With a mop of hair and dressed in jeans and a black and white striped sweater, Martin Odegaard, 16, looked like a student walking through the streets of Madrid.
But he was not a teenager.
Ten years ago today, Odegaard in the Spanish capital was signed as Real Madrid’s new signing for £3. 5 million ($4. 3 million at current exchange rates), after the club beat out a host of other wonderful beasts of European football to buy one of the world’s footballers. Stromsgodset’s greatest hopes, in their home Norway.
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Flanked by Madrid’s communications director, he sat in silence for more than a minute as a cacophony of camera shutters clicked in front of him. Not entirely sure where to look, what to do with his hands or whether to wear the headphones he had been given for translation, a 15-minute press conference with the world’s media soon commenced.
It had been a long time since he had been informed of the occasion on which he would attend. Once off the plane, he was not taken to a hotel to receive information and was not given any club tracksuit before being taken to the Bernabéu, Madrid’s stadium, and placed in a chair with a microphone in front of him.
Odegaard’s upbringing and temperament meant he was not overawed but it seems unthinkable today that more care would not be taken in preparing so young a player for such an experience.
Perhaps it was thought that ‘civilian’ clothes and scruffy hair would present him as a teenager with boyish potential, whereas a glossy makeover would risk hurriedly packaging the kid as Madrid’s next galactico-in-waiting.
It was to be that very dilemma, of how to pace his ascent to stardom, which paralysed his six years as a Madrid player.
But how is it possible that such a player, who has shown that he can excel in the elite during the last three years as Arsenal captain, has not achieved it at the club that has invested so much to recruit him from the beginning?
Odegaard’s call began to resonate in European recruiting circles in 2012, when he was only thirteen years old and was already training in Stromgodset’s first team. The secret was revealed and the festival began with the red carpet rolled out by almost all the big clubs. His father said they won more than 30 official offers until the end of their tour.
“There is a meeting in my living room, with me, the Norwegian national team coach, Martin and his father,” says Jan Aage Fjortoft, Norwegian national team coach since 2014.
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“We were discussing his options, which was like choosing between The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley. I still have two lists: the four I thought he should choose between and the four I guessed he was thinking about.”
Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Arsenal and Liverpool were on the final list.
Odegaard was a player rubber-stamped by Madrid’s renowned chief scout Juni Calafat and the club’s offer included the guarantee he would train with the first team. They were also the only one of the four contenders to have a B team, which was coached at that time by legendary former player Zinedine Zidane, who had made a point of introducing himself.
Odegaard chose Madrid and without delay embarked on an unusual hybrid calendar. He trained this week with Carlo Ancelotti’s first team, along with Marcos Llorente and Borja Mayoral, two other of the club’s top young talents. It was only in the last consultation of the week. that Odegaard joined the Castilla team (substitute), which plays in the 3rd division of Spanish football.
He didn’t get off to the most productive start.
“He made his debut against Amorebieta and played forty-five minutes on a muddy pitch; The water is up to our ankles,” says Jorge Franco Alviz, a former Castilla teammate, known as Burgui. “Zidane had to substitute him (substitute) at half-time and in the dressing room Odegaard kept saying: ‘Disaster, disaster’. I think he touched the ball twice.
Odegaard started regularly in Zidane’s reserve team but has only scored one goal and one assist in 11 appearances. The media attention and the prodigy label did not sit well with the rest of the Castilla players who watched those games from the bench despite working hard in education all week.
Madrid’s two youth managers, Paco de Gracia and Ramón Martínez, asked Burgui to help Odegaard adapt because the newcomer is very shy. He took a step forward over time, but tended to avoid giant teams and liked to socialize with only one or two teammates.
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Odegaard’s father Hans, now manager of Norwegian club Lillestrom, moved to Spain with his son and was given a job coaching Madrid’s under-11 team. Football Leaks later said Odegaard Sr’s contract was allegedly worth £2.7million, roughly 10 times what would normally be expected for that kind of job.
“His father was with him. We saw him in the corridors, so he never left him alone,” Burgui explains.
“I tried to help him by putting him next to me in the dressing room because I’m very open. We train in combination in the gym in the afternoon. Every Tuesday and Wednesday we were in combination and that brought us closer. 16 and I 21 but he at the tip of the Castilla because he is very skilled. He made one last impressive pass, in addition to his shot at the ball. I had no doubt that it would get to where it is today. “
Top young talent still wants a way to enjoy competitive matches if they are not considered in a position for a club’s first team. At the end of that first season, Ancelotti still showed little interest in Odegaard: he did not call him up with a single squad until the league final.
