Just seen this on twitter;
Football Tweet @Football__Tweet Martin Ødegaard: "I’ve always had this weird connection to Arsenal. It started long before I signed. I don’t even really know how to explain it, except with one little story.
I’ve never been that much into video games. I am of that generation that always played outside, but the one exception was FIFA. I mostly played Career Mode. You know, where you get to be the manager?
The club I always chose to manage was Arsenal. They were my FIFA team.
Growing up in Norway, I watched a lot of Premier League and I just had this good feeling about Arsenal. I’d seen clips of Thierry Henry and the Invincibles. I knew the club had a history of developing playmakers like Fabregas, Nasri, Özil — really smart, technical players, who were good on the ball and played the difficult passes. My kind of players.
As I got older, around the 2015 edition, I started actually appearing in FIFA. I didn’t look much like me at first. I think I was like a 67 overall, but I was actually in the game and it was a big deal. So, naturally, one of the first things I did when I was pretending to be Arsène Wenger on Career Mode was to buy myself. Haha!
Me and Arsenal. It just seemed like a good match in my head.
That special connection turned into a reality when I signed here two years ago. It was a decision that changed my life around. I come into training smiling every day. But my story is definitely not Career Mode. This has been a very different journey to how I imagined it on FIFA. In real life, you can’t just select where you want to go and everything will be perfect."