Our man ambles slowly across the Anoeta pitch dressed in civilian clothes, but before the journalist assumes personal sins of footballing ignorance and before giving a voice to the interested party, which is what’s important, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hang here this brief gallery of praises for a certain Mikel Oyarzabal Ugarte (Eibar, 29 years old), uttered by various football people:
“Amazing goal from the killer who has no tattoos, who combs his hair like a private school kid, who doesn’t make bombastic statements, who is a silent leader in the locker room, who unfortunately broke his knee, who doesn’t give headlines to the press but who is a footballer par excellence, who is the obvious leader at Real Sociedad and who here is Spain’s killer with anthological and important goals like the one that gave us the Euro Cup!” (narration by Cadena SER announcer Antonio Romero of Oyarzabal’s goal for the Spanish national team against Georgia on October 11, 2025).
“Tomás Roncero, who has been the best player this season?”. And the answer: “Mikel Oyarzabal”. (Journalist Tomás Roncero, a few weeks ago on the set of the television program El chiringuito).
“Those who doubt Mikel Oyarzabal’s ability have no idea about football” (Imanol Alguacil, former Real Sociedad coach).
“He can play as a 9, he can play as a 10, he gives you continuity, he gives you understanding of the game and he is competitive” (former footballer, commentator and Atlético de Madrid supporter José Antonio Martín, Petón, asking for Oyarzabal’s signing).
“What a player!” [and four surprise emojis] (Lamine Yamal, on his Instagram account, referring to Oyarzabal after his brace against the Netherlands in March 2025).
“Oyarzabal is the most underrated player in this national team” (Marc Cucurella, player for La Roja and Chelsea).
“If he were of another nationality, we would undoubtedly be talking about him as a world top footballer” (Luis de la Fuente, national coach).
Mikel Oyarzabal is a phenomenon. He has played 429 matches with the team of his life, Real Sociedad, and 52 with the Spanish national team. With Real, he has scored 129 goals, and with Spain, 24. He is the second highest scorer in his team’s history, only behind Jesús Mari Satrústegui, and ninth in the national team’s history. He has played six finals throughout his career. He has scored in all six: in the 2020 Olympic Games, in the 2021 Nations League, in the 2021 Copa del Rey —the pandemic one, without public, which Real won against Athletic Club in La Cartuja—, in the 2024 Euro Cup —against England in the 86th minute: the goal that would give Spain the title—, in the 2025 Nations League and in the recent 2026 Copa del Rey, last April 18 against Atlético de Madrid, which the txuriurdin team also conquered in Seville. All this measures a player who, beyond quality and effort, knows how to make an impact in decisive contexts.
It must be remembered, at this point, that we are not even close to a pure center forward. At most, at most, Mikel Oyarzabal is what in football jargon is usually called a false 9. It was Imanol Alguacil at Real, first, and Luis de la Fuente at La Roja, later, who bet on the scoring potential of this lanky, compact, powerful attacking midfielder, not the fastest in the world, capable of scoring as much as assisting, pressing like an angry Cossack, making diabolical diagonal runs, and arguing with referees, rival players, and ball boys if necessary. Everyone respects him equally.
He is 29 years old but many people think he is 35, because he started entering the first team’s starting lineups at Real at 18 after arriving from Eibar at 14…, although it seems he has been playing for 30 years. The boy is an old soul on the pitch. And, of course, he could easily rank among the top spots on an imaginary world list of the most underrated footballers (except for the smart ones who now claim they always said blah blah blah). But you don’t have to be Einstein, or even Cruyff, to realize how much the vast majority of sports journalists in this country have ignored this footballer. This football star with infinite personality, almost no glamour, understanding glamour as the usual trinkets and nonsense, and in the ranks of a team that is neither Madrid, nor Barça, nor Atleti. This star we didn’t see coming, who isn’t a 10 in any discipline of the game but moves between a 7.5 and a 9 in all of them. And who will be, again and if there’s no cataclysm, the starting center forward for one of the favorite teams to win the World Cup.
So the initial question of this conversation with the captain of Real Sociedad, one morning in the bowels of San Sebastián’s Anoeta stadium, is simple.
