Bayern Munich tried to sign Dani Olmo twice. Both times his representative pushed him in a different direction.
Speaking on the Croatian podcast Inkubator, in comments picked up by multiple outlets, agent Andy Bara described two separate moments when the Spain international had a route to Germany’s biggest club and chose a different one.
The second rejection is the more recent, and the one with the bigger price tag attached.
“Later, he received another offer from Bayern as a Leipzig player, and Barcelona and other clubs were also interested. We chose Barcelona, which perhaps wasn’t the best choice, but everything worked out for him afterwards.”
Read also: Gianni Infantino handed major lifeline by six Arab nations as pressure explodes
That decision sent Olmo to Camp Nou in the summer of 2024 in a package worth around €62m. Bara’s hedge on it “perhaps not being the best choice” nods to the registration crisis that initially kept Olmo from being able to play LaLiga matches, before Barcelona finally cleared the paperwork.
From Zagreb to Leipzig, not Munich
The first Bayern approach is older and had barely been talked about publicly before this. Bara traces it to the final months of Olmo’s spell at Dinamo Zagreb, the Croatian club where he had made his name as a teenager.
“He rejected Bayern on my initiative when he was at Dinamo. I told him: you need to take another step, and that’s what happened.”
Olmo left Zagreb for Leipzig in January 2020 for a fee reported at around €20m. He spent four and a half years in the Bundesliga before Barcelona came calling in 2024.
Read also: Premier League Player of the Month: Pascal Gross
A World Cup winner, a rotation player
Bara’s revelation lands with Olmo in a strange patch of his career. On the international stage he is near the summit: the 28-year-old helped Spain win Euro 2024 and then the 2026 World Cup, where Ferran Torres scored a 106th-minute goal to beat Argentina 1-0 in the MetLife Stadium final on 19 July. The agent, listing his client’s honours, counts him among the ten best players Spain have produced.
At Barcelona the picture is more complicated. Olmo has contributed three assists in seven LaLiga matches as Hansi Flick’s side sit top of the table with 21 points, but Bara acknowledged in the same interview that his client is not an undisputed starter.
The agent used the podcast to spell out where he thinks Olmo’s story ends anyway, and it is not in Munich or in Catalonia.
“He wants to finish his career at Dinamo and hopes that will be the case, even as a manager; he’d like to start his managerial career at Dinamo.”
Read also: Bad news for Arteta: Arsenal hit by multiple injuries during international break
Olmo donates 2 per cent of his gross annual salary to Vukovar, Bara said, a practice he has kept up since leaving Dinamo as a teenager, through his years at Leipzig and now in Barcelona.
Read also: Wolff breaks silence: Russell found it ‘difficult to cope’ with Antonelli’s rise inside Mercedes
