Dani Olmo was one of the stars of Euro 2024, but the Spain international has been shining for a while now at club level. We take a closer look at Olmo’s talents.
Among the many ways international football differs from the club game is that proportioning the talent of a squad across positions is much harder to achieve. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible to control most of the time.
Even if a nation makes a considered commitment to developing defenders skilled in building from the back, there’s no guarantee the circumstances of football will see them arrive on time, in the moment when they’re most needed. By the time the 2030 World Cup rolls around, your country might have happened upon two world-class full backs and yet have no central defenders near their level.
Need a top centre-back to balance out your four-man club defence? Pick up the phone, make some calls, and you can have one arriving on a plane in a matter of days.
Take England, for example. There were only four players at Euro 2024 who had been directly involved in 40+ goals for a club in Europe’s big five leagues last season. Three of those were Englishmen – Harry Kane, Ollie Watkins and Cole Palmer – and the other was Kylian Mbappé. Watkins and Palmer would have started for most teams in the competition, but the circumstances and composition of Gareth Southgate’s squad meant neither of them made a starting XI even once.
As for Spain, they had something similar occur with their No. 10 position. Pedri was one of the stars of Euro 2020 and is cherished in the national setup, while Dani Olmo is a top-level European player who had always performed for Spain, Barcelona’s Fermín López had ended the season brightly and seemed to fit into La Roja’s high-pressing approach, and the only player who assisted more goals than Álex Baena (17) in Europe’s big five leagues last season was Florian Wirtz (19).
Even reduced to a decision between just Pedri and Olmo, one of the best attacking midfield talents in Germany would have to take a back seat.
As we well know, Spain went on to win Euro 2024 in convincing fashion. And despite starting the tournament on the bench, Olmo made UEFA’s Team of the Tournament; something that didn’t look all that likely a prospect for a while. Had a Toni Kroos tackle not ended Pedri’s campaign prematurely, an Olmo performance that will now be remembered in the history of Spanish football would have otherwise been a victim of an exaggerated depth of options.
On the back of five direct goal involvements in six appearances (three goals, two assists) – including goals in the last 16, quarter-final and semi-final matches – a tournament he began on the bench ended with Olmo driving a historically good Spain side to glory, and putting himself among Europe’s elite in his position in the process.
Olmo’s Craft in Reduced Spaces Makes Him Unique
A standout tournament showing will always put you ‘in the shop window’ to an extent. However, beyond the goals, assists and match-winning contributions that drive the noise, Olmo’s Euro 2024 was littered with a subtlety of play that went beyond managing to find himself in the right place at the right time on numerous occasions.
Along with the 26-year-old’s versatility in attacking positions, what we saw repeatedly from him was an ability to play in the most congested areas of the pitch, avoid being crowded out, and more often than not come up with decisive contributions from within that difficult terrain.
In tournament football where defensive shapes are designed to frustrate, Olmo’s central craft turned Spain from a dynamic attacking side into what felt like an inevitable one; capable of doing damage in every channel of the pitch.
Among players who had 100+ touches at Euro 2024, the only one to make a higher share of them under pressure than Olmo (89.5%) was none other than Mbappé (91%).
While the Real Madrid forward is the man all opposition managers circle on their tactics board, encouraging someone to be on him every time he comes into contact with the ball, Olmo’s crowd was more a product of his role for Spain. Indeed, how to navigate (and attack) the central areas that defending sides want to protect is an art he has honed for a number of years with club and country.
What Luis de la Fuente wanted was a presence between the lines who can encourage those splits in the defensive shape, and who repeatedly asks the question of whether he’s the responsibility of a defender or a midfielder for the opposition. The available space there is rarely abundant, and only the sharpest need enter the arena. Inhabiting the space between those two lines, Olmo’s positioning invites the possibility of being dispossessed from every angle.
Fortunately for Spain, Olmo is as sharp as they come. While being second only to Mbappé for the proportion of his touches made under pressure, the only player who was directly involved in generating more shots from open play per 90 minutes in Germany was teammate Lamine Yamal.
Throughout the tournament, the Catalan midfielder was a constant source of solutions on the half-turn, and crucially, his involvement was finely balanced between working shooting opportunities for himself and combining with teammates to help with chance creation. Once into threatening positions, defenders could never quite be sure what was coming next.
What sets Olmo apart is the speed and precision with which he gets through receiving the ball and into his next action within those congested areas. His first notable involvement at Euro 2024 was precisely that, halting a run beyond the defence to collect the ball between the lines, swivelling into position, and putting Ferran Torres through to open the scoring versus Albania.
While the final action differed, it was a formula we saw repeated throughout the summer. The variety of ways in which Olmo could get into the teeth of the opponent’s shape and then figure his way out of it with productive results made him one of the great attacking conundrums of the tournament.
