Omo Skillful: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of the Number 10

Ball Knowledge · Opinion

Omo Skillful: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of the Number 10

Ronaldinho, Okocha and Zidane made Dalu fall in love with football — the classic number 10, the Omo skillful. Then the press arrived and squeezed him out. So who took the job, and can a kid at Como bring the 10 back?

By Dalu · November 2, 2026 · 11 min read

Zidane, Totti and Riquelme with Ronaldinho, Del Piero and Okocha — the golden-age number 10s — The golden age of the 10.

Back in my teenage years I had a name for the number 10. I called him the Omo skillful.

Every team had one. Not always the captain, not always the top scorer, and definitely not the one who ran the most. The Omo skillful was the player everybody passed to when they didn’t know what to do. The best player on the pitch, the most technically gifted, the ultimate playmaker. People came to watch him.

That’s how I fell in love with football. Ronaldinho, Jay Jay Okocha and Zidane. I’d watch those three and forget to blink. Then I started admiring the rest of the family: Totti, Riquelme, Del Piero, and Bergkamp, who was more of a second striker but carried the same spirit.

The 10 was my first love in this game. And I have to be honest with you, I’ve watched it slowly stop being the main character.

These days people talk about the 10 like it’s an aesthetic luxury. A tactical ornament. Something you admire in a highlight reel and then quietly leave on the bench. I’ve seen the signs for years, and I want to walk you through all of it: how the position evolved, who the modern version actually is, and whether my first love is ever coming back.

The golden age: one man, all the freedom

Picture the old way of setting up a team. Midfielders doing the dirty work, strikers waiting to be fed, and in the gap between them, one man with all the freedom in the world. The Italians called him the trequartista, the player who lives in the three-quarters of the pitch. In Argentina he was the enganche, the hook that joined the team together.

The coach didn’t ask him to chase anybody. The coach asked him to decide the rhythm of the game.

That’s the part I fell in love with. The 10 had time, or at least he behaved like he had time. Riquelme played at walking pace and made everyone around him look like they were rushing. Totti gave Roma his whole career, and Del Piero gave Juventus 19 years. Bergkamp’s first touch could end an argument. Zidane floated. Okocha, well, you only had to watch him once to understand why they said he was so good they named him twice.

One night sums up what a 10 meant. April 2006, Champions League semi-final, Villarreal against my Arsenal. Late on they get a penalty, and Riquelme takes it. Lehmann saves it and we go to Paris, so I’m not complaining, but think about who the whole club trusted with that moment. The 10.

The squeeze: when the gap closed

Then football changed, and the gap the 10 lived in started to disappear.

Pressing arrived. Compact mid-blocks arrived. Midfields got fitter, centre-backs started stepping out to meet you, full-backs tucked inside. A classic 10 needs to receive the ball in the middle, facing forward, with time. Modern teams took away all three. One analysis I read points to FIFA’s review of the 2022 World Cup, where all four semi-finalists used a mid-block as their main way of defending, with the goal of shutting the middle. The writer’s argument is that creativity didn’t die, it just got spread around the team: passing moved to the deep midfielders, dribbling to the inverted wingers, the final ball to the eights.

And the results back it up. Spain won Euro 2024 without anything I’d call a classic 10. Rodri ran the tempo from deep, Dani Olmo found the pockets between the lines, and Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams stretched the pitch on both sides. Creativity everywhere, one creator nowhere.

It works for the team. It was brutal on the individuals, and it chewed up a lot of my favourites.

Juan Mata. Two-time Chelsea player of the season. Then Mourinho decided he preferred Oscar, Willian and Hazard in the creative spots, and in January 2014 Chelsea sold Mata to Manchester United for £37.1m. Mourinho later said, “I am sorry that I didn’t make him a stronger player.” Brother, that line still annoys me.

James Rodríguez. Six goals at the 2014 World Cup, the Golden Boot, a volley against Uruguay that won the Puskás Award. That summer Real Madrid paid a fortune for him. He started brilliantly. Then the injuries came, Ancelotti was sacked, and he never clicked with Zidane. By 2017 he was on loan at Bayern. One World Cup made him a superstar. Three years later nobody had room for him.

Mesut Özil. My own beloved Arsenal’s record signing at the time. I loved him, but I’ll also admit he made me wince when we didn’t have the ball. Here’s the funny part: his legs were fine. In 2016-17 he covered 329km, second only to Nacho Monreal at Arsenal. What he didn’t have was a defensive job, because Wenger deliberately gave him less of one than most of the team. Wenger put it politely: “He is a guy who works much harder than people think, but his body language goes against him sometimes.” In an era that wanted everybody pressing, that became the whole conversation around him, and it ended with him frozen out before he left for Fenerbahçe in 2021.

Isco. I’ll keep this one short because it still hurts. A beautiful player who kept getting shunned, season after season, in a squad where he could have been the heartbeat.

Look at the pattern. Every one of these guys was brilliant on the ball. The problem was what the manager thought they did off it.

The new ten: the one who crashes through the lines

So who got the job after the Omo skillful left? To my eyes, the very top level has fallen in love with the runner. The physical 10. The man who doesn’t wait between the lines to receive the ball, he crashes through them.

Maybe Dele Alli was a sign of things to come. Looking back, he was the original Jude and Morgan. At Spurs he played as the number 10 behind Kane, but he never waited around for the ball. He arrived late in the box and scored like a striker. Over his first three seasons, only David Silva touched the ball in the opposition box more among midfielders, according to Opta. We thought we were watching one special talent. Turns out we were watching the blueprint.

