Michael Olise: estrellas del fútbol, ​​Copa del Mundo 2026

Modern football can iron out the creases in a personality. Kids join academies as raffish improvisors, little bundles of wild ideas and schemes. They leave them, years later, as footsoldiers, drilled in pressing patterns and mechanised attacking moves, notes from a hundred media-training seminars still etched on their retinas.

An exaggeration? Sure. But there is a reason we cherish the outsiders, the non-conformists, those who walk a slightly different path. There is a reason we love players like Michael Olise.

Olise is a dreamer.

“I like players who play with freedom,” he told L’Equipe Magazine last year, and he enacts that on the pitch. He is constantly trying things, none of them dull. There are neat little flicks, slalom runs, full-body feints, through balls. When none of that is feasible, he’ll just knock out a 30-yard curler into the top corner. The 24-year-old, according to advanced stats that I certainly haven’t just made up, last played a simple pass back down the line to his full-back in 2020.

His is a playground repertoire, a rolling repudiation of the safe option.

At the same time, Olise has a genuinely fascinating public image. You may have seen that infamous, monosyllabic post-match interview on Sky Sports during his time at Crystal Palace and written him off, but there is something more interesting going on.

Olise has purposefully cultivated a kind of detached non-persona. His Instagram profile picture is a purple circle. None of his posts are captioned. His most frequent celebration involves him plugging an ear with one hand and making a ‘shhh’ gesture with the other. His social media bio is wordless; there is just a ninja emoji. In, out, deadly but silent: is this the blueprint for Olise’s career?

Taken as a whole, it looks a little like a rejection — of the game that surrounds the game, the whole circus. Olise has no major commercial deals, which is both vanishingly rare and incredibly cool. He has given a grand total of one in-depth interview since turning professional. “As a footballer, you have to give your answers on the pitch first and foremost,” he told Bayern Munich’s in-house magazine in 2024. “That’s where I want to show what I can do and who I am.”

On someone else’s lips, that would have sounded like cliche. Coming from Olise, it seemed more like a philosophy.

Olise was born in west London and grew up in Hayes, a stone’s throw from Heathrow Airport. His progress through youth football, initially frictionless, slowed when he entered his teens: Olise was let go by Chelsea, joined Manchester City and was then let go by them, too.

It wasn’t that Olise lacked talent. He just didn’t quite fit the mould. “He has a very different way of thinking about life and football,” one of his mentors, Sean Conlon, told The Athletic in May.

Olise found a home at Reading, where he made his senior debut at 17. By the start of the 2021-22 season, he was a Premier League player with Crystal Palace, who had been impressed by his work in the second flight. Three years later, Bayern paid the London club €60 million, including add-ons, to bring Olise to the Bundesliga.

He has since established himself as one of Europe’s best attacking players. This season, especially, has been a whirlwind of goals, assists and eulogies. “He will surely be one of the best in the world one day,” Bayern manager Vincent Kompany said before the Champions League game against Real Madrid in April. “He’s already on his way. If he keeps this up, we’ll see just how far he can go.”

It has been a rapid ascent, all the more impressive for the fact that it has been on his own terms. “If I had followed the classic path, I would have become someone quite different,” he told L’Equipe Magazine. “You have to take each challenge as a lesson, as something to process.”

Off the pitch, Olise has no time for films or television. His preferred pastime is chess, which chimes with one of the more insightful descriptions of his character, offered by Kompany in January 2025.

“He’s a very cerebral player,” Kompany said. “He thinks deeply about everything. He’s obsessed with his work. There is attention to detail in everything he does.”

Those same qualities have come to the fore at international level. Olise could have opted to represent any one of four countries: Nigeria, Algeria, England or France. He chose the latter, saying that he had dreamed of pulling on the blue shirt since his first childhood holidays in France.

The decision was vindicated in 2024, when he was picked for Thierry Henry’s under-23 squad for the Paris Olympics. Olise was the star of the tournament, setting up five goals and scoring two more as France won a silver medal. It boosted his profile in the country and put him onto the radar of Didier Deschamps, the coach of the French senior team. Seven weeks after the final, Olise was called up for UEFA Nations League games against Italy and Belgium.

It took him five matches to adjust. In the sixth, he bent home a heart-stopping free-kick against Croatia. As France prepare for the World Cup, he is now considered an automatic pick on the right, despite stiff competition for places. Deschamps, not always the easiest man to please, has full faith in his talent.

Olise has a tattoo on his leg, in Japanese. “Each day, a little more,” it reads, a telling little mantra. Olise may be a little off-kilter, hard to pin down, but he is serious about his craft. Ambitious, too: he has said that he casts ahead, five or 10 years, and imagines what the view will be like from there. Ideally, it will include a drawer full of medals. “That’s what I want: to have won things,” he told L’Equipe Magazine.

Another quote stands out from that interview. “I never look back,” Olise said. “It’s the future that excites me.”

If he’s excited, it stands to reason that we should be, too.