The best young footballer in the Premier League this season is busy walking us through the meaning behind each of his tattoos when he lets slip that there has recently been another addition to the collection.
Nico O’Reilly raises his T-shirt. He is not yet ready for this particular tattoo to be photographed, but there on the left side of his chest is a maxim he had inked in the wake of scoring both goals in Manchester City’s 2-0 Carabao Cup final win over Arsenal at Wembley a couple of months ago.
“Life is one big, continuous circle of giving and receiving energy,” it reads. “Be thankful for who and what’s in your life, instead of complaining about what you don’t have. If you focus on gratitude, you’ll start to attract prosperity and abundance.”
Next to it, in red, are the words “Be happy, life is short” and “Face everything and rise”.
O’Reilly will be back at Wembley with City on Saturday, this time hoping to overcome Chelsea and add an FA Cup winner’s medal to his name. Should he manage it, do not be surprised if there is another tattoo to follow.
Guardiola’s latest remarkable conversion
His body art serves as something of a monument to the values he holds dear and the dreams he is living out as the proud son of his inspiring single mum, Holli, and the latest pet project of the great innovator Pep Guardiola at City.
Guardiola has repurposed