faced a lot of competition.

“In the academy are players from all over Serbia,” recalls Darko Tesovic, former Partizan player and former youth coach in their academy. He met a 14-year-old Mitrovic in 2008. “You have to fight for a place. It gets harder to get chances if you are not part of the national team. Mitrovic showed character and succeeded.

“He was, well… let’s say he wasn’t a football build. He was a bit heavier. He didn’t have speed, which is a big requirement now. He didn’t get many chances to play, but in training, he was always giving his best, like he was the best in the world. That is a reason for his big success.”

Mitrovic’s physique evolved at Partizan. Initially, he looked like a late developer, but then had a growth spurt between the ages of 13 and 14. “The other day, I was speaking to his old PE teacher, and he told me that in one class, Mitro went up to him and said, ‘Teacher, teacher, will I grow up to be bigger?’,” recalls Rakic. “He said, ‘Yes, yes, you will’.

“He had a growth spurt at 13/14. He couldn’t coordinate in that year or two properly. But he bounced back from there.”

Mitrovic would often make cameos from the bench and was not initially a standout player. But the person who changed everything was Rasovic, who saw something he wanted in him for Partizan’s second team, Teleoptik.

“Everything happened in January 2011,” recalls the former Partizan defender and coach as we talk at Amici. “I was assistant coach at Partizan and they offered me the chance to take the second team, to try to adapt young players easily into the first team.

“I was 37, I had ambition. It was: ‘OK, let’s prepare players, but I want to win!’.

“We played in the second division, and it’s so hard for 17-to-20-year-olds to play against men. It’s difficult to hold the ball, they get caught and score against us. I said, ‘OK, I need someone to stay in the middle and to save the ball’.

“I told the sport director and he said, ‘Your idea is good, but we don’t buy players for the second team. You must find one in the school’. One coach said to me, ‘There is one. He’s tall, but he’s young’. I said, ‘Let me see him and work with us for seven days, and see if he can help us’.

“Aleksandar came in. First training session, second training session, third training session. One game. Then, I gave him a four-year contract.”

Initially, there was a lot of scepticism. “Partizan is a big system, people watch training,” Rasovic says. “People came up to me. ‘Why are you giving a salary like this to (Mitro)?

“I saw it as my responsibility. I am the coach, I know what I need. He’s my choice. Why did I do it? I saw big potential in him. I saw what I needed.”

Mitrovic was 17 when he signed his first contract. And of course, with this being Mitrovic, it was not always plain saying. He had to channel his fight into his football. But at Teleoptik, he was able to make his mistakes.

“I could see how much he wants to make something, every game,” says Rasovic. “Sometimes you’d play in a village 100 kilometres from Belgrade and you knew how much he would fight. It’s not at all easy in his head. He was not always easy to manage. But we found the connection. I told him, ‘You are not easy. You fight but you cannot fight. We must work together. And you must listen to me because I’m your coach’.

“One game, he entered the pitch in the 75th minute. In the 78th minute, he scored a goal. He takes off his jersey. Yellow card.

“Next attack. He catches some player, and it’s a second yellow. He’s off.

“I told him in the meeting afterwards, ‘How is it possible, in three minutes, you score and receive two yellow cards?!’. He was young, he looked at me and thought I would be mad. 

“But it is part of their growing up. It’s so important to have one or two seasons for young players in a team like this. So they learn.”

Mitrovic continued to score goals and it became impossible to ignore him. He scored seven from 25 league games for Teleoptik, and he was then called up for the Serbia youth national sides for the first time. He was the under-19s’ top scorer during European Championship qualifying in 2012 but he was then sent off during the first game of the tournament itself. A year later, he returned and was a key part of the team that won the Under-19 Euros. He was voted as the “Golden Player” in a tournament that included Portugal’s Bernardo Silva and France’s Anthony Martial.

“After one year, he was with the Partizan first team,” says Rasovic, who would be promoted to first-team manager during the following season and went on to win the Serbian Super League with Mitrovic. “After one season, he signed for Anderlecht. Then he went to Newcastle and again Partizan received more money — they earned more than €10million (£8.8m, $10.4m).

“After six months, all those people who attacked me came to me and shook my hand. ‘Coach, this is the best choice. He’s better than the first team’. I appreciated that.

“He has absolutely deserved everything that’s happened to him. He is an unbelievable professional.

