Eva Olid: Man Utd's new miracle-working manager tasked with leading the Red Devils to the top of the WSL table

At the start of the 2025-26 season, one that would ultimately end in Hearts winning a surprise first SWPL title, Olid deviated from her usual practice. In the past, she would set goals for the team before a season, whether to accumulate so many points, wins, goals scored or related to the team’s final position in the table. It was an approach that had worked a treat in her first four years, allowing the team to evolve into a consistent top-six side, having been a relegation candidate upon her arrival.

But last year, Olid changed tact. “That was completely gone,” Joely Andrews, part of Hearts’ title-winning side, tells GOAL. “She was like, 'We're just going to take it one game at a time'. All season, she said, 'The most important thing is winning the next game'.”

It made the group so laser-focused that the thought of winning the league didn’t even enter their minds, not when they were fourth before the league's split in February, nor when they had climbed to its summit two months later. It wasn’t until the final few games that it was talked about as a possibility.

Whether the change of approach was a sign of Olid knowing she had a team that could achieve something truly special, only she knows. “I think that's probably a good sign of a good leader, isn't it? That you're able to adapt and that you're able to change your approach,” says Sean Burt, Olid’s assistant for four years, including at the start of that 2025-26 season. “It obviously paid dividends. There were lots of standout results, standout performances, and that evidently won the title in the end.”

It’s just one example of the adaptability and continued growth that Olid, still only 41 years old, showed during her five years at Hearts, qualities that will have certainly caught the eye of United and will be key in delivering success south of the border.

When speaking to players who were part of Olid’s success at Hearts, there is one thing that is repeated time and time again: Playing in her team, with her style, was a lot of fun. “The way she wanted to play football, it’s like total football,” says Andrews. “It’s the way any footballer wants to play: Ball on the ground, possession-based.”

“She encouraged us to play from the back, progress through the thirds, and I think the movements were so sophisticated,” Olivia Chomczuk, the Hearts’ academy product who signed her first professional contract and made her senior debut under Olid, adds. “She's quite attacking as well. I like to get on the front foot. When we're off the ball, it's quite high-pressing as a team, so I enjoyed that.”

For Katie Lockwood, Hearts’ Player of the Year in 2024, that style was a big draw when she joined the club. “It was just free-flowing football,” she tells GOAL. “It was such a joy to play in and be a part of.”

It only gets to that point, though, when everyone is well-versed in Olid’s ideas and knows their role to a tee. That takes time and it takes work. With different triggers for different movements and lots of rotation within the team, there is a lot to take in, for players and staff alike.

“It probably took me about two years to fully understand what she was doing because it was so much information,” Chomczuk, who made her debut under Olid as a 16-year-old, admits. “The angle somebody presses, there's a whole new system for that. It’s so complicated.”

Lockwood remembers training sessions that would stop and stop again, “until we got it right and we had it perfect”. “She'll make sure the little things are right because come game day, the little one per cents makes such a difference. Her passion and her attention to details are probably second to none, honestly.”

It also helped that Olid was surrounded by staff who could help reiterate those messages, with Lockwood crediting her for building “a really good team around her”. Burt, who worked as Olid’s assistant and later as the head of recruitment at Hearts, remembers realising quite “quickly” that she “was going to demand very high standards from the staff”. “Ultimately it was to drive the standards of everything within that environment,” he says.

Olid kept those standards up herself, too. “She puts those demands on the players, but the players can put demands on her as well, and she always meets those demands in terms of being there to run through individual analysis, to run through if there needs to be more detail in terms of playing style, playing philosophy,” Burt notes.

Lockwood can testify to that. “I had countless little meetings with her,” she says. “You could always ask her. Once she got you one-on-one, she could have those personal conversations and she understood what made you tick and what different players needed. She was really good at that. She's probably the most approachable manager I've ever played under.”

And while it might have been a lot of detail to take in, the players would soon learn that, in the words of Chomczuk: “Once you get it, it really works.”

When the pillars of Olid’s philosophy were established, too, there could be little tweaks. Lockwood remembers coming up against Hearts during her time at Glasgow City, whom she joined after leaving the Edinburgh club, and noticing they were playing in a different formation. “She definitely adapted to have a Plan A, Plan B, even Plan C,” she says.

