Tuesday, July 13, 2021 at 1:21 PM• Mart Oude Nijeweeme • Last update: 13:24

The collaboration between Martijn Jol and Mladen Petric has certainly not produced warm memories for the latter. The Croatian striker was brought to Fulham by Jol in 2012, but it did not come to a successful reunion. The duo previously worked together at Hamburger SV. In an interview with Goal Petric says he went through hell and first thought about ending his career under Jol.

After a successful collaboration in the 2008/09 season at HSV, Jol decided to bring Petric to London in 2012. “He had made many promises to me,” Petric recalls eight years later. “I told him that. I thought that Berbatov and I could play well together, but he saw it differently. He was quite cold in our conversations, so I knew it was not going to end well. being fooled, was deeply disappointed as a human being and very angry that he had cheated on me like that. That was when I first thought about quitting.”

Petric and a number of teammates were suspected at Fulham of having misbehaved during a night out. “That story is rather inflated,” said the Croat. “I remember going to a pub with about ten players and watching football together. My English and Irish teammates then worked nine or ten at a frenzied pace. pints away and one of them was unable to walk by the end of the evening. I thought he was a few days out but the next day he marched into practice as if nothing had happened. I was completely stunned. That’s the beauty of England: if you perform well at the weekend, people don’t care what you do privately.”

In 2016, Petric ended his career as a football player at Panathinaikos. Today, the forty-year-old former attacker works as a TV expert. He won the German Super Cup with Borussia Dortmund in 2008 and the Greek Cup with Panathinaikos in 2014. Petric played a total of 44 times for the Croatian national team, where he played together with Luka Modric. The Croatian playmaker has made the most of Petric’s 19-year career. “He has become a world footballer for a reason. His overview, the technique, the passes with the outside of the instep, that is unbelievably good.”