“I thought, ‘I don’t care if he comes or not, because he’s not going to play for me now’,” recalls Ancelotti in a chapter from his 2016 autobiography Quiet Leadership, about how he focuses on managing rather than the power dynamics at clubs.
“I may be the most productive player in the world after I leave, but this signing doesn’t interest me because it doesn’t matter for my job,” he continued.
“Of course, when he came, I treated him with the same respect I would give to any young player, but why would I want to be involved in his recruitment? He is being recruited for the future, for other managers after my time.”
OdegaardArray, however, is part of Ancelotti’s tenure as he played 58 minutes in a 7-3 home win over Getafe at the end of May, replacing reigning Ballon d’Or winner Cristiano Ronaldo.
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It was a game to get into. There was a crazy score in Madrid’s last game of the season, but a flat atmosphere due to a crusade without trophies for the club. He would possibly have starred in Madrid’s long-awaited Champions League triumph a year earlier, but Ancelotti knew the failure meant it was likely to be his last minutes in charge.
Despite this, he gave in to the orders of the club president, Florentino Pérez, so that Odegaard made his debut.
“It’s important to respect the vision of the owners,” Ancelotti said. “Perez was well known for his galactic approach, where the biggest and most beloved superstars in world football are recruited, so players came and went who wouldn’t necessarily have been my choice, but that was my job, to make the team paint with whatever it was. “the goods were delivered to me.
“It’s a waste of time and being able to combat something that’s already happened – you want it to be fixed. After all, that’s why they call us managers. If the president makes the decision that, as a public relations exercise, he wants the Norwegian boy to play 3 games for the first team, I will find a way to make it happen.
Rafael Benítez took over that summer, but was fired midway through the following season and replaced by Zidane, who knew Odegaard’s game because he coached him at Castilla. Even so, Odegaard did not play a single minute in 2015-16 and only played one game. .
Madrid’s midfield still included Casemiro, Toni Kroos, Mateo Kovacic, Luka Modric, Isco, James Rodríguez and Llorente, which meant Odegaard and Llorente had to get regular time somewhere.
“There was no board (to play against them),” says Luis Miguel Ramis, who went from coach of the under-19 team to coach of Castilla in January 2016. They were very intelligent children, so it was common for them to play. I only remember one time, an attack in Castilla La Mancha, in a very bad field, that I did it. I took (Odegaard) off at half-time. The boy was lost.
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“What happened to Array because he is so young that he still cannot maintain the competitive speed of the first team or pass at the same speed? With us, the league we played in had many defensive teams. He was a kid who used to hunt up front and when he came to us we had to work on getting him to start hunting at the back, and it was a little harder for him.
Although Odegaard played in the Spanish 3rd division, he was also a regular starter for the Norwegian national team. Norway benefited from a long-term investment in his talent, made from a young age, as they sought to publicize him and build a team around him.
“We were discussing the option of nominating (choosing) a 15-year-old, going back and forth,” Fjortoft says. “I asked, ‘Is he one of the 18 most sensible players in Norway?’And we all agreed. One of the reasons we welcomed him is that we considered it a wonderful idea for him and his family circle to use the experience and wisdom in and around the national team.
“For him to come to the national team was a great way to escape everything. The coach, Per-Mathias Hogmo, was very supportive and saw that he had to build him, to understand what a valuable asset he will be for the future of Norwegian football. He was brilliant, as a lot of coaches don’t always speak with the players a lot as they have others who will do it but he was close to Martin.
“The first game I played through Martín. I came in and the players started giving him the ball. There was an acceptance of the fact that he demanded the ball and demanded the next one even if he had lost it. The most productive thing the players have is that.
In Madrid, Odegaard was considered a bit introverted but very intelligent and professional in terms of training. However, he felt he was caught between two camps and his progression was stagnant.
“He exercised very little with us, he was with the first team,” explains Burgui, his Castilla teammate. “He told me that he would like to exercise with us for two or three days, because there were times when the first team was resting or the workload was very low because they had played the Champions League the night before, because of the language and the Since he was not in the daily dynamic with us, when he arrived here he did not notice the training at all.
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Odegaard played 23 games in the Norwegian top flight after making his debut at 15 years and 118 days. He became his country’s youngest foreigner four months later and had made nine international appearances by March 2016, when he was just 17 years old.
