Manchester United Women took the significant decision to part ways with Marc Skinner at the start of the week.
The club officially announced on Wednesday that Spaniard Eva Olid will be the new head coach of the women’s team.
Consequently, many fans will be wondering who exactly she is and why the club have decided to entrust her with building a team capable of winning the top trophies.
Background
Olid was born and raised in Sabadell, a town near Barcelona in Catalonia.
She has claimed that her hometown has helped shape not only who she is as a person but also her footballing philosophy. Her love of football came from watching multiple matches a week with her football-obsessed father and playing for her local side.
She originally studied to be a teacher while still chasing her dream to work in the sport. Olid worked in the United States with Houston Dynamos in an academy role before also working with the Catalan Football Association, where she built up a reputation for “developing young players and implementing an attractive, attacking style of football.”
History
The manager’s biggest achievement has come in the form of turning relegation candidates Hearts of Midlothian into league winners in just five years.
Explaining her role at Hearts, she claimed, “in the women’s team there were players to whom no one had explained concepts like perception or body position. It was like starting from scratch, I can’t go into tactics if we don’t know how to position our bodies to receive the ball, to play…”
Commenting on what she learnt from working in Scotland, she has previously stated, “when you work hard, but you see that other teams win because they have a bigger budget, it’s hard to digest, but when you achieve it, the satisfaction is immense.”
Style of play
The 40-year-old’s success and work with young players are already big plus points for her, but her attention to detail and style of play will also excite many fans of the team.
Explaining her own coaching philosophy, she stated, “my obsession is how we beat the first lines of pressure. In pre-season, I always start working on building up from the goalkeeper and insisting that my players know how to play under pressure.”
Consequently, a ball-playing keeper is pivotal to her team’s ability to build up the play, very much taking inspiration from the total football of the Dutch national team of the 1970s and the FC Barcelona philosophy.
Adding further analysis to her style of play, she has stated, “I also work a lot with the third-player combination. That is, when you attract the pressure and there is a free player, but you cannot play direct to them, we use a player in the next line to connect with the free player between the lines. We also work a lot on creating the spaces, and on my players feeling confident to play under pressure.”
Intriguingly, she has also spoken about the need for a number of tens in her system, and she has used a 3-4-3 formation at Hearts during their title-winning campaign. Olid also preaches a side who will counter-press as soon as they lose the ball and claims that her side will always play long balls with “intentionality” to create space.
Final thoughts
Olid certainly comes with some risk, having never managed at the level of the Women’s Super League.
Nonetheless, her obsession with tactics and strength in working with young players will certainly be an intriguing watch for United fans and a gamble worth taking as the club plot a way to break into the top teams in the country and in Europe.
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