How a Scout on Holiday Turned Atletico Madrid’s Antoine Griezmann into a Star

The business card was handed over long before Antoine Griezmann’s decisive goal for Atletico Madrid in the UEFA Champions League semi-final at Bayern Munich. It was before the striker became the highest-scoring Frenchman in La Liga history, before he played for France in the World Cup or helped his country win the UEFA European Under-19 Championship.

By the time a guy saying he was a scout for Real Sociedad gave Antoine his card in 2005 and told him to have his father get in touch, the 14-year-old had been turned down by many French clubs, among them Lyon, Auxerre, AS Saint-Etienne and Sochaux.

That’s why Alain Griezmann thought this new approach was some kind of joke.

After all, not long before, Metz had shown interest in his son, telling him to come down one weekend for a trial, but the club then cancelled at the last minute, saying Antoine was too small.

Alain had played football, ran the local club where the family lived in Macon and understood that not everyone in the industry was genuine. As he told French football magazine So Foot in 2014, he soon learned that Eric Olhats, the French scout representing La Real, was different.

Antoine had just played at a tournament arranged by Paris Saint-Germain at Camp des Loges, the club’s training ground. He was there as part of a trial with Montpellier. But while all the other Montpellier trialists were wearing club tracksuits, Griezmann was wearing his own clothes: He played in a T-shirt with the word “Jamaica” on it.

Olhats tells Bleacher Report he was not even meant to be there. He had just landed at the Paris airport after a scouting trip to Argentina and received a call from some friends in the industry who wanted him to come and say hello. They were watching the youth tournament. Olhats turned up. Griezmann only played 10 minutes, but that was enough.

“I fell for his technical skills,” Olhats says. “His technique may still be improving, but the talent that I saw that day was intuitive.”

But that still did not make Griezmann a natural fit for Real Sociedad. For a start, Olhats was a first-team scout; he was not working for the academy. Then there was the reason for his visit in the first place: to see friends, not to scout. Olhats was concerned about the ethics of an approach, he says, so he made some calls and found out neither Montpellier nor Lyon were interested in Griezmann.

“I knew the youth-scouting criteria at that time, in France at least, were mainly related to athletic and physical abilities,” Olhats says. “And Antoine did not fit into that at all. In Spain, I knew that we were more into letting time take its course. If I had worked for a club other than Real Sociedad, I don’t think they would have taken Griezmann on their books.”

Griezmann was football-obsessed as a youngster. His grandfather on his mother’s side, Amaro Lopes, played for Pacos de Ferreira while Alain was a coach at the local club in Macon. His mother, Isabelle, remembers that in Grade 6 he wrote that he would make it as a professional footballer.

His younger brother, Theo, found a cartoon in the back of a school textbook in which Antoine had drawn himself being interviewed by Canal Plus, the main football broadcaster at the time, including the questions and answers. He wanted to grow his hair long so he looked like Pavel Nedved.

Olhats had waited a week before speaking to Alain, who had been on holiday at the time of the tournament. Once he had done his due diligence, he passed his details to Antoine at the awards ceremony and told him to tell his dad to give him a call.

After they spoke, Olhats drove to Macon to meet Alain and spent a further four days convincing the family to allow Antoine to come to Spain for a trial. The scout did not want to leave without Griezmann.

“I no longer believed [he would make it as a professional] when he was spotted by Eric,” Alain told L’Equipe magazine. “I was sceptical at the time, but Eric convinced us to let him go to …

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