Michael Olise picked up the ball deep on the right touchline, deftly controlling a slightly errant pass. He had two defenders on him instantly, the sort of special treatment that a glowing talent like him has come to expect, even though this was on his 19th birthday and he only really established himself as a first-team regular midway through the previous season.
It was the 89th minute of an away game against Queens Park Rangers in November. The score was 0-0 and the west Londoners were digging in, seemingly settling for a point; not unreasonably so against a Reading team who were 12 points and 13 places higher in the table. Just shut down this nascent attack. Hold on and take the draw.
Olise headed down the line, seemingly running straight into the narrow channel that his two markers, Macauley Bonne and Niko Hamalainen, wanted him to run into. Then came a sudden snap of his hips, a near-180-degree turn and a flick back with his left foot. Olise had rope-a-doped the two QPR players into opening up a pocket of space inside, into which he moved before playing a sharp one-two with Tom McIntyre as Bonne scrambled to recover the situation.
From there, things were straightforward: all Olise had to do was lope infield, pull back his left foot and pass the ball into the corner of the net from nearly 30 yards out.
This was just the latest bit of brilliance from Olise, probably the most promising attacking talent in the Championship right now, and there’s plenty more where that came from.
“He was maybe the most wonderful and fantastic talent I’ve worked with,” Jose Gomes, the former Reading manager who gave Olise his senior debut, tells The Athletic. “And look — I’ve worked with very strong academies, at Porto, Benfica, Panathinaikos, Malaga, with a lot of important and big talents.”
The son of Nigerian parents, Olise was born in France and represented them at the Toulon Tournament last summer, but is eligible for England, where he grew up. Nominally, he’s a No 10 but you could stick him anywhere across the attacking line and he’d probably still be the best player on the pitch.
“Michael is really special,” continues Gomes. “He can see, even before receiving the ball, more options than regular players. His technical ability and speed, decision capacity is really, really good.”
He’s a player made for a YouTube compilation, who constantly looks like he’s showing off for someone in the crowd. These sound like insults but they’re a crucial part of his game. He’s productive alongside the flamboyance.
He has seven assists to his name this season, the most of any player in the Championship, placing him ahead of proven Premier League creators such as Emiliano Buendia (six assists), David Brooks (five) and Harry Wilson (four). In the opening weeks of the season, Reading were a tricky team to get a handle on. They were a side who had taken the fewest shots in the division but only dropped two points in their first eight games, but when you’ve got a creator pinging in pinpoint set pieces or drawing three men to leave a colleague in acres of space, or playing absurd reverse passes through gaps water might think twice about penetrating, then you might not actually need many shots to score.
In terms of gait and running style, he resembles a left-footed Jesse Lingard. However, there are more tricks — lots more tricks. The way he teases defenders by showing them just enough of the ball before flicking it away is cruel, almost like dangling a treat for a dog but jerking it out of reach just as the gullible pet/defender jumps for it. Simply put, he often looks like he’s taking the piss. He’s the sort of player that you’d watch and think, “I bet he gets kicked a lot in training”. And, as it turns out, you’d be right.
“At times, he had this little bit of arrogance about him in training,” says Mark Bowen, the man who was Reading’s director of football and then replaced Gomes last year. “If he overstepped the mark with it, which he did once or twice, you’d have players like a Liam Moore, who would fly in and leave something on him.”
Being hoofed in the air by a hoary old veteran might discourage some youngsters, but Olise isn’t among them.
“The one thing that really stood out for me was even during those training sessions, if he got clobbered or clumped by any player, he would bounce straight back up. That was unusual because young players coming in, they’re often a little bit of a shrinking violet. He wasn’t like that. He would basically get back up, wipe himself down and get on with things. I thought, ‘That shows he’s got a good level of maturity’.”
On top of everything else, Olise is potentially a bargain. The Athletic understands he has an £8 million release clause in his contract, meaning that even in these times of COVID-straitened budgets, he wouldn’t even be that much of a risk for any Premier League club who’d like a rough but still sparkling diamond to polish some more. Spurs have been watching him for some time and half the Premier League have been credited with an interest.
The obvious question to ask is, in this world of sophisticated scouting operations, where big clubs seem to know who the best young talents at EFL clubs are before the clubs themselves do, if he’s this good, why hasn’t Olise been snapped up before? And, indeed, why was he not signed up by the academies of Chelsea and Manchester City, where he spent some time earlier in his career?
Bowen explains, about watching Olise playing for Reading’s reserves: “He’d be playing in a wide area and do a little bit of brilliance, but then lose the ball. And then he’d walk back. You could see in his mind it would almost be, ‘Yeah, OK, it didn’t happen today but I didn’t really want to be here. It’s reserve-team football’.” It took a while to actually get into him that every game he plays. There are people watching him.
“I said, ‘Those are the times when you’ve got to be running harder than everybody else, working harder than everybody else. If things aren’t going right for you on the ball, then those people who think you’re a good player will still come back and forgive you that’.”
Elements of those concerns still linger. Current Reading manager Veljko Paunovic left him out of a few games recently and offered a hint as to why when he said: “You can expect, from the young players, a certain lack of understanding of the big picture.” But it’s perhaps telling that in two of the games Olise has come off the bench, he’s provided a goal and an assist.
“We cannot forget he’s a kid,” says Gomes. “He’s very young, he’s growing and he needs a lot of support. Because without this support, maybe he cannot show all of this talent.”
Olise will be playing in the Premier League sooner or later. It could be January, it might be after that. At the moment, it just feels like a question of which club will make the decisive move, rather than whether any of them will.
“He deserves everything,” says Gomes. “If my words can give him strength and confidence, it’s my obligation to do it.”
