Twelve years after a Spanish teenager boarded a flight to Croatia to sign for Dinamo Zagreb, the same shirt is still hanging in his wardrobe. Dani Olmo plays in Barcelona now, wears the number 20 and sits on a contract that runs until 2030. At home, according to his agent, he puts on an old Dinamo Zagreb jersey with a 7 and his own name on the back.
The detail came from Andy Bara, Olmo’s long-time agent, in an appearance on the Croatian Inkubator podcast that has been picked up across European football media this week.
“He wants to finish his career at Dinamo”
Bara did not stop at the wardrobe. He went further and spelled out where his client, now 28, actually wants to end his playing days.
“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,” Bara said, as reported by Goal.
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That is a long way off. Barcelona brought Olmo back to Catalonia in August 2024 in a deal reported at €55m plus €7m in add-ons with RB Leipzig, and his contract runs until June 2030.
Catalonia is also where his football began, in the La Masia youth academy, before he made the unusual choice at 16 to leave for Zagreb rather than wait his turn in Spain. He stayed at Dinamo until January 2020, when Leipzig signed him for the Bundesliga.
2% of his salary, every year, to Vukovar
The loyalty is not only sentimental. Olmo has been sending money back to Croatia for years, and specifically to Vukovar, the city in the east of the country that was besieged and largely destroyed during the 1991 Croatian War of Independence.
“Ever since he left Dinamo, he has been donating 2 per cent of his gross annual salary to Vukovar,” Bara told the podcast, in comments relayed by Barca Universal.
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“These are substantial sums because he earns a great deal of money, and this has been going on since he was at Leipzig and now at Barcelona.”
Bara also described how the identification works the other way around, inside the Barcelona dressing room.
“Other players approach him and they all know the story: when you mention Olmo, the first thing that springs to mind is Dinamo.”
A plan for after Barcelona
The managerial ambition is the newer piece of information. Olmo has never been publicly linked with coaching, and nothing in Bara’s comments puts a timeline on it. The nearer-term picture is more conventional: Bayern Munich have been mentioned in recent transfer speculation, but his agent has said there has been no official contact from Bayern and that Olmo remains focused on his Barcelona career.
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Olmo’s current Barcelona deal still has close to four full seasons to run after this one.
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