It’s something backed up by those in the building. Burt witnessed the evolution of Olid’s style more than most, having joined Hearts in 2021 and watched the team evolve from effectively an amateur one threatened by relegation into title winners. “As the project progressed, we had different types of profiles of players that were coming in,” he notes. “But the fundamentals were always there. It became very adaptable but I think, ultimately, the fundamentals of her playing style never changed.”

“She can deter from her traditional way of playing if we need, like if a team's pressing a certain way,” says Chomczuk, who believes “that versatility helped” in the title-winning campaign, one in which Hearts played a few different formations.

“It looks really flexible,” Andrews says of that. “But within it, it's only small tweaks within the system that make that sort of bigger change.”

Amid it all was a trust of young players, something that has been picked out plenty since Olid’s move to United was announced given the Red Devils are making a conscious decision to focus more on the club’s academy and the development of those prospects.

There is a point to be made that the SWPL is a very young league which focuses a lot on the development of that talent in general, so Olid was not going against the grain in putting trust in youth. But when GOAL asks Burt if a trust in young players was important to the 41-year-old, something that just made good sense in the financial picture Hearts and the SWPL are in, or a mix of the two, he points to the former, describing youth development as being “massive” for Olid. “Every season, there were players making their debut,” he points out.

Chomczuk was one of them. The young midfielder was just 13 years old when Olid joined Hearts and she remembers seeing the Spaniard at some of the academy’s training sessions and games, way before she herself was on the fringes of the first team. “It was encouraging because quite a few of the coaches came, so it just showed that if you took your chance in the game, then maybe you'd get an opportunity,” she says.

And when Olid did bring those young players into the first team, whether from the academy or through external recruitment, she didn’t treat them differently. “Whether you're the most experienced player on the team or the youngest player on the team, she has the same standards for both and both are constantly challenged,” Andrews, who was only 22 years old and playing abroad for the first time when she signed for Hearts, says. “I think that really helped me as a player.”

Chomczuk shares that sentiment. “You don't want to be treated differently when you come up,” she says. “You want to be treated the same as a first-team player because that's what you're aspiring to be.”

None of what Olid achieved at Hearts – the rise from the bottom of the SWPL to the top, the FA Cup final, the unprecedented title win and the style at the heart of it all – happens without time and patience, though.

Olid needed time to understand the players and what made them tick. That’s true of the group as individuals, with Lockwood simply describing her as a coach that “got it”, with she herself thriving in the No.10 role under the Spaniard.

It’s also true of the team. The switch to a game-by-game approach worked a treat in the title-winning season, for example, as did Olid’s relaxed management of the dressing room, which was more in the hands of a leadership group rather than the coach, who often only stepped in to nip issues in the bud when necessary.

“She's not like an overawing power or anything,” Andrews remembers. “She lets the players be the players and she's the manager.”

Then, of course, there is the style, the detail that must be absorbed for it to work and the patience needed for the performances and results to come through. “Mistakes will happen,” Burt concedes. “In terms of the mental characteristics of the players as well, it will take time to build up that courage, to build up that bravery, which she wants those players to have.”

Andrews had a front-row seat for that journey, as the holding midfielder in Hearts’ title-winning side. “As a player, you're getting high-pressed and you have to play out from the back, and you're going, 'Oh my, I just want to kick the ball long, we're under so much pressure',” she recalls. “But when you know you have to, and you do it and it comes off, you get so much confidence from that, and that's the football you want to play.”

There is a phrase that Burt repeats time and time again when talking to GOAL about Olid’s time at Hearts: “The proof is in the pudding.” In the results she achieved, the progress and success she delivered, the positive environment she created and the talented young players she helped develop, that is true. Now, her reward is a massive opportunity at Manchester United.

It won’t be easy. While Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City – the three teams United are trying to keep up with – have all strengthened in the summer transfer window, and promising teams below them like London City, Tottenham and Brighton continue to show their ambition, the Red Devils have only made three signings, one of whom is a back-up goalkeeper. Instead, there is a desire to look closer at the talent coming through at Carrington and integrate that into the first team. Will Olid be expected to marry that with trophy success right away? Or will she be given the time to make her mark?

Burt isn’t worried. “I'm really relaxed about the situation because I've seen Eva close up,” he says. “I've seen how she works. I've seen her dedication and her passion for the game, and it's infectious. I have absolutely zero doubt that Eva will be a success there. At Hearts, obviously, it took time to implement a philosophy and it didn't happen overnight, and it'll take time at United as well.”

If Olid is given that time, then her incredible, transformative five-year stint at Hearts is a testament to what she can achieve.