Get free access to the most comprehensive World Cup coverage in The Athletic app.
Everything is carefully scripted.
An hour or so before kick-off in Dallas today (Tuesday), France’s newest superstar will emerge from the tunnel to inspect the pitch.
Except this won’t be a normal pitch inspection. It will be a Michael Olise pitch inspection: a languid walk towards the fringe of the playing surface, a couple of scuffs of his trainers on the grass, and a quick glance around the stadium before returning to the sanctuary of the dressing room. Blink and you’ll miss it – at least until it goes viral on social media again.
Forty-five minutes or so later, when Olise returns for the warm-up, there will be pink boots, the colourway of choice for the sport’s biggest brands this summer – everywhere you look. But Olise won’t be wearing them – well, not unless France surprise us by playing all in pink in their World Cup semi-final against Spain. Olise likes his footwear to match the rest of his kit, which is easy to do when you don’t have an individual boot sponsor; wear what you want, when you want.
In the warm-up, Olise kicks the ball as high as he can into the air before controlling it effortlessly. On one occasion at Bayern Munich, he nearly took out their manager Vincent Kompany and a television crew with a wayward punt. Sprinting across the pitch in a rare show of panic, Olise arrived just in time, beautifully bringing down the ball with all the softness of your head hitting the pillow after a long day.
In another part of his matchday routine, Olise runs, leaps and performs a 360-degree spin in the air in the seconds leading up to kick-off, making him a photographer’s delight (some brilliant images are doing the rounds) and drawing praise from an unlikely source.
— Equipe de France (@equipedefrance) July 9, 2026
“He jumps higher than many professional dancers,” Francois Alu, a French ballet dancer, told the French sports paper L’Equipe. “And on top of that, he’s wearing boots on a pretty soft surface that doesn’t really allow for any spring. That’s quite… astonishing.”
Finally, the France kick-off. Olise always takes it and boots the ball straight out of play. It feels totally at odds with how elegantly Olise plays football that he’s tasked with doing that, and yet it’s also strangely befitting of a man who seems full of contradictions.
Sean Conlon, who has known Olise since he was six years old and coached him at various stages during a football journey that was far from straightforward, smiles at the aura and mystique that surrounds arguably the most fascinating player at this World Cup.
“It’s becoming marketable now, the whole nonchalant thing,” Conlon says.
Advertisement
Enigma is a good word. There are so many layers to Olise and his extraordinary talent; just don’t expect him to explain them.
September 2024, Weserstadion. Bayern have just won 5-0 at Werder Bremen in the Bundesliga. Making his fifth appearance for the club, following a £50.8million ($67.9m at the current rate) transfer from Crystal Palace of England’s Premier League in the summer, Olise was outstanding, scoring twice and assisting twice.
“Right, let’s go,” the Bayern midfielder Jamal Musiala says to Olise, as the two of them reach the bottom of the stairs in Bremen’s stadium.
It’s hard to suppress a smile as you watch the footage that follows, which was filmed by Michel Schroer, a journalist with German newspaper Bild.
Unprepared for what’s around the corner, Olise takes one look and performs an emergency stop. He starts to stretch a hamstring that doesn’t need stretching and turns on his heel. It’s like he’s seen a ghost.
Musiala carries on walking, oblivious to the fact that his new team-mate is no longer by his side until two of Bayern’s media staff, one with a microphone and another holding a camera, scamper back to the stairs, where Olise is hiding.
Pointing towards the post-game flash interview area, they gesture for him to come back — something that isn’t going to happen without Musiala’s intervention.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Musiala says to Olise, sounding like a lawyer briefing his client before the police turn on the tape recorder and the interrogation starts.
“Aight,” Olise replies, as he steps down the stairs for a second time.
“I’ll talk for you,” says Musiala, who previously played alongside Olise at Chelsea’s academy.
Wearing a pair of headphones, Olise shuffles back into view.
Musiala turns to him before the interview starts. “This is the start, you know. Part of the life.”
It’s “part of the life” that Olise would happily do without.
Advertisement
“As a footballer, you have to give your answers on the pitch first and foremost,” Olise told Bayern’s club-members magazine shortly after signing for the German giants.
In 2022, Olise scored a stoppage-time winner for Palace against West Ham United in the Premier League, making him an obvious candidate for a post-match interview. To give you a clue as to what’s coming next, when Sky Sports put the footage on YouTube, it was titled, ‘The shortest post-match interview ever?!’
“Just talk us through it?” the reporter asked.
“Through what? The goal?” Olise said, deadpan.
“Mmmm-hmm,” replied the reporter.
