“It was like watching an ice-skater play football — the way he used to glide around the pitch. It was effortless, everything taken in his stride.”

Michael Richards is reminiscing with The Athletic about coaching a young Michael Olise when he was starting out at his local club, Hayes ^ Yeading.

“He was an unbelievable little footballer, even at the age of six,” Richards says. “His football IQ at that age was probably three, four, five years ahead of other children. The way he used to play football — he still does, funnily enough — was like he was playing in the street.”

As a pupil at Dr Triplett’s Primary School in Hayes, west London, Olise was also showing his prodigious talent on the sports field.

“He’s still got the same sort of moves — jinking it onto his left foot and curling into the top corner,” says Daniel Coker, his former primary school football coach. “He’s always done that.”

From the parks of suburban London to the Allianz Arena, it was that trademark Olise finish that sealed a thrilling 4-3 home win for Bayern Munich against Real Madrid in the second leg of a Champions League quarter-final last month, and a 6-4 triumph on aggregate.

The France international followed that up with another wonderful solo goal against Paris Saint-Germain in a game for the ages last week, a semi-final first leg that Bayern lost 5-4 away. It was Olise’s 21st goal of an incredible second season with the German champions. He has also registered 26 assists.

As he prepares for the highly anticipated second leg tonight (Wednesday) in Bavaria, The Athletic speaks to those who coached and played with Olise about his pathway to the top.

As Olise’s coach at Hayes & Yeading, Richards remembers a quiet, humble and polite boy who came alive on the football pitch.

He recalls having a queue of scouts asking to be introduced to Olise’s parents, Mina and Vincent, after every game they played.

Olise was born in White City, west London, and raised a few miles further west in Hayes, close to Heathrow airport. He started playing for Hayes & Yeading aged six and spent around 12 to 18 months there, before joining Chelsea, via a spell at Old Isleworthians, another club in the area, managed by former Chelsea coach Sean Conlon, who was one of his early mentors.

He had also spent some time training at Arsenal’s academy after being spotted by club scout Miguel Rios, but opted for a team closer to home.

At Hayes & Yeading, he would line up against a young Bukayo Saka, who played for Greenford Celtic, another team in the same league.

Six-year-old Michael Olise, second right, with his Hayes and Yeading team-mates (Michael Richards)

“Both teams had some very good players, but those two were a cut above,” Richards says. “So it was pretty much them grabbing the games by the scruff of the neck.”

Richards says one of his standout memories was Olise scoring a volley from the halfway line at a summer tournament.

“It was one of those where you think, ‘Oh my god. I’m in my twenties and I can’t do that!’.

“He probably set up more goals than he scored. He was a big team player.”

At Dr Triplett’s, Olise was excelling in every sport, a cross-country running champion for the London borough of Hillingdon, a district sports gold medallist in the 400m and a talented cricketer. He was also a keen chess player.

However, it was his quality on the football pitch that really stood out. “From as early as year two, the football coaches knew that Michael was a special talent,” Coker says.

Coker was also Olise’s coach when he represented Hillingdon at the London Youth Games in July 2013.

“I had six different scouts approach me during that tournament saying, ‘Who’s this boy?’. I had to tell them, ‘Oh, sorry, he’s already at Chelsea’. But they saw the talent as well.”

The school’s headteacher, Rachel Anderson, feels pride at seeing their former pupil’s trajectory. “It’s humbling and it’s an honour to have been a part in any child’s journey when they experience success,” she tells The Athletic. Olise later attended Douay Martyrs Catholic Secondary School in nearby Ickenham.

Anderson tells how Olise was from a tight-knit and supportive family. She says Vincent still uses their school fields for his church football team in the summer, while Mina, who is French, helped with multicultural days at the school.

In an interview with Bayern’s website in December 2024, Olise explained he comes from four countries: Great Britain and Nigeria (from his father’s side), and France and Algeria (from his mother’s). “I feel each individual part in me, I’ve developed attachments in all countries,” he has also said.

He qualified for all four, but opted to play for France, as he previously told reporters he had always felt a connection to their national side. He was first called up to play for France at under-18s level, appearing at the Toulon Tournament in June 2019.

As a young player at Chelsea, Olise’s ability was not in question — he was talented and produced moments of brilliance — but some of the club’s academy coaches found him difficult to deal with at times.

There were days when Olise would turn up for training and not want to take part, or not like the look of how the session was set up at the beginning and be disruptive. On other occasions, he would just sit on the side of the pitch, watching.

When it came to matches, he had an obsession with wearing the No 10 shirt and would often put that jersey on before the line-up had even been named. That created a problem for coaches, who could easily find themselves straying into awkward territory by getting into an argument with a child in a dressing room about a shirt number.

Chelsea had conversations with people inside and outside the club about Olise’s behaviour to understand him better. It wasn’t that Olise was nasty or rude, but he did not conform in the way young players typically do in a professional academy environment, and some staff found that testing and frustrating.

Others viewed it as a challenge in a good way, in the sense that an elite young footballer was making demands of them to work out how to get the best out of him. That might mean adapting or tailoring a training session, so it stretched and motivated Olise, right down to a coach delivering balls for him in a crossing-and-shooting drill if necessary, rather than having another academy player do it.

Solutions to some of the other issues could also be found without conflict. For example, by putting the kit out later in the dressing room to prevent that scenario with the No 10 shirt, or by just accepting that Olise would not always be in the frame of mind to train.

Clearly, none of this is straightforward. Olise was different — a word you frequently hear attached to him — but he was also far from the only gifted player in Chelsea’s academy.