—Football is one of the topics that most people in this country believe they know a lot about, although it’s probably one of the ones they know the least about. Proof of this is how you were ignored for so long and how long it took to recognize your dimension as a footballer. And I include myself. Until you shut us all up.
—Ha, ha, ha, ha!
—So, now that you are one of the fashionable footballers, it’s worth asking… Have you felt this way, undervalued?
—I don’t know, I haven’t really had that feeling. The thing is, at all times, since I arrived at Real, I’ve had the opportunity to play practically everything every year. And look, when you accumulate many games and you see that everyone trusts you and wants you to be there, well, it must be because you’re doing things well. Look, it’s clear that there will always be thousands of tastes and opinions, but I have always felt very, very loved by all my teammates, highly valued by the club and by all the coaches I’ve had, and I have always felt like a very important piece, and in the end, that’s what matters to me, having the feeling of being on the right track.
Anoeta’s ’10’ is, in addition to being an established and rising footballer (with a market value of 25 million euros according to the Transfermarkt website on January 1, a valuation that today seems paltry), a level-headed guy. He has a degree in Business Administration and Management from the University of Deusto and has an excellent level of English. He was once asked how an elite footballer could find time to study, and he replied: “Easy. On trips, while my teammates play games and listen to music and laugh, I’m with my notes.”
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Mikel Oyarzabal has not forgotten certain things. The culprits for instilling values, a solid education, and an unpretentious character were his parents. His family, including his sister Elene, was and is an essential pillar in the life of this footballer who, before football, tried judo and swimming at La Salle school in Eibar. He doesn’t have an agent. Or rather, he has two: his father, Ernesto Oyarzabal, and his mother, Dorleta Ugarte, who for years was the commercial director of CaixaBank Companies in Cantabria and the Basque Country. Down-to-earth people with a head for numbers. “Yes, yes, I still don’t have an agent. They are,” he confirms with a half-smile. And then he paints his self-portrait: that of a normal, ordinary guy in a world of not-so-normal, ordinary people: “My parents, the education they gave me, my group of friends whom I still keep in touch with and talk to almost every day, and obviously my partner and my son are the people who have given me the stability I have. The order in my life is my son [Martín, to whom he dedicates his goals] and my wife [Ainhoa Larrauri, his long-time partner, a doctor], my family, my friends… and then football.” “Besides,” he adds with a smile, “my wife doesn’t like football too much, and that… well, it puts me in my place a bit.”
Among those unwritten rules of knowing how to navigate life —both as a person and as a professional footballer—, he highlights one that his parents instilled in him when he was little and that he always respected, and continues to do so: the one that speaks of the relationship between talent and effort: “I believe that things must be done with effort, with dedication, with stubbornness, with competitiveness, and yes, waiting for talent to emerge…, but if there is only talent, there is not much to do. With effort, I believe it is easier for your individual characteristics and your talent to come to light. And in that, Real, I believe, is a model.”
Oyarzabal associates all this with the Gipuzkoan character, which, according to him, permeates the way of working at the San Sebastián club presided over by Jokin Aperribay. “It is very difficult to gather a lot of talent in a team like Real; we are aware of how the world of football works, and nowadays, almost at the slightest hint, when a talent stands out, you know that any big club from here or another country will come for him. In football, everything is short-term, everything is for yesterday. But I think that the ability to have brought together so much talent in such a short time in recent years speaks very highly of Real.”
The names of yesterday and today from Zubieta’s inexhaustible academy pour out: Griezmann, Xabi Prieto, Illarramendi, Oyarzabal, Zubimendi, Le Normand, Barrenetxea, Jon Martín, Turrientes, Gorrotxategi, not to mention the national and foreign players who shone and shine at Anoeta: Merino, Brais, Soler, Silva (“Silva is a class apart,” he clarifies), Isak, Carlos Vela, Odegaard, Kubo, Guedes…, although the player who impressed him most was Sergio Busquets: “I was lucky enough to face him and share a locker room in the National Team. For me, an exceptional world-class player whom some, because of his last years at Barça, tried to single out.”
There was a specific day when all that emotional stability the player spoke of went up in smoke. It was a morning in 2022, on the Zubieta training pitch. In the middle of a practice match, a bad turn, a snap. An anterior cruciate ligament injury to his left knee. A Calvary for any footballer, and in Oyarzabal’s case, it made him miss the Qatar World Cup and be sidelined for nine months.