“He works a lot. We recorded a lot of clips to show him. You know when you put a number in the phone and push save? It’s the same with his head. Every bit of information I gave to him… tomorrow I could tell him something else. But this thing from yesterday…” Rasovic points to his head. “He has it saved here. Because of that, he improved every day. You and I could find 10 players like Mitrovic, same speed, good jump, but Mitrovic is worth €50million and the others are between €1million and €5million. The value of a player? It’s in his head.

“I am so so proud because he has become the best striker in the history of Serbia. He is an absolutely amazing striker.”

Mitrovic has crossed party lines in Belgrade in a way only a privileged few have managed.

At Partizan, in his one season with the first team, he scored in the Eternal derby with Red Star, during a 3-2 defeat. He celebrated in front of the rival supporters. But a decade on, after becoming Serbia’s all-time leading goalscorer with 50 goals from 75 appearances (reaching 50 goals for his country quicker than Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi), he finds himself respected by both sides. On the streets of the city in the weeks leading up to the World Cup, Mitrovic’s name could be seen in adverts and on the back of shirts sold by street sellers. Goran, a Belgrade taxi driver and proud Red Star fan, underlines the point in broken English while travelling from the airport: “Mitrovic? Ah, now he is a great player.”

Mitrovic’s career accelerated after Partizan, but it was not a linear rise to the top at club level. When he arrived at Newcastle, aged just 20, he was still raw. He was booked 22 seconds into his debut and was then sent off four games later. He would be sent off twice in his first season and receive seven bookings, but he still scored nine goals

However, he fell out of favour over a couple of seasons and joined Fulham, initially on loan. There, his career would initially mirror the club’s ups and downs amid seasons of promotion and relegation. All who knew Mitrovic in his early years speak of playing to his strengths to get the most out of him: “With Mitro, it’s really important to have players that give him crosses,” says Rakic, echoing Rasovic. “When he gets the ball in the box, it’s a goal.”

At Fulham, his spiritual home abroad, he has matured — he has not been sent off for the club across his five years there. He has spoken of how becoming a father helped him to settle. On the field, it would be working under Marco Silva when he truly showed his potential. Since the Portuguese head coach took charge, Mitrovic has scored 52 league goals from 56 matches and has nine Premier League goals from 12 appearances this season. Glib doubts about his top-flight pedigree are over.

At Craven Cottage, his goalscoring has elevated him to a god-like status. For the national team, his exploits are now near-mythical. Two years ago, while struggling for game time under Scott Parker at Fulham, Mitrovic missed the decisive penalty against Scotland in the European Championship play-off, denying his country their first qualification for 20 years.

Earlier this month, he told Serbian television he considered retiring from the national side as a result. “You start to question yourself — is it important to play football again? All kinds of things went through my head for seven, eight days. I literally didn’t get out of bed for the first four,” he said. “It’s like I disappointed my people, the whole country.”

But 12 months later, he went on to score the goal that took Serbia to the World Cup.

His legend is already written.

“He’s the star of our country,” says Rasovic. “He’s a big star in his team in the Premier League and in the national team. He scores in almost every game. These are his years and I expect five or six years on a big level because he’s thinking about his body. He takes care of himself, his muscles, recovery about everything.

“We don’t have a bigger star at this moment.”

The story of his journey is admired greatly today. “I use him always as an example when speaking to younger players,” says former Partizan coach and player Tesovic. “That is, the first condition to success, is to work hard.”

Back in Radinac, on that football pitch where Mitrovic first discovered his talent, Rakic has memories running through his mind. Vivid, as if they were yesterday. Today, he makes sure to watch every single goal scored by Mitrovic, and he hates to miss matches. “My wife always complains that I watch too many games, she wants to watch other things,” he smiles. “The thing I like to do the most is to go on the internet and re-watch his goals. When I do that, everyone in the house must be completely silent.”

Now, Mitrovic has his World Cup chance, a leading light in Dragan Stojkovic’s impressive strike force.

How does it feel for Rakic to know he nurtured his country’s greatest goalscorer, playing a part in Mitrovic’s journey to the top?

Rakic pauses, and his smile gives way to a quiver. It is overwhelming, and he begins to cry.

“It’s too much,” he says, after a long pause. “It’s too much.”

With thanks to Nikola Lalovic, Nemanja Stanojcic and Nebojsa Markovic for their assistance.

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(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)