Within the club, there were concerns about how he would adapt to enrolling on the full-time programme, including education, and that led to a difficult decision. He was eventually released.

Asked why it didn’t work out for Olise at Chelsea, Conlon replies: “‘Complicated’ might be a fair word. He has a very different way of thinking about life, about football. It’s what is his genius, it’s what makes him special.”

Conlon is keen to stress there were no hard feelings from Olise to Chelsea. In fact, he was grateful for his time spent there. Conlon also points out that he came close to returning in 2023, before signing a new contract with Crystal Palace, while his younger brother Richard is currently in their academy and has been looked after well during some health and injury issues.

After leaving Chelsea, Olise joined Manchester City, where he was enrolled at St Bede’s, the independent school in the Whalley Range district that educates many of the club’s academy graduates.

However, he found the adjustment difficult, especially living far from home. Since then, City have made greater efforts to find more relaxed school settings for certain children who might not be suited to the private one.

After also being let go by City, Olise returned to London and weighed up what to do next.

He played in some matches for Conlon’s ‘We Make Footballers’ programme, along with several former Brentford youngsters who needed somewhere to go after that club shut their academy in May 2016.

“All of this has been so good for him,” Conlon says. “Because of the journey he’s been on, and the hardship and the struggle, that has humbled him, in a real positive way.”

That summer, Olise was recommended to Reading’s head of academy recruitment, Brendan Flanagan, by Darren Richards, a scout who used to work for Tottenham Hotspur. He joined Reading, from a commuter town just beyond London’s western outskirts, in August 2016 on an initial trial basis before he was signed up.

Flanagan tells The Athletic: “The coaches sat him down. They were quite honest with him, and they said, ‘What happened at Chelsea and what happened at Manchester City?’. He explained, and they said, ‘Look, you start here with a clean slate. Up to that line, you’re fine. You step over it, we’ll be on you’.

“We never really had a single problem with him. We just let Michael be Michael. Let him do what he does with a football. We never tried to take that creativity out of him.”

Flanagan remembers Olise as a reserved personality, but with total confidence in his footballing ability.

He recalls a match against Sparta Prague in the International Cup youth tournament, when Olise was a second-year scholar. Flanagan was sitting next to former West Ham midfielder Hayden Mullins, who was by then a coach and had just joined Watford from Reading.

“He turned around to me and said, ‘Who the hell is that?’. And I just started laughing. Michael was just… different, he was unique. Hayden said, ‘Come on, Brendan. Tell me. Where did you find this one?’.”

In March 2019, Olise made his first-team debut at age 17, coming on as a 69th-minute substitute for Mo Barrow against Leeds United in a 3-0 home defeat.

That summer, Reading played Chelsea in a pre-season friendly, with the two sides fielding entirely different teams in each half. Olise came on for Reading after the break and had an eye-catching match, setting up Sam Baldock with a perfectly weighted pass for their third goal. It served as a reminder to Chelsea of what they had let go.

Mark Bowen remembers Olise first coming onto his radar when he was Reading’s sporting director. He later succeeded Jose Gomes as their manager in October 2019.

He recalls Olise bouncing back to his feet and brushing himself down following any robust challenges from senior pros on the training ground.

“Nothing seemed to faze him,” he tells The Athletic. “He just got on with it, and you could see he had pace, he had ability.”

Former Wales international Chris Gunter, a team-mate at Reading, said it was immediately obvious that this was an exceptional talent. “It was his awareness to know where space was, where pressure was coming from, which way to turn,” Gunter says.

Bowen explains how Olise’s natural ability was clear to see, but the main challenge was getting him to add more end product to his game. In his 2019-20 breakthrough season at Reading, he did not register a goal and had one assist in 19 league appearances, 13 of them starts.

“You’d see him do things in training, literally drop his shoulder, come inside, go past three people and smash it in the top corner,” Bowen says. “And everybody’s stunned and senior players would clap him and it was trying to get him to realise: ‘Mike, why don’t you do that in the games? Don’t be in your comfort zone in games. You can do exactly that on a Saturday, not just in training’.

“The penny did drop with him eventually.”

Bowen also says that, for all Olise’s quality, he worked hard for the team, too. He recalls asking him to man-mark Manchester United and former England record goalscorer Wayne Rooney when Reading played Derby County, and him carrying out the role exactly as had been designed.

Bowen describes him as being quiet but with a strong belief in his ability: “If you didn’t look at him the right way and empathise with him the right way, sometimes he could come across as being a little bit arrogant, a little bit like, ‘Who is this kid?’. But it wasn’t what I call big-headedness, it was just his personality. He was very confident in what he could do.”

It was in the following 2020-21 campaign, under Veljko Paunovic, that Olise really kicked on, with seven goals and 12 assists in the Championship leading to him being voted the EFL’s young player of the season.

Following that standout season, he secured an £8million ($10.8m) move to Palace and the Premier League.

He has not looked back since.

Conlon says he spoke to Olise after that last-minute goal against Madrid last week.

“I sent him a photograph of him when he was aged seven that my dad took,” Conlon says. “You can see in the photo he’s moving exactly the same way, when he chops onto his left foot, and his planted foot goes down with his right, and his arm is completely straight, and then he pushes the ball away from a defender. He’s literally doing that at age seven, those exact body mechanics.

The pictures Sean Conlon sent to Michael Olise last week

“We were having a conversation and I said, ‘You were always born to do it’. It was really cool his response because he said, ‘Oh yeah, I haven’t got it perfect yet, but I will’. It was after the Real game, he was man of the match, he scored that final goal, but he’s thinking that he’s not perfect yet.

“That’s his mentality, he’s such a perfectionist.”