The Ballon d’Or doesn’t capture football’s wonder – Michael Olise is proof | Zito Madu

W hen I was younger, I wanted to be the captain on my football team because back then, I assumed that the armband was given to the best player. It was a goal of mine for so long that, even as my youth teams won tournaments and trophies, and I won top scorer and best player awards, I still felt unsatisfied because someone else always had the armband. Whenever I saw another teammate sprinting around with the armband on, I took it as an indictment.

I had forgotten this childish way of thinking until France v Belgium in the Uefa Nations League last week. Ousmane Dembélé, who was wearing the armband for France, was particularly active. Had it not been for the wastefulness of his teammates, he would have had several assists during his time on the field.

That time came to an end in the 60th minute, when France manager Zinedine Zidane decided to make changes in order to galvanize his team. Dembélé was doing well, but Belgium were nullifying the threat that he presented. They would double or triple team him, knowing that he wasn’t the best passer and that he would often dally on the ball. Those extra touches and extra dribbles allowed the Belgium defenders time to close in, or to recover before the pass made it to a teammate.

On came Michael Olise as Dembélé’s direct replacement, with Dembélé handing Olise the captain’s armband. There’s a clip online of the moment zoomed in, which shows what the broadcast cameras seemed to miss. When Dembélé gave Olise the armband, Olise accepted it with a look of confusion, seemingly not understanding why he was being given the honor, since he is not usually the captain or vice-captain. Seeing this, I remembered that I used to believe that the best player on the team is – and should be – the one who wears the armband and in that moment, the exchange made perfect sense.

You can always tell the quality of a player by how the crowd reacts to them. When Olise came on, the crowd roared, behaving as if victory was inevitable, even though France were down when he made his entrance. Whenever he touched the ball, they rose and took a deep breath in anticipation. He had wowed them throughout the World Cup, where he provided seven assists and innumerable moments of magic, and he had already scored a late goal to beat Belgium at the end of September. The French crowd expected great things, because he had delivered for them over and over again.

The first goal would actually come not from Olise but from Désiré Doué, who had subbed on for Bradley Barcola before Olise came on. But once things were back level, Olise took over and ended the game as a contest. In the 80th minute, he beat his man with ease down the line and cut the ball back for Rayan Cherki to slot past the keeper. Seven minutes later, he got the ball on the right side of the box from Doué. Surrounded by several defenders who were grabbing him all over, he managed a weak shot with his right foot that took the goalkeeper by surprise and went in the bottom left corner. Then three minutes after that, in the 90th minute, he made a run through the middle where Doué once again found him with the ball. With one touch Olise slotted the ball home through the keeper’s legs. His fourth goal in the last four matches. He didn’t just win the game, he turned a tough match between two of the best teams in the world into a rout in the span of 10 minutes.

Olise is often accused of performing nonchalance. Maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s a case of social anxiety and shyness being so unusual in the professional football ranks that fans have to see it as something insincere. Regardless, if you watch Olise play closely, beyond the YouTube highlights of isolated moments, it’s impossible to accuse him of nonchalance. His playing style is one of ease and grace, but that is not a consequence of pretending not to try. His style is so similar to that of Zidane, in the sense that the grace comes from both a sense to entertain the crowd but also from an economy of movement.

If the danger of Dembélé comes from the innumerable ways that he can beat you, options that are so numerous that they tend to sometimes weigh him down when he tries to do too much, Olise beats defenders and teams by doing the simple things extremely well. When he controls the ball, he sets it to lead up to his next move. When he runs with the ball, he pushes it with the exact amount of force that allows him to either get by the defender or set up a pass. And when he’s presented with a number of options of what to do in front of goal or to find a teammate on the run, he usually chooses the best one. That doesn’t mean that everything he does ultimately leads to success – his inability to score during the World Cup eventually made it seem as though he were under a curse – but he is usually making the right choices with the ball at his feet.

Armbands don’t actually signify the best player on the field or in the world. Rather, that conversation is now centered around the Ballon d’Or. Players and their teams openly campaign to be crowned, and fans of each player attack the other sides, with each denigrating the opposing side’s favorite player in order to boost the campaign for their own. The obsession with the award has completely atrophied how we understand and appreciate players, replacing it with a destructive kind of comparison where great players are torn down as being bad if they haven’t won enough, or scored enough goals, or had more assists than the others that they’re up against.

This kind of engagement is intellectually silly and insincere, and leaves us no space for one of the best parts of watching football: The sense of wonder that players give us. And in the effort to boost one over the others whether through tribalism or idol worship, we miss the beauty of such a diverse group of players at the top of their game doing the ridiculous, match after match.

The joy that I get from watching Olise and Dembélé (or Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappé, Raphinha, Harry Kane, Rodri, and others) doesn’t come from the possibility that they might win the Ballon d’Or. What is wonderful to me is seeing how each player solves the same questions presented to them on the football field. How each one interprets the game, its constraints, and faces it with their own strengths and weaknesses. What matters is how each of them makes magic from a collection of rules and chaos of 22 people on the field.

When Olise steps out onto the field after checking the length of the grass, and looking in bemusement at the armband, my thoughts aren’t about whether he can prove that he’s the best player in the world. No, like everyone else who stands and gasps whenever he tries the spectacular, what I’m looking and hoping for is to be impressed by a player expanding what is possible on the field. And more often than not, he delivers.