“I think Wilf (Wilfried Zaha) passed me the ball. Shot. Scored,” Olise said, not showing a flicker of emotion.
The reporter laughed. “Nice and brief,” he said.
Olise, looking nonplussed, nodded.
“It was a moment that captured the game, that won the game. What’s the feeling like when the ball does hit the back of the net?” the reporter continued.
“Yeah, it’s a good feeling,” Olise said.
“Do you feel you deserved it overall?”
“Yeah,” replied Olise.
The interview caused a stir at the time and, inevitably, led to all sorts of comments about a monosyllabic footballer. Some people wondered if Olise was being difficult, while others thought he wasn’t very bright.
For the record, Olise is quick-witted and smart. He scored 127 in an IQ test in 2024.
As for his football intelligence, it’s off the scale.
Halfway through the 2020-21 season, Veljko Paunovic called Olise into his office to discuss his development.
Paunovic, now the Serbia national team’s head coach, was the manager of Reading — then in the Championship, English football’s second division.
As for Olise, he had not long turned 19 and was playing his first full season in senior football, one which would end with him being named the three-tier, 72-club English Football League’s young player of the year after scoring seven goals and registering 12 assists.
Advertisement
Paunovic still has the seven-page document he presented to the teenager that day. There are separate team graphics showing Olise’s contribution (goals, assists and chances created) across three different positions — left-winger, right-winger and No 10 — as well as half a dozen or more areas for him to target for improvement, including working on his right foot, his heading ability and becoming more ruthless in front of goal.
“Because we always thought that he could score more goals, and it looks like he prefers to assist rather than score,” Paunovic says. “But this is something that is a part of his character, I believe.”
What was Olise’s interaction like with that presentation?
“It’s a great question,” Paunovic replies. “He was very quiet. He would observe. He was focused. It’s not like he was looking around the room.
“As a player, I never had these kinds of conversations with my coaches, and I would like to have known what the coaches really thought about me. And I think this is what caught his attention – you’re talking about him, and there is no bulls–t in this. This is what he is, and this is what he has to improve, or can improve, if he wants to commit.”
Paunovic scrolls to the next page, which is titled ‘Set pieces’.
“What he liked more was this part — because he wanted to take penalties for us,” Paunovic says.
“I said, ‘Look, I need you to practise. You can’t just show up and say, ‘Hey, I’m taking penalties’. I’m not gonna throw the coin in the air with you. I want to see if you’re capable of being efficient taking penalties’.
“And in my head was this, ‘Michael, if you want to take penalties, and you prefer to assist, who are you going to assist when you take a penalty?’.
“So I want to see that ruthless, killer instinct you have in order to take penalties. After training, when you stay behind, I want to see that those balls really go into the net.
Advertisement
“So, answering your question, ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ — a lot of those. But this was, I think, profound for him. He had something in front of him where he could evaluate our vision against what he had in his head, and I believe we were pretty close to what he wanted to hear from us.”
“Michael was a cool kid,” Martin Kelly, a former Palace team-mate, says. “He wasn’t interested in any of the fads of the modern-day game — playing FIFA (the video game) or getting caught up in social media. He let his football do the talking.”
Occasionally, that football talked him into trouble at Palace, albeit in strange circumstances.
“I remember he kept doing the same thing in training once — and which Patrick Vieira (Palace’s manager at the time) never wanted him to do: getting the ball, being direct and trying to beat a player, instead of playing it inside and getting it from a one-two off a No 10 to then break a line,” Kelly explains.
“Patrick ended up sending him in from training. I hadn’t seen anything like that for years. But Michael was that strong-willed at such a young age. You’re getting coached by someone who has won everything in the game (as a player for France and clubs including Arsenal, Inter and Milan), but Michael Olise was just not bothered in the slightest. He was so unfazed. A maverick.”
Olise spent much of his childhood training at professional academies in England, predominantly with Chelsea, who released him at the age of 14, and later Manchester City, who also let him go. Clearly, those experiences contributed to his development as a young footballer, together with his time at Reading’s academy, where he finally blossomed.
Yet when you watch Olise play and you see the sort of things he’s capable of doing with a football, you also can’t help but wonder how much of his ability is innate.
Advertisement
“I don’t think that coaching will have played an enormous part in Michael’s life, really, or that he will need to thank coaching for a lot of what he’s able to do,” Roy Hodgson, Vieira’s replacement at Palace, says. “Whatever happened, Michael doesn’t need coaching now.
“What he needs now is to be put in the right position on the field of play alongside players who are good enough to play with him, to feed him with the ball and to make the necessary runs so that he can show all his attacking ability.”
