Arsene Wenger offered to take Martin Ødegaard out for dinner. His treat. Martin ordered the steak.
This was December 2014, more than six years before Ødegaard moved to north London, when it would be Mikel Arteta tempting him to Arsenal in an entirely different era. Wenger was planting the seed of a tree whose shade he would never get to enjoy personally.
On that night long ago, three people, the future unknown to them, sat around a candlelit table and discussed football, development and values: the Arsenal manager, a teenage Ødegaard and his father. Hans-Erik had been a reliable, uncapped midfielder in the 1990s for Stromsgodset in Norway, but now the biggest clubs in Europe were lining up to lay gifts of gravity and light at his family’s feet – not because of his own talents, but because his son was already the jewel of the Norwegian game. Martin wasn’t even old enough to order a glass of wine with dinner.
Wenger spoke of the pathway Martin would take at Arsenal’s leafy London Colney base, where the tyro had enjoyed a training session that afternoon, but also how he could develop as a person under his tutelage. He would learn to cook. He’d visit local hospitals. He’d contribute to the community. It was as if Arsenal’s boss was already assembling the next leader of this football club.
He’d eventually get there, of course – the long way round – because Wenger was often right about the direction that a young player’s career would take. At the time, a 15-year-old Ødegaard sat, wide-eyed, feeling ever more painfully self-conscious. Playmakers tend to be hyper-aware, after all.
“It’s Arsene Wenger, you know?” he said of the odd dinner date years later. “I was so nervous. I was just sitting there thinking, ‘Is he analysing me now? Is he going to judge me if I eat the fries?’”
A PRINCE WITH NO PRECEDENT
“I got to know about Martin Ødegaard via the Norwegian press,” says Norwegian football journalist Thore Haugstad. “Everybody began writing about this kid who was scoring loads of goals and playing with adults. You saw clips of him pirouetting in games, the great goals he was scoring, and you realised… this is not normal.”
Especially in Norway. The national team of this sleepy, icy landscape, with a population of just over five million, last played at a men’s World Cup only months before Martin was born, in 1998. Rather like Erling Haaland, his junior by only a year and a half, Ødegaard owed his