An injury like that truncates some careers. In other cases, the player is never the same again. And in others, not too many, he returns better than he left. “Experience, normal physiological changes related to age, other aspects such as the team’s playing style or his position on the field, and probably the injury itself, have modified his way of competing. In recent years, he has improved in game reading, composure, leadership, and efficiency, he manages his efforts better and achieves even better results,” explains Javier Barrera, who was Real Sociedad’s doctor for nine seasons, until 2024-2025, and who was one of the people who helped him cope with that process from the front line. “As for the numbers,” Barrera adds, “if we talk about goals scored and assists given, combining Real Sociedad and the national team, his best seasons have been the last two, 2024-2025 and 2025-2026. These data would support the assertion that Mikel is better after the injury than before.” Clear as day.
Far from sinking into despair, the player decided to apply practical sense to that situation. As always. “You get a blow like a cruciate ligament injury that stops you for nine months from everything you’ve been doing for practically the last 10 years of your life. That puts you in your place and makes you say: well, look, now we have to start from scratch again. And I think that moment helped me to be aware of where I was, what I had, and how privileged I was to be able to be where I was every day.”
He started from scratch… and won. His figure has grown exponentially in the collective imagination of Spanish fans. The debate about who was Spain’s 9 —or false 9— died out (although in his case he will wear the number 21): a footballer who scores goals, provides assists, makes diagonal runs, and appears as serene here, in this table conversation, as he is enraged on the field. A footballer who, when asked about it, admits that you play as you are, though with nuances: “Yes, I agree, you play as you are. But often it is said that the player or person can be a certain way off the field and then transforms on the field. And for me, perhaps it’s a bit the opposite. My true self, more than in everyday life, I believe I bring out when I compete and when I’m in extreme situations, that’s when my genius, my true self, comes out. And then in daily life, well, I can perhaps adapt it a bit depending on each situation because I have more options to think.”
And now, the World Cup. His first World Cup. Mikel Oyarzabal wouldn’t dare say it out loud, but you’d have to be an inhuman Martian not to know that he has a thorn in his side. If one day he said that the Euro Cup he won with Spain had been one of the greatest experiences of his life, what can be said about the World Cup? For example, that he arrives at it in optimal form and after a season of spectacular numbers and conquests: in addition to the Copa del Rey won in Seville against Atlético de Madrid, there are those 15 goals in the League (the best in his career in terms of goals scored), a streak of 11 goals and six assists in La Roja’s last ten matches… and the consequent, recurrent, and inevitable rumors about his future.
Just a few days ago, last Monday during a press conference in Las Rozas, he responded with a dry “I’m not going to answer anything special about this, now we are here with the national team and my attention is here now” to a reporter’s question about a hypothetical interest from Barça in him. Meanwhile, and as long as there is no news about it, Mikel Oyarzabal’s career still smells of a One Club Man… although a certain Lamine Yamal has already hinted that he would love to have him by his side in Barça’s attack. “Mikel is a top player,” the Blaugrana star has said.
Like Luis de la Fuente, who was, is, and looks set to remain his main supporter, Oyarzabal speaks of La Roja as “a family.” And he recalls his relationship with Marc Cucurella, with whom, after a fierce rivalry during a now distant Real Sociedad-Getafe match, he ended up forging a special connection. “In the national team,” he explains, “there’s a feeling that the teammate next to you will fight for you until the end, just as you will fight for them, and I think that was a bit the success of what happened in the Euro Cup, at a time when perhaps we weren’t in the predictions.”
Adding his current form and Morata’s progressive decline in his relationship with goal-scoring —and his definitive non-inclusion in the World Cup squad—, Mikel Oyarzabal’s consolidation in the national team is now a fait accompli. And his starting position in the World Cup seems to admit no great doubts
—Predictions?
—As a team, I see it very well and I’m calm, we are focused on the day-to-day, working hard, we know that’s the only path to success, we know each other very well, we know what each one needs.
—Spain among the favorites?
—We are very excited and eager to start… but we’ll leave that to the journalists.
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