That pretty much captures exactly what Olise has got with this France team at this World Cup and goes some way to explaining why he has been able to thrive. The fact that he has got what Hodgson describes as “God-given ability” helps, too.
“I was watching Messi the other night, and Messi reminds me of him a little bit,” Hodgson says. “He gets himself into positions and people feed him the ball under a lot of pressure, and he finds his way out of it, and finds the right pass, and of course, like Michael, he’s got that weight of pass.
“I’m now talking about probably the greatest player in the world, so if he (Olise) considers himself close to that, he’s doing pretty well.”
In an interview with L’Equipe last year — a collector’s item — Olise cited the influence of Messi on his style of play as well as Brazil’s Neymar, but also explained that he wants to be true to himself, and that goes for how he lives his life off the field, too.
When Hodgson reflects now, he wishes that he’d had a chance to get to know that person behind the footballer better.
“He is quiet. He wasn’t easy to speak to,” Hodgson says. “I suppose, at times, I maybe respected a little bit too much his desire to be left alone. I certainly never pushed him. When it came to interviews, I knew that he didn’t like them. Occasionally, people would say to me, ‘You should tell him he’s got to do more (media work)’, but I respected who he is and what he likes to be.”
“Just pause it now,” Conlon, Olise’s former junior and youth coach, says.
It is the build-up to France’s first goal at this World Cup, against Senegal. Olise is on the ball, on the French right, about to set up Kylian Mbappe with a wonderful disguised pass.
“Did you know Michael plays a lot of chess?” Conlon asks. “Joe Shields, who’s the head of recruitment at Chelsea, when he was at Manchester City, he was the one that brought Michael to City. I remember having lunch with him and we were talking about Michael and what he was achieving. He was recalling when he was at City, it was Michael’s first day and he was in one of the waiting rooms and he’s reading a chess book. At 14, a boy who has come up from London! They were like, ‘Who’s this kid?’
Advertisement
“When you play a lot of chess, there’s moments when you see into the future. Sometimes (in football), it can become quite instinctive, you’re going a little bit off a feeling and you’re seeing pictures of attacks that are not necessarily obvious. When this happened against Senegal, I’m really wondering at what point did Michael work out what he was going to do.
“This shape here (shown in the image below); 70 per cent of players in the World Cup are delivering a ball to that back-post area for a header. I wonder, is he now having the connection with Mbappe and seeing that ball to thread through, and he’s already planned it at this moment, like a chess move?”
Some movement patterns are well-rehearsed on the training ground; others feel more instinctive — the product of improvisation and, in the case of Olise and Mbappe here, a meeting of minds. “It seems that he and Michael have got really strong telepathy with each other,” Conlon adds. “Because class recognises class, they would feel that they’re the best and so they know how to connect with each other.”
A showreel of clips moves on to the round-of-32 game against Sweden.
“Look at the little dance he does now, how he passes this,” Conlon says, as Olise rests one foot on top of the ball while offloading it with the other for a little one-two.
Why does he do that?
“Because he’s a west London boy and he cares about flair and he cares about style. He’s a showman!” Conlon says, laughing. “It’s unnecessary but isn’t it so beautiful?
“But this is also what I’m saying about his personality; to be a real winner and take the game by the scruff of the neck. The shot that follows: that won the corner that got France the first goal and unlocked Sweden.”
Olise is different, that’s for sure — different as a person and different as a footballer.
Advertisement
In the last-16 game against Paraguay, he played an extraordinary volleyed pass. It barely got a mention at the time because the clock was running down and everybody was far too preoccupied with Paraguay’s ugly tactics, but it’s a moment of artistry and beauty — a pass that was so good team-mate Desire Doue didn’t start running until after Olise made contact with the ball because, quite frankly, how on earth could the winger have expected it?
“Oh my god,” says Conlon, laughing. “It has come into his path, so it curls for him to run inwards — it’s got backspin on it, too! It’s so nuts and it’s all done deliberately.”
Conlon shakes his head and smiles.
“Michael’s so special. The sky’s the limit for him.”
For now, it’s all about trying to navigate a way past Spain tonight to have a shot at winning a first World Cup.
Just don’t expect Olise to get carried away if France are crowned champions on Sunday. Celebrations, much like interviews, aren’t really his thing. At Bayern, he hid his face behind the Meisterschale trophy when he reluctantly, and half-heartedly, lifted it after being cajoled by his team-mates, who couldn’t help but laugh.
Staying cool with the smaller World Cup trophy in his hands could be trickier, but you wouldn’t put it past him.