Michael Olise: The Future Star for Real Madrid
Claude Makelele has seen enough of the game’s greats to choose his words carefully. So when he talks about Michael Olise as the one player Real Madrid should spend big on, it lands with weight.
The former Chelsea and Real midfielder revealed he has already taken that message straight to the top at the Bernabeu, telling president Florentino Perez that Olise should be the club’s priority target.
“Michael Olise to Real Madrid? I would support it. I had the opportunity to speak with President Florentino Perez and I told him that if there's money to spend on just one player, it's him,” Makelele said, laying his cards firmly on the table.
For Makelele, Olise is not just another talented winger. He represents a feeling. A throwback.
Olise, he argued, restores the childlike joy of watching football – the sense that something brilliant might happen every time he receives the ball. Creativity, freedom, quality, end product: in Makelele’s eyes, the Frenchman carries all of it, and the team feels it when he is missing.
“Olise brings back the feeling of watching football, the taste of what we experienced as children: talent, freedom, quality, effectiveness. When he's not on the pitch, his absence is noticeable.”
Then came the comparison that underlines just how highly he rates him.
Makelele placed Olise’s influence in the same bracket as Lionel Messi’s in terms of unpredictability and game-changing spark. When Olise is in rhythm, Makelele sees that same sense of danger, that same pause in the stadium as everyone waits for something out of nothing.
“When he's on form, you sense that, at any moment, like Messi, he can do something unexpected,” he said.
Opponents feel it, but so do his teammates. Makelele pointed to the way elite forwards trust Olise’s vision. Players such as Ousmane Dembele, Kylian Mbappe and Bradley Barcola, he suggested, know that Olise can slide passes into spaces most players never spot.
“Look at Dembele, Mbappe, Barcola: they know he's capable of placing the ball in a space that other players don't even see. That's the modern football we love, the football that makes fans dream. Even the commentators are amazed by his technique. He's exceptional.”
Those are big names and big claims, yet Makelele resisted one of the most fashionable debates of the moment. Asked to weigh Olise against Jude Bellingham, he refused to turn it into a contest.
For him, the obsession with ranking players across positions and eras misses the point.
“Jude Bellingham or Michael Olise? Let them speak for themselves. What they're doing is exceptional. I don't make comparisons,” he said.
That stance runs through his entire view of football history. Makelele pointed to Pele and Diego Maradona, to Zinedine Zidane and the endless arguments that surround them, as examples of why he avoids those traps. Greatness, he insisted, stands on its own.
“You never compare the greats. You can't compare Pele with the generations that followed him, and with Maradona, the comparisons never end.
“Zidane left his mark on world football and it will last forever, regardless of the generations that follow him. Let each of these young players build their careers in their own way and write their own name in the history of this sport.”
For Olise, that history is still being written. Makelele, though, has already decided: if Real Madrid choose to turn the page and start a new attacking chapter, he believes the first name on it should be Michael Olise.
