The Catalan woman who has become a legend in Edinburgh

Barcelona“I was on the bus and the driver wouldn’t let me pay; I was in a restaurant and someone approached me. Everyone recognizes you because you’re everywhere.” These are some of the experiences of Eva Olid (Sabadell, 1985), who last May won the league with Hearts of Midlothian FC, a team from Edinburgh which, when the Catalan arrived in 2021, was amateur. Furthermore, they have also qualified for the Champions League preliminary round, although the Sabadell-born coach will not continue to lead the Scottish team.

“The year before I arrived, the team had finished last, but they didn’t go down to the Second division because they wanted to expand the league and there was covid-19. It was like starting from scratch. The first season we were fighting not to be relegated. We survived and then we started to grow,” Olid explains to ARA. “The second year, when the club signed three or four professional players, we went from eighth to fourth. That was like finishing first in the real world because the three Glasgow teams [Celtic, Rangers and Glasgow] were another world, we surprised everyone,” she adds.

The Catalan woman recalls that when she arrived she found players who lacked basic football knowledge. “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… I remember we had extra sessions and the players came from university to do extra hours, the commitment was incredible,” she assures.

Another aspect that Olid has had to work on is the mental side. “When you are a coach, you also have to manage personalities and emotions. It's curious how different each player can be. A footballer may need you to tell her 'This is not good, either you improve or you don't start next weekend' and you can't tell others that because you'll crush them. That's the hardest part of coaching,” she admits. It's also not easy to manage when results don't come. “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,” recalls Olid, who has experienced both sides of the coin.

A path based on work, effort and sacrifice

Eva Olid is now enjoying the successes achieved this past season with Hearts, but the path to the elite has not been easy. “Football is very closed and you need to have contacts. I saw it difficult to dedicate myself to being a coach until they called me to go to the Houston Dynamo academy after they liked how I had been managing one of their teams in a tournament in Catalonia. That was my first professional contract and it started to give me a name,” she recalls.

“Coaching the children filled me a lot. You have it in you to be a coach because it is very sacrificial. I took all the possible courses, even the one for goalkeepers. I have never been a goalkeeper, but I wanted to understand how I could work with goalkeepers. It was my dream,” she acknowledges. Olid has also had to overcome obstacles because she is a woman. “There are still clubs that are not open to having women, it's about hiring the most prepared person. And I'm talking about Spain, abroad they are more open,” she confesses.

An English football that eats everything

Another of the problems the Catalan coach has encountered are the available resources. Scotland is a growing league that sees that it cannot compete with the big English clubs. “England is putting in a lot of money; it is at another level, more than Spain. The millions being moved there mean that the best players go there. It is impossible to match the salaries”, confesses Olid, who sees a similar problem to what happens in the Spanish league.

This was one of the reasons that led the Catalan coach to leave Hearts. “I wanted to continue if my project continued. To compete in Europe you need to invest a little more, but the club was not open to it. I wanted to coach in Europe, but it was a preliminary round and perhaps we would be there for a week and get eliminated. I don't want to go backwards, I preferred to leave after winning everything because otherwise I would feel frustrated”, admits an Olid who would prefer to coach abroad.