Meet Christos Mouzakitis, the Olympiacos wonder kid wanted by Real Madrid and Man Utd

You didn’t have to be a talent scout to see how good the No 96 was. The audacious flicks and feints, the precocious fearlessness with which he won back possession, the vision, the kaleidoscopic array of passes; they alone were enough to make it clear. Kylian Mbappé’s four-goal salvo may have dominated the headlines, but it was Christos Mouzakitis who stole the plaudits.

“Mouzakitis has a great impact,” said Xabi Alonso following Real Madrid’s 4-3 Champions League win over Olympiacos in the Greek port city of Piraeus last month. “He is a very talented midfielder with excellent qualities, and we will be watching him.”

Most 18-year-olds would be ecstatic to receive such a review from Alonso, who once pulled the strings for Liverpool, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich and was widely regarded as one of the finest midfielders of his generation. But then Mouzakitis is not your average 18-year-old. His first thought afterwards was not of himself, or of any excitement he felt at rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s most feted players, but of his team’s diminishing prospects of advancing beyond the competition’s league phase.    

‘I don’t give a damn who’s facing me’: Christos Mouzakitis on playing against Real Madrid

“There can be no satisfaction after a defeat,” said the teenager. “We are proud of the effort and performance, but there is no joy in the locker room.

“[Playing against Real Madrid] can affect you if you think about it, but I didn’t. I don’t give a damn about who’s facing me. I play my game and try to give my best.”

The Greece international’s best has been good enough to establish a stellar trajectory. His virtuoso display against Madrid was merely the latest staging post in a journey that has taken him from the Greek island of Corfu, where he was born on Christmas Day 2006, to Athens, where he was brought up and represented Heraklion Attica before joining Olympiacos’s youth academy. 

At that point, Mouzakitis was a goalkeeper, but that changed when a ball struck him in the eye during a match, causing a potentially serious injury.

‘I could have lost my eye’: the accident that shaped Mouzakitis’s future

“I could have lost my eye,” he recalls. “It happened when I was little, seven years old. I made a play and they hit me in the eye with the ball. Now, everything is fine.”

On his recovery, Mouzakitis switched to left-back, and he would also go on to play as a winger before finding his niche as a central midfielder with a knack for exerting his influence at both ends of the pitch.

Last year, Mouzakitis was part of the Olympiacos team that won the Uefa Youth League, the youth equivalent of the Champions League. He has since gone on to become an established presence for both club and country. His first senior goal came in February in a 1-0 Greek Super League win against Levadiakos, where he scored with a low drive from outside the box five minutes from time. Not one for baby steps, the midfielder followed up three days later with a stunning stoppage-time volley in a 1-0 win over Panathinaikos in the Greek Cup. Olympiacos would go on to win both competitions.

Now, the wider world is beginning to take note.

This week, Mouzakitis travelled to Turin for the Tuttosport Golden Boy awards. The main prize, won this year by Paris Saint-Germain attacker Désiré Doué, goes to the best player under the age of 21, as decided by votes from journalists from leading European newspapers. A second category, the Golden Boy Web award, is determined by fans; with almost half a million votes, Mouzakitis was the runaway winner, beating off competition from the likes of coveted Juventus forward Kenan Yildiz, Real Madrid attacker Arda Güler, and Borussia Dortmund midfielder Jobe Bellingham.

The European giants monitoring Christos Mouzakitis

Unsurprisingly, Alonso’s Real Madrid are not the only elite European club monitoring Mouzakitis’s progress. Manchester United scouts are understood to have been in attendance at the Real Madrid game in Piraeus last week, while Dortmund, AC Milan and Juventus are among clubs also believed to be interested in the midfielder.

Mouzakitis has identified Luka Modric as his childhood role model – the teenager describes him as “a smart player who is very important for the core of his team” – but his main focus for now is not following in the Croatian maestro’s Bernabéu footsteps, but making further headway with Olympiacos.

A driving ambition is to win the Champions League, however, and the possibility of a move, a constant source of speculation in the Greek press, cannot be ruled out. What is certain is that it won’t come cheaply.

“I imagine that if Real Madrid wants to get Mouzakitis, they will have to give a lot of money to Olympiacos,” says Olympiacos manager José Luis Mendilibar. “So everyone will be happy.”

Everybody other than Georgios Karaiskakis Stadium regulars, one suspects.