Michael Olise and Lamine Yamal: Rising Stars of the World Cup
Michael Olise will head to North America with France. Lamine Yamal is expected to be there with Spain once he shrugs off an ill-timed injury. Two of the most exciting wide creators in the game, set to light up a World Cup many expect Les Bleus and La Roja to dominate.
If either heavyweight is to go deep, the wings will matter. Not as decoration, but as the sharp edge of the attack. Didier Deschamps and Luis de la Fuente know it. They each carry a trump card out wide.
At Bayern, Olise has turned potential into end product. In his second season at the Allianz Arena, the Bundesliga champions watched him rack up 20 goals and 26 assists across the 2025-26 campaign. Those are not “promising” numbers. They are elite.
Yamal answered from Barcelona with a season that felt like a statement. Still only 18, he drove Barca to the Liga title with 24 goals and 18 assists, a teenager dictating games in one of the most demanding leagues on the planet. The rise has been rapid, almost dizzying.
Olise, now 24, has taken the longer road. London-born, France-chosen, he has climbed step by step to the top tier. No shortcuts, no sudden explosion. Just steady ascent until Bayern came calling and he started delivering like a star.
On pure output, there is barely a sheet of paper between them. Goals, assists, influence from the flank – both sit in that rare bracket where defenders know what’s coming and still can’t always stop it.
Yet for Marcel Desailly, the distinction lies somewhere more subtle.
The 1998 World Cup winner, speaking to GOAL, drew a line between the two when asked if Olise and Yamal now share the same level. For him, the gap appears when the stakes rise and the pressure bites. In what he called the “intensity of a higher-grade match”, Desailly believes Olise remains a step behind.
He pointed to the clash between Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich as the clearest evidence. Under the heat of that contest, Desailly felt Olise struggled to handle the pressure, to navigate the traps set for him. The quality is there, he stressed, but the response to repeated high-intensity demands is not yet fully formed.
Yamal, by contrast, already reads those situations with a maturity that belies his age. Desailly highlighted the youngster’s grasp of what top-level football really asks of you: the constant repetition of sprints, the mental sharpness, the ability to recognise where the danger lies and where the space will open. For someone younger than Olise, that understanding stands out.
Olise, in Desailly’s eyes, suffered a real dip in performance when the game demanded relentless effort. That, he admitted, left him disappointed – not because it exposed a lack of talent, but because it underlined how much room there still is for growth before Olise can be spoken about in the same breath as Yamal.
The verdict is not a dismissal, but a challenge. Yamal, already reading the game like a veteran. Olise, armed with numbers that scream world class, still chasing the consistency and composure that define it.
North America will test both. One already trusted to carry the weight of a nation at 18. The other desperate to prove that his learning curve is steep enough to close the gap when it matters most.
