A serbian star with one foot in his village

That no fanfare greeted Vrelo Sport’s owner was not unusual; club owners are not the most popular people, in Serbia or elsewhere, even when their teams are winning. Still, the arrival of Nemanja Matic, caused hardly a ripple even though he is Serbia’s most famous player and spends most of his time playing for one of the world’s biggest clubs.

Matic, 29, entered the stadium here by walking past the two police officers guarding a flimsy fence and folding his tall frame under a broken metal guardrail. He took his place in the center of the stands among the home supporters and opened a packet of pumpkin seeds, the snack of choice at soccer matches anywhere in the Balkans.

In 24 hours Matic would join his Serbia teammates as they made their final preparations for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. But he had important business to attend to first. Matic, who spends most of his year in England, where he plays for Manchester United, had come to see whether the team he founded in 2015 in his home village, Vrelo, would win this season’s championship. Vrelo Sport had run away with the league, but Brezovica was still hanging on in second place.

Few world-class soccer players are also team owners. Matic owns two. He also finances FK Jedinstvo, a third-tier club from nearby Ub, where he played as a boy. It is all part of a deep connection he maintains to Serbia, and more specifically to his hometown, with the help of the millions he has earned in the Premier League. Matic has also become known in Serbia for his philanthropy; he has financed an array of projects, including church improvements, equipment for firefighters and, reportedly, even the grocery bills of some retirees.

“We all respect him very much,” said Zivorad Vucetic, a Brezovica fan sipping a beer. “It’s not just about sports.

“He’s invested in football clubs, yes,” Vucetic added. “But he is also the kind of person that remembers his roots. He never gave up on his village.”

Slowly Climbing the Ladder

Matic took the long road to Old Trafford and the World Cup. He began playing for Vrelo’s village team, coached by his father, before eventually joining the prestigious academy of Red Star Belgrade. Matic was tall and gangly, but Red Star saw a burgeoning attacking midfielder. He stayed four years but was let go, and another year at Partizan Belgrade’s academy also ended in failure.

At 16, Matic returned home and signed with the biggest team he could find, FK Jedinstvo. “It was a big disappointment for him,” said Tomislav Jevtic, who grew up with Matic and now works at Jedinstvo. But, Jevtic added, “he didn’t give up.”

Unable to claim a regular place on the team, Matic found himself, at 18, on trial up the road at FK Kolubara. “More than 15 youth players came, but we needed only five,” said Veroljub Dukanac, who coached Kolubara at the time. When Matic scored with a fierce left-foot shot, even though he wasn’t wearing any boots after injuring himself, Dukanac snapped him up.

After one season he was spotted by an agent and taken to Slovakia for a successful trial at Kosice, and Matic’s circuitous journey to the Premier League began. Chelsea signed him and then promptly lent him to their Dutch feeder club, Vitesse Arnhem, before selling him to Benfica. At Benfica, Matic was converted into a defensive midfielder and played so well that Chelsea spent $29 million to buy him back three years later.

Matic became one of the key players in José Mourinho’s Premier League title-winning team in 2014, and when Mourinho eventually moved on at Manchester United, he returned to his old club and bought Matic for the third time.

But as he climbed the ladder, Matic never forgot home or the people he believed had helped along the way. He started Vrelo Sport from scratch then agreed to take over Jedinstvo a year later, in 2016. Both clubs were filled with family, friends, players with connections to Ub, and others he had met during his early years.

Dukanac, the coach who gave Matic his big break, is now in charge at Jedinstvo. “I didn’t have a conversation like with an owner of a club,” he said of the day Matic called to offer him the job. “We made a deal in 30 seconds, like friends.”

The president of both Jedinstvo and Vrelo Sport is Darko Matic, his cousin. The equipment man is an old school friend. The Jedinstvo assistant coach is Milos Obradovic, a buddy from the Red Star academy; when Obradovic had to retire as a player after breaking his leg a second time, Nemanja Matic offered him the job.

“There are about 50 people whose wages he pays for in Ub,” said Branko Matic, the club’s secretary and one of the few people at the club not related in some way to Nemanja Matic.

Jedinstvo was on its knees financially when Matic agreed to take it over two years ago. The club had just been relegated to the fourth tier, and its stadium, Branko Matic said, was in bad shape. Nemanja Matic paid for its reconstruction and named it after Dragan Dzajic, perhaps Serbia’s greatest player, who has roots in Ub, and at Jedinstvo.

