Dani Olmo stood there tapping his wrist. What time do you call this? It was 11.20pm on 27 August 2024, 81 minutes and 35 seconds into the third game of the season: Olmo time. His shot, left-footed, settled in the bottom corner and Barcelona had their third win of the season, their first in Vallecas since Lionel Messi. As for Olmo, making his debut as a second-half substitute, this was a dream: a first goal for the club he joined at nine. And all it had taken was two touches: one to control the ball and another to guide it past the goalkeeper he played with as a kid back in Terrassa.
Well, that and 16 years. A decade away from home. A decision nobody else would have taken. A journey across three countries, setting off early and alone. More than 300 games. Five league titles. Three cups. An Olympic final. The Euros. His Euros. A clause. Then another one. €55m, seven more to come. Ilkay Gündogan to be given away. Clement Lenglet, Vitor Roque and Mika Faye to go. Nico Williams to stay. An injury to Andreas Christensen. Three doctors, a second opinion and article 77. A bench, a referee, a crossbar. And then two touches. “He waited a long time to score his first for Barça,” coach Hansi Flick said. Ten long years and three unexpectedly long weeks.
“It was time, it was time,” Olmo said.
Olmo had been on the pitch for only 36 minutes when he scored. He had been registered to play since only 11.30am that morning. Just under 12 hours later he set off smiling, Lamine Yamal joining him in a familiar celebration borrowed from Milwaukee Bucks’ Damian Lillard, Dame Time – his now.
Olmo had, Marca declared, “arrived and kissed the saint”, and everyone else said so too. The line is standard: everyone who turns up and immediately succeeds does so, which might be why Roger Moore always looked so surprised; what isn’t so standard is for Marca to put Barcelona on there. That they did says something about how significant this was, what he had had done and what it had taken to get him there.
Born in Terrassa, Catalonia, Olmo joined Barcelona and left at 16 for Dinamo Zagreb. When it happened, in 2014, they knew they had lost something special; they also thought he was mad, the move so unexpected they kept calling him, wondering where he was, unable to believe that he had actually done this. But Olmo was different and the decision, he always said, was theirs not his. It was also, like everything he does, carefully considered. “There are parents that don’t have a clue and think they’re coaches,” he told El Pais. Miquel Olmo actually is: a former player, manager and a guide.
Barcelona’s starting XI against Rayo included three 17-year-olds – Lamine Yamal, Marc Bernal and Pau Cubarsi. But in 2014 Olmo was playing for the Juvenil B, the second under-19s’ team and didn’t see opportunities opening. Barcelona had Messi, Luis Suárez, Pedro, Neymar, Munir, Halilovic, Douglas and Sandro. Adama Traoré and Jean Marie Dongou were in the B team. That year, they won the treble. “If I had stayed, who knows what would have happened. Would I have been given the chance?” Olmo says.
At Zagreb, as promised, he was; they had brought through Modric, Brozovic, Mandzukic, Kovacic, giving them European football at 17, 18 and they did the same for Olmo. This wasn’t the obvious path but he took it for a reason. “To be there from 16 to 21 makes you grow. I was looking for that,” he says. “What Dinamo offered me in sporting terms no other team could offer me.” From there he went to Germany and a different development, the Red Bull model: more direct, vertical, intense, making him more complete.
Every so often home called and so did others, Bayern Munich among them. This summer, he was ready to go. The doubt was where. A clause allowed him to move two days after the final of Euro 2024, at which he emerged as arguably the tournament’s best player, but it didn’t happen then. Barcelona were trying to get Nico Williams as well, although they knew they would probably be able to sign only one, and the left winger was the priority.
Eventually, Olmo rejoined them. For Barcelona, still over budget, registering him was a different matter. Sergiño Dest, Oriol Romeu and Marc Guiu had gone and when Gündogan left on a free, waiving two years’ salary, he said: “If my departure helps the club financially it makes me a little less sad.” But, with Barcelona yet to close a new contract with Nike, it wasn’t enough.
Julián Araujo, Clément Lenglet and Vitor Roque followed out the door, Mika Faye was sold to Rennes for €10.3m, but still it wasn’t enough. On the opening weekend, Flick said Olmo was not fully fit anyway, which didn’t convince everyone. He was provisionally named in the squad for the second game, but evening came and his registration didn’t, so he had to watch from the stands. The deadline got closer and the doubts grew. The solution came thanks to an injury to Christensen.
Article 77 of the financial rules allows clubs accounts to “use” 80% of an injured footballer’s salary to temporarily “pay” for another player if the problem is long term, defined as anything over four months. Christensen’s achilles injury was initially expected to keep him out for half that but they took it to a tribunal of three doctors that accepted a four-month prognosis, allowing Olmo to be registered until 31 December. At which point they would have to find another solution. Like so much else, though, that is a problem for another day.
And so Olmo was registered. Less than 12 hours later he had scored the winner against Rayo Vallecano. “I was confident, just getting ready for when I could play,” he said, which was at least half-true. “Today I could make it and I am really happy. It was a dream to come back after 10 years. When Barcelona knock on your door, I had no doubt. I’ve been imagining this, visualising it, dreaming it.”
“Magic Olmo”, cheered the front of El Mundo Deportivo. “In Vallecas, the rayo, the lightning bolt, was Olmo,” Sport said. AS claimed he had “revolutionised” Barcelona and they were right. His signing had not appeared a priority, not at the expense of others; Pedri and Gündogan were among a handful of players that fill the role of No 10. Not, though, like this: here was a demonstration of why Flick had wanted him.
“He changed the game,” Rayo’s coach, Iñigo Pérez, admitted. Dreadful in the first half, 1-0 down, Barcelona were suddenly alive, the impact immediate. Olmo had waited long enough; he wasn’t going to waste any time. When he replaced Ferran Torres, Raphinha moved wide and flew, and Pedri was liberated, handed the perfect partner. “He gives us calm, he plays one, two touches; he turns, has ability on the ball, carries it. He understands football very well,” Pedri said. Olmo said: “They know me well; there is a connection.” All over the pitch Barcelona were transformed, their play going “from stodgy to a torrent of faith”, one report reckoned. He was contagious: it wasn’t that he was better, it was that they all were. This was about personality as well as play, intensity.
“When he came in you saw that we had more control with the ball, we had another player to combine, and it was really good,” Flick said. “His ball possession is really safe and in front of the goal he knows exactly how to score. With him, we are nearer the ball, we press opponents very good; he made the difference. That was why he was on the pitch.”
“In Vallecas, Dani Olmo climbed up the scaffolding after his sandwich break, the site manager calling on him because he had seen a serious crack that needed fixing,” wrote Xabier Fortes, pummelling his poor defenceless building metaphor into a pulp. “He had barely started labouring when he was hit with a falling slate inside the Rayo area but neither the foreman [referee] nor the [VAR] site supervisor watching on closed circuit TV thought it reason for punishment [a penalty]. But instead of complaining, Olmo got to work as a draftsman, bricklayer and architect.”
In short, he did everything. “He even eclipsed the referee,” Sport claimed, when no one ever does that. Almost the first thing he did was dribble into the area, where he had a big penalty shout turned down. He played the penultimate ball to bring the equaliser. He smashed a 30-yarder off the bar. He completed 21 passes, three dribbles, six progressions, three shots and one dream, going all the way back to Terrassa, via Croatia and Germany. At 11.20pm on a Tuesday night in August, the day he made his Barcelona debut at last, Dani Olmo had done it all except score, but in the end that too was just a matter of time.