Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard is gearing up to play the most important game of his Gunners career to date, as the Norweigan aims to lead his side to a first Champions League semi-final since the 2008-09 season.
After five successful seasons terrorising Premier League defences, some may have forgotten his first big break came in the form of a move to La Liga giants Real Madrid.
The shy and retiring teenager had just turned 16 when Los Blancos snapped him up for peanuts in 2015, paying Stromsgodset €2.8 million to facilitate a transfer to Real Madrid Castilla.
Odegaard made just 11 competitive appearances across six seasons, settling for minutes with the Castilla squad and enjoying a loan spell at Real Sociedad, where his value skyrocketed and he found himself on Arsenal’s radar.
Ancelotti was given his marching orders at the end of the 2015 season, long before Odegaard returned to haunt his former club.
Having been granted permission to turn out for Sociedad in a Copa del Rey quarter-final tie in 2021, Odegaard opened the scoring as he eliminated his parent club from the competition.
Also on the scoresheet that day was Mikel Merino, Arsenal’s current makeshift striker, and Newcastle hotshot Alexander Isak, who bagged a brace.
The Gunners secured his services in 2020 for a fee of €45 million.
Writing in his book Quiet Leadership in 2016, just two years after Odegaard joined Real and was still on their books, Carlo Ancelotti labelled his signing a “PR exercise”.
He wrote: “When Florentino buys a Norwegian footballer, you simply have to accept it.
“Furthermore, the president decided that he would play three games with the first team as a public relations exercise. He could be the best player in the world, but I don’t care because he was not a player who I asked for.”
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While it’s understandable that Ancelotti would be displeased at having a young player thrust upon him, it now looks an impetuous comment given the emergence of Norweigan talent such as Odegaard, Erling Haaland, and Alexander Sorloth, the man who scored four goals in one game against Madrid in 2024.
Odegaard’s mature performances in North London earned him the captain’s armband in 2022, which preceded winning Arsenal’s player of the year in 2023 and 2024.
Tuesday’s Champions League quarter-final comes during a season when the Norweigan’s best form has deserted him, which perhaps illustrates Ancelotti’s point about him not being the sort of player he needed.
Still, Don Carlo’s comments are water under the bridge at this stage and were never a direct criticism of Odegaard, who can expect a hearty handshake when the pair square off on Tuesday.