Claude Makelele's Vision for Michael Olise at Real Madrid

Claude Makelele has seen enough of the game’s great artists to recognise one when he appears. And in Michael Olise, the former midfield enforcer sees a player he believes Real Madrid should move heaven and earth to sign.

Makelele revealed he has already taken that message straight to the top at the Bernabeu.

“I had the opportunity to speak with President Florentino Perez and I told him that if there's money to spend on just one player, it's him,” he said, making his stance on Olise’s future brutally clear.

For Makelele, Olise is not just another talented winger. He represents a feeling the sport risks losing.

Olise, the former Chelsea man argued, brings back the essence of why people fell in love with football in the first place: “talent, freedom, quality, effectiveness.” When Olise is missing, Makelele insisted, you feel it. The rhythm of the game changes. The spark goes out.

The praise did not stop at aesthetics. Makelele spoke about Olise as a genuine game-changer, the kind of player who alters the geometry of a match with one touch or one pass. When he is in form, Makelele said, there is a constant sense that something unexpected is coming, the same tension that used to hang in the air when Lionel Messi picked up the ball.

That comparison was not casual. Makelele placed Olise’s influence alongside that of Messi, stressing how opponents and team-mates alike live on edge around him. He pointed to the reactions of elite forwards such as Ousmane Dembele, Kylian Mbappe and Bradley Barcola, who understand that Olise can slip the ball into spaces others do not even imagine. That, in Makelele’s eyes, is modern football at its most thrilling: the kind that makes fans dream and leaves commentators searching for superlatives.

“Even the commentators are amazed by his technique. He's exceptional,” he said, distilling his admiration into a single, emphatic verdict.

Yet for all the enthusiasm, Makelele drew a firm line when the conversation turned to comparisons with Jude Bellingham. The temptation to stack one rising star against another is constant, especially when both are linked with Real Madrid and both carry the weight of expectation. Makelele refused to play that game.

“Jude Bellingham or Michael Olise? Let them speak for themselves. What they're doing is exceptional. I don't make comparisons,” he said, framing his stance as a matter of principle rather than diplomacy.

He backed that up with a wider reflection on football’s history. You cannot, he argued, sensibly compare Pele to those who came after him, just as debates around Diego Maradona never truly end. Zinedine Zidane, he reminded, left a mark on world football that will endure regardless of what any new generation produces.

For Makelele, that is the point with players like Bellingham and Olise. The task is not to outdo legends or mirror contemporaries, but to carve out something uniquely their own. Let them build their careers, he argued, in their own style and on their own terms, and let the record books decide where they sit.

If Real Madrid act on his advice, Olise may soon have the grandest possible stage on which to write that story.