Forgetting is supposed to be the antithesis of learning. And Dani Olmo lives in a contradiction: he needs to forget, but also learn. He has to erase the board’s unfulfilled promises from his memory to be able to play his football, but also remember them so as not to fall into their trap again. The registration of his contract, resolved late thanks to the precautionary measure of the Higher Sports Council (CSD) on January 8, while Barcelona was traveling by bus to play the Super Cup semi-final against Athletic, had kept him in suspense since on January 1st. In fact, his anguish had begun much earlier.
“If you look at Olmo’s last games, you realize that he was not having a good time,” commented a Barcelona manager. In the first seven games he scored six goals and gave one assist. In the last eight, he remained silent: neither goals nor assists. “What was happening with Dani was not fair. They did that to him, who was the club’s star signing,” stressed a teammate of Olmo’s at Barcelona.
When the number 20 signed his contract for six seasons with the Barça entity, he was assured that his registration would not be a problem. It was not a minor issue for Olmo, who, after living for a month in Germany with Iñigo Martínez during the Euro Cup, knew first-hand the uncertainty that the Basque center-back experienced with his registration in the 2023 campaign. Then something unprecedented happened until that moment : LaLiga registered only one year of the two that his contract had.
“Don’t worry. The fair play thing will be solved,” Barça assured Olmo. However, on the day the player had to sign his contract, with his entire family already in the Camp Nou offices and the shirt with the number 20 in his hands, they informed him that they would not be able to sign up for the agreed six years, but rather only one. A solution modeled on that of Iñigo Martínez: the sloppiness that Olmo wanted to avoid.
The player’s lawyers agreed on a clause according to which he would be free if Barça failed to register him in LaLiga. From the top they insisted: “Calm down, it will be solved.” But it wasn’t like that. Barça did not obtain the approval of the employers, and Olmo’s registration was resolved provisionally, until December 31, thanks to Christensen’s long-term injury.
“We are not in the 1:1 rule because we don’t want to,” Laporta announced a few days later, while the player was assured that, with the new Nike contract, Barça would regularize his situation with LaLiga. It didn’t happen either. It was then that Olmo went on alert. Without a response from the club, on December 20 he requested a meeting with the leadership. Without clarity in the explanations, nine days later he asked for another meeting, this time with Flick and Deco present. “Don’t worry,” they told him again.
December 31 arrived and the documents presented by Barça were not enough for LaLiga. Then, Barcelona’s promises were left naked, and Olmo, without a license. “It has been a nightmare. Communication was not clear and confusion was constant,” they summarized from the player’s entourage. An environment that suffered in silence, while Olmo’s name dominated the sports press. “The Olmo case here, the Olmo case there,” the same sources complained.
The Barça dressing room did not take long to defend its teammate: “Seeing Olmo’s situation, if I were in another club I would think twice before signing for Barça,” Raphinha released, after LaLiga and the Federation denied the license to the number. 20 Barcelona.
The CSD, in its quest to “protect the rights of athletes,” granted the precautionary measure and Olmo recovered the license, along with his joy. “This whole situation could have been avoided if the regulations had been applied correctly,” Laporta protested this Saturday, before facing Madrid.
Flick, in any case, would keep Gavi in the eleven. That is, Olmo would start the classic on the bench. “Now I have to crown this with a goal on Sunday,” the footballer celebrated. He knows that he needs to forget “the nightmare” to recover his football, but he also knows that he must remember it to protect himself from Barcelona’s unfulfilled promises.