Although many on the outside world expected Odegaard to be part of the Madrid first team, there was a feeling shared internally by some staff that even the Castilla side was too quick a step to make.
“You may see him differently technically, but he struggled with language and tactical patterns,” says a senior source within Madrid’s academy, who spoke on condition of anonymity for club relations.
“He didn’t get along very well with José Gil (Ramis’s assistant). José gave him a lot of trouble. The kid didn’t pose any challenge and they even asked him to move to Juvenil A (youth).
“I would have put him in Juvenil A and encouraged him with appearances in Castilla, little by little. I would have had more security and time. He doesn’t like Rodrygo or Vinicius Júnior years later, arriving ready-made. He is very anarchic (in his game), but when he practiced with the ball, he was a weirdo. He came from a technology-based culture, and that weighed on him.
With no first-team experience in Madrid, Odegaard joined Dutch side Heerenveen on loan in January 2017. He spent 18 months there and a further year on loan in the same country at Vitesse Arnhem, playing 82 times. while posting expected assist (xA) figures that made him the top under-21 artistic talent in all of Europe’s major leagues.
The lack of goals and assists, combined with the lower level of competition, skewed the fortunes of his stay in Holland. Odegaard was out of sight and out of brain, a player who had less applicability because he was not performing at the top of his game, as expected.
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Upon his return to Madrid in the summer of 2019, he was still not considered fit to make his way into the senior category. Instead, he joined Real Sociedad on a season-long loan and established himself as a player in La Liga, helping the Basque club finish sixth and win the Copa del Rey, starting and scoring the first goal in a 4–3 win. victory over their parent club at the Bernabéu in the quarter-finals.
Installed in a team that is committed to European football, the prospect of extending his stay in San Sebastian seemed moderate to him. It seemed that could also happen, until Madrid tried to get Odegaard to return to the mothership with the promise of the former. a team role with them that he had played for five years.
“All I can say is that he was very happy here,” says a Real Sociedad source, speaking anonymously to protect relationships. “Only a call from Zidane telling him that he was counting on him and that he would be important at Madrid led him not to continue for a second year. Martin wanted to stay.”
Zidane’s footballing taste was less structured and gave way to more back-and-forth games rather than being a team with dominance of possession every week. Isco and Marcelo were two of those who suffered this, and it was an idea that Odegaard did not sit well at all either.
True to his word, Zidane started Odegaard in the first two league games of the season, but at that point he left at half-time against Real Betis with his team trailing 2-1. Isco replaced him and Madrid turned around to win 3-2. Odegaard left the team and two muscle injuries forced him to start only one League game and two extra Champions League games.
By that December, Odegaard was 22 years old and had played just 489 minutes for Madrid in almost six years.
Most likely, the loan to Arsenal for the rest of the season will be an unsettling experience, some other new country with a different footballing taste and uncertain if it would be just a six-month layover.
Four years later, Odegaard made 174 appearances for the north London club. It took him a while to get back to his best, but in Mikel Arteta he discovered a manager who believed in him and designed Arsenal’s right flank to maximize their strengths in small spaces.
Odegaard does not regret his decision to sign for Madrid, which he considered the best team in world football at the time. There were moments in the adventure when he didn’t know if he was going or going, however this series of loans made him stronger.
Entering so many other dressing rooms with the weight of his call weighing on him is easy, but it has allowed him to expand his leadership qualities and Arteta saw compatibility to give him the forward captain’s armband for the 2022-23 season, having made the move permanently for an initial payment of £30 million last summer.
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“People talk about players like they’re machines, but he’s like any 16-year-old leaving home to go to school for the first time,” Fjortoft said. “When I was 16, I didn’t need to go to school. ” my grandparents’ space, 30 km from home, because I missed home. Everything depends on the mind, on tenacity.
“There were other people who thought he could just get into the Madrid team and be the most productive player, but luckily he had a smart team around him. There aren’t many prodigies who have turned his skill into the career he has. Some, like Wayne Rooney (after joining Manchester United at 18), come on: trophy, trophy, trophy. But Martin had to go down and then back off, which is amazing.
“Don’t underestimate him because of his appearance. He is one of the most consequence-aware people I have ever met. He looks like a guy the Vikings would have said no to because he’s not big or brutal enough, but I’d take him on any ship.
Arteta chose Odegaard to lead Arsenal and now the task, although the most complicated, remains for them is to make the transition from challengers to winners.
Additional information: Mario Cortegana, Guillermo Rai and Dermot Corrigan
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)