“His connection with this place is so strong,” Branko Matic said of Nemanja Matic.

He spoke while sitting in a restaurant overlooking the field. Forests rise on two steep banks around the stadium, where 1,300 new red seats were recently installed. Nemanja Matic paid for a new roof, too.

The stadium, however, shows little trace of him aside from a framed Chelsea shirt in the trophy room and a large action picture of him on the wall of a clubhouse corridor. But he was never far away.

“When he plays in Manchester and Jedinstvo is playing at the same time, he calls at halftime” to find out what the score is, Branko Matic said.

“Sometimes he has too much time,” Darko Matic said of his cousin, tongue in cheek. “He has a lot of free time between matches. He’s always calling and texting.”

Running two soccer clubs is not cheap, though. Jedinstvo costs about $29,000 a month to run, team officials said, and that does not count the renovation of the stadium, which cost more than $350,000. Vrelo Sport brings another set of expenses; there is, not surprisingly, little money to be made in the Serbian fifth tier.

“Jedinstvo is not a profitable business,” Branko Matic acknowledged, although the long-term plan is to polish talented young players and sell them to bigger teams. Even for a small club in Serbia’s third tier, the potential rewards can be huge. In Europe and elsewhere, so-called solidarity payments to early clubs follow a player as he rises up the world ladder.

“When Nemanja went to Chelsea, we got 120,000 euros,” Branko Matic said, even though Nemanja Matic had only made one senior appearance for Jedinstvo.

A Town’s Uniting Force

The office of Ub’s mayor, Darko Glisic, a 10-minute walk from Jedinstvo’s stadium, can be found next to Nemanja Matic Street. The decision to rename it, Glisic said, was the easiest vote his municipality had ever taken.

“No one ever said anything bad about him, and he united all the citizens of Ub,” Glisic said. “That is why we gave him a street.”

The vote, in March, was unanimous. The road is a little barren, but a hotel is being built, and a large billboard featuring Matic was erected in time for the World Cup. People come to take pictures next to the street sign every day, Glisic said.

Close to a dozen public soccer fields are walking distance from his office. Ub, Glisic said, has produced an inordinate number of professional soccer players. It has almost 40 fields in all, and 32 registered teams, almost as many as Montenegro, for a population of just 10,000 people. Matic, though, has become by far the most famous hometown player. “Time stops here when Manchester United play,” Glisic said.

Everyone had a story about Matic. When Ub was hit by powerful floods in 2014, a disaster that killed almost 60 people in Serbia, Matic replaced many of the ruined soccer fields, as well as a kindergarten and a fire station. If a problem arises in Ub, Matic is willing to listen.

“We can call him,” Glisic said. “One day we watched him play against Liverpool, and that night he flew to Serbia and came to Ub to have a drink with people.”

In his home village, Vrelo, a few minutes’ drive away, a small brass plaque was all that marked the fountain he donated to the Orthodox Christian church where he was married and his children were baptized. Last year Matic paid for the church’s new roof, the four clocks in its spire and the fences that surround it.

On a visit in May, the only noise that could be heard over chirping birds was a bulldozer flattening a piece of adjacent land to build another field for Vrelo Sport. But despite his help, this remains a proud place. Some residents were angered by local news reports contending that Matic had visited grocery stores and paid off debts. They said the reports made them look as if they couldn’t care for themselves.

In one store, a woman working behind the counter responded angrily to a question. A priest at the church politely declined to talk.

A Day for Celebrating

The championship match between Brezovica and Vrelo Sport kicked off to the sound of Serbian music from the second day of a raucous wedding party taking place next door. Vrelo was the stronger team and took a 2-0 lead. When Vrelo’s goalkeeper was sent off and a penalty awarded to the home team, though, the atmosphere changed. But Vrelo Sport held out and won, 2-1, confirming its status as champion. The team owner, who began his journey to the World Cup the next day, stood and cheered with the rest.

“Tonight we will have a big celebration because a player from Vrelo Sport is having a wedding as well,” Darko Matic said.

Nemanja Matic was the last person to leave the stands. He swept his pumpkin seed shells into a plastic bag, congratulated his players as they left the field, and headed to the party.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

A serbian star with one foot in his village

The soccer match, between Brezovica and Vrelo Sport in Serbia’s fifth tier, was something of a local derby. A few hundred supporters, paying about a dollar a ticket, filled the uncovered concrete bleachers along one side of the field. It was the biggest crowd of the season.

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