Olise silent in interview, Bayern and Kompany defend him

Three days after Bayern Munich’s victory over Bodo/Glimt in the Champions League (5-0), the German club had to step up to defend Michael Olise, whose brief interview with a journalist triggered a wave of criticism on social media.

The sequence, captured Wednesday evening just after the final whistle, shows the winger responding in monosyllables, voice low, to each attempt by the journalist to follow up. When the journalist, visibly running out of ideas, asks with a smile: “You’re not really making this easy for me. What makes you happy?”, Olise lets a long silence settle, utters an indistinct word, shakes the journalist’s hand and walks away. The video quickly circulated, with some social media users seeing it as a clear lack of respect toward the journalist.

Sporting director Max Eberl was the first to respond. “Michael Olise is a person who wants to play football. Off the pitch, that’s not really his thing. We could already tell that during his presentation,” he said, recalling that the player’s reserve was no surprise to anyone at the club.

Vincent Kompany echoed this view at his press conference on Saturday, ahead of the trip to Elversberg in the Bundesliga. The Belgian head coach chose to turn the argument around: “Do you think the journalist who conducted the interview with Michael is unhappy that it went viral? I can assure you that no sponsor or journalist speaks badly of Michael’s manners. We shouldn’t mix everything up.”

For France team followers, Olise’s reserve in front of microphones is nothing new. It is clearly the discovery of this facet by a wider audience, amplified by the viral nature of the sequence, that forced Bayern to break their silence.