There was a football pitch in Drammen. But like most other outdoor pitches in that part of Norway, it was made of hard gravel: built for durability rather than control or technique. So in 2005, Hans Erik Ødegaard and about a dozen other parents simply forked out £50,000 to build a state-of-the-art all-weather surface, just a few hundred yards from the lavish villa he shared with his family.
Money was not a problem. The Ødegaards ran a chain of high-street clothing stores and Hans had been a professional footballer in his younger days. But he had even grander ambitions for his son, Martin, who even at the age of six could shoot a football at 40mph and possessed an unusual and extravagant range of skills. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but the artificial grass that Hans was paying for might as well have been a red carpet, spiriting his son to the most exclusive enclosure of the professional game.