Of course, the first part of that revolves around getting oneself free in the first place. Since a young age, Olmo has put much thought into that pursuit of how to move on the pitch in relation to the opposition. His father, Miquel Olmo, was a player and a manager in the professional game and the one who taught Dani to find his way through the action in his formative years.
“We spoke about how to improve controlling [the ball], how to orient myself quicker. I wasn’t making technical or footballing errors, but more those to do with positioning,” Olmo said in a mid-tournament interview with El Pais. “He told me I had to look more at how the game was going, to think about what was happening with the play. He taught me to read the games.”
On those occasions when Olmo can’t be found between the lines as a first option, the threat is far from over. The RB Leipzig man has spent years thinking about and inhabiting crowded midfield spaces, where there’s no single solution to freeing oneself as a receiver. Sometimes standing still is the best option; other times it relies on dynamic, timed movements to deceive your markers, as shown in the passage of play below from the Euro 2024 final in Berlin.
There was the option of sitting off and not allowing Olmo to get beyond the midfield by any means, but even that didn’t dim his impact. As a player capable of playing on the wing, his talent as a ball carrier isn’t restricted to the minutes in which he’s free to receive in space in wider areas. Whether spinning out on the half-turn in one of the inside channels or dropping deeper to pick up the easy pass, Olmo can take markers out of the game through his own forays, too.
He completed 14 take-ons at Euro 2024; the most by a Spain player in a single edition of the tournament since Lobo Carrasco in 1984 (16). At the same time, his take-on success rate (67%) was the highest of any Spanish player to attempt 20 or more in an edition on record (since 1980).
Olmo’s Attributes Are Cherished in Modern Football
The timing of Olmo’s Euro 2024 display also has relevance against wider developments in the game. In short, on the big stage when the lights were brightest, he carried out a role that is much coveted in today’s game to an incredibly high level.
However you label it – whether it’s the 3-2-5, the box midfield, the front five, or some other way – the rise of certain systems across the sport have elevated the attributes of attacking midfielders who can play in the inside pockets. At club level in 2023-24 and during Euro 2024, the instances of teams attacking with a front five – made up of two wide players, two inside attackers and a centre-forward – were abundant right across the spectrum of team strength.
While systems and tactics rise and fall in popularity over time, the importance of players who can pick the opponent apart from inside will never lose its value. “It’s impossible to play well if you don’t pass the ball through the middle,” Pep Guardiola once said.
While some teams use variations of the above to add the ‘extra midfielder’, allowing them greater control with four central players, for others the intention revolves more around overwhelming the opposition’s back line. As in the example above from Barcelona’s 4-2 win over Valencia in April, the attacking five outnumber the back four and that means individuals in the defence have more than one player to be wary of.
Note how determined Valencia are to stop passes through the centre, too, knowing the danger that could stem from a player receiving between the lines. Without yet touching the ball, Barcelona’s inside presence has already influenced the opposition.
The positional advantages have been clear for those who have the right profiles of players, but positioning is of course only part of the equation. In the constant battle to find space between the lines, along with the complexity of controlling the ball, making split-second decisions, and then executing your next move once you can be found, it goes without saying those players don’t grow on trees.
At Euro 2024, Olmo took us pretty close to the gold standard, combining the technical elements with a match-winning class. And rather than it being the overnight explosion of an unlikely hero, Olmo’s tournament was more a culmination of a career that has been diverse in influence, beginning to acquire its final form.
Now 26 years old and preparing to enter the prime years of his career, Olmo’s displays at Euro 2024 would have been tantalising for Europe’s elite teams. After developing as a youngster in Barcelona at the famed La Masia, he made his way into the professional game with an unorthodox move to Dinamo Zagreb, and has spent the last four years developing in German football with RB Leipzig. In that time, he’s blended the attributes of a winger with that of a number 10, and benefitted from distinct ideas between club and country.
From the technical mastery of La Masia to his latest stop in Leipzig, the direct style of attacking he’s developed in Germany went on to fit perfectly with De la Fuente’s new-look Spain at Euro 2024. Though the national team retain their typical pass-and-move quality, their directness in the final third combined the best of both worlds for Olmo, and the results were spectacular.
With the 2024-25 club season less than a month away, what happens to Olmo next is one of the most interesting summer storylines in view of the market. His declaration of “I want to win titles” when discussing his future earlier this month would suggest a move is in his mind, even though RB Leipzig are unlikely to facilitate an easy exit now that his reported release clause has apparently expired.
Following on from his best scoring season at club level and an outstanding tournament display shortly after, catching a player of Olmo’s class on the cusp of his prime years will be alluring for a lot of clubs. Though he may have had injury-hit campaigns in his past, his best version – from a specialist and coveted position in today’s game – isn’t reachable for many.
Euro 2024 covered the native of Terrassa in mystique, and what might lie ahead for him will trigger the imagination. Even for RB Leipzig – who either keep him or earn the biggest return possible – that’s a good situation to be in.
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