Guardiola: “I'm going to make Odegaard the best in the world”

You have to go back to 2015, when Guardiola was Bayern coach and Odegaard was a promising 15-year-old who was raffled off in half of Europe. The coach was doing the traditional winter ministage with the German club in Qatar, where the Norwegian youth teams were also concentrated. Former footballer Jan Age Fjørtoft, with extensive international experience, was on the technical staff of the Nordic federation. When Guardiola could see Odegaard on the pitch, he did not hesitate to exclaim to Fjørtoft: “You have to bring that boy to Munich, you have to bring him to Munich! I will make him the best player in the world… ”. Now, we know that event from the mouth of Fjørtoft himself.

It is the Nordic newspaper Nettavisen that has released the anecdote, which it collects from a podcast, ‘Here we go’, by the Italian journalist Fabrizio Romano. The latter had as a guest Fjørtoft, who enthusiastically recalled what had happened. At that time Odegaard was still in the Strømsgodset. And Fjørtoft tells how he, the coach of the Norwegian national team and the Odegaard family got together to talk about the next step in the career of a young Odegaard: “Later, when we returned, I, as coach of the Norwegian national team, invited Martin, his father and the coach of the national team to my house. At that time I wrote down on a paper, I like dramaturgy, what four clubs that at that moment I thought they were closer to signing Odegaard. Liverpool, Arsenal, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, “he confessed.

Fjørtoft, who, although he was not Odegaard's agent, did advise his father directly, recounted insights from those days when the young footballer decided his future: “As you know, Liverpool was his favorite club, it was his favorite club as a child. I still think that the reason why he ended up at Real Madrid was quite simple, in my opinion. First of all, Real Madrid had a second team, the other three clubs did not. The second team coach was Zinedine Zidane. He is not a bad player, he is not a bad coach ”, he jokes.

According to Fjørtoft, Bayern were very sorry that they had not been able to fulfill Guardiola's wish to sign Odegaard: “Michael Reschke, who is now at Schalke, was the recruitment manager in Munich at the time. I met him after Martin chose to go to Real Madrid and he told me: ‘If I had known that the second team would be crucial, I would have built a second team to achieve it. Fjørtoft concluded in his conversation with Romano.