Dele Alli celebrating in the Tottenham shirt — Dele Alli at Spurs, the original Jude and Morgan.

Jude Bellingham is the poster boy. He arrived at Real Madrid and scored 10 goals in his first 10 games across La Liga and the Champions League, and Madrid went on to win the Champions League that season. He wasn’t floating between the lines. He was arriving late in the box like a striker with a midfielder’s shirt on.

Morgan Rogers is the same family. Chelsea paid a club-record fee this July to sign him from Aston Villa, reported at around £117m. He can play on either wing, as an attacking midfielder, or just behind the striker. Nobody would call Rogers a trequartista. He gets the ball under pressure, turns, and goes.

Then there’s Dominik Szoboszlai, 6 ft 1, all engine. By late February 2025 he was already third in the Premier League for counter-presses, according to Opta. He played attacking midfield, he played deeper in midfield, and he also played right-back. Right-back. Liverpool started him there in a 3-2 win over Newcastle in August 2025 and he was man of the match. Somewhere, Riquelme just fainted.

And Kevin De Bruyne, the last great creator of that generation, who has always had the legs and the power to drive through a defence as well as split it open. He’s at Napoli now, and injuries cost him a big chunk of last season.

Look at what these players have in common. Szoboszlai started at right-back. Rogers can play anywhere across the front. Bellingham arrives in the box like a striker. None of them waits in one pocket for the ball, and that is the point: the modern game rewards the player who is useful in six places over the one who is magic in one. They have the frames to win aerial duels and the engines to lead a relentless press. I’m not mad at any of them, they are excellent. It’s just that when I close my eyes and picture a 10, I don’t see this.

Jude Bellingham, Morgan Rogers, Dominik Szoboszlai and Kevin De Bruyne — The new ten arrives from deep and crashes through the lines.

The bridge: the nimble tens who press

Between the old school and the new school sits a group that feels like a bridge. Ødegaard. Bernardo Silva. Wirtz. Bruno Fernandes.

Martin Ødegaard, Bernardo Silva, Florian Wirtz and Bruno Fernandes — The nimble tens who press.

These guys can still create in volume. They can still thread the pass, find the pocket, and make the team tick. But they also press and harry for the full 90 minutes, and that’s the ticket to survive in today’s game. Imagine telling young Riquelme he had to hunt a full-back down the touchline.

Here’s my honest take, and some of you won’t like it. I think Ødegaard and Bernardo are 8s these days. Before you come for me, hear me out. Ødegaard runs Arsenal. He leads the press, dictates the tempo and creates, all in the same game. That is a lot more than your olden day trequartista ever had to do, and it’s why I see him as an 8 who gets the creative freedom of a 10. Bernardo is the same story, and now he’s doing it at Real Madrid.

Wirtz is the interesting case. Liverpool paid up to £116.5m to sign him from Leverkusen in June 2025. His first season was quieter than the fee suggested, but the work rate came with him: Opta had nobody at Leverkusen pressing more than him in the 2024-25 Champions League. Is he a 10, a winger who drifts inside, or something that doesn’t have a name yet? Depends who you ask, and that confusion tells you everything about where the position is right now.

These four give me hope. They prove you can still be a nimble, skillful artist and creator at the top level without being a physical monster. They also make me a bit nervous, because to survive, the 10 had to become something else.

Nico Paz: the heavyweight artist

Years ago I wrote an article about the evolution of the target man, and I did not see Haaland coming 😂. Everybody wanted a false 9. Every academy was producing little technical forwards who could drop deep and link play, and the old-school target man looked finished. Then a giant Norwegian turned up with a winger’s speed and started scoring goals at a ridiculous rate.

So I’ve learned my lesson about predicting the death of anything. And if the 10 is going to surprise me next, I think I know who might make me look like a clown: Nico Paz.

He does something strange to my heart.

Nico Paz celebrating in the Como shirt — Nico Paz, the heavyweight artist.

He’s 6 ft 1, born September 2004, an attacking midfielder who came through Real Madrid’s system and now plays for Como. Look at the frame and you’d think power. Watch him play and you see the panache and the pausa of the old greats I fell in love with. He takes a half second longer than everybody else, and then the pass arrives exactly where it should. And he does the running the modern game demands too.

The numbers back it up. Last season he scored 12 goals in 35 Serie A games, double what he managed the year before. Real Madrid confirmed at the end of June that he’d stay at Como for 2026-27, so we get another season of watching him cook.

That’s why I call him the ultimate heavyweight artist. He has the body the new game wants and the soul the old game gave us. If any player is going to carry the 10 into the next era without turning it into something else, my money is on him.

Will the Riquelme pro max ever show up?

So maybe the 10 comes back. Maybe Paz is the one, or maybe there’s a kid in an academy right now with Zidane’s touch, Ronaldinho’s swagger, and the legs and lungs the modern game demands. A Riquelme pro max who springs out of nowhere and leaves me looking like a clown for writing this whole article.

Honestly, I’d happily be the clown.

Until that day, I’ll keep watching Nico Paz, keep arguing about whether Ødegaard is really a 10, and keep replaying old Ronaldinho clips late at night when nobody is looking.

Now tell me. Who was the last real 10 you watched, and is the modern one better or just different? Drop your take below, then come argue it out in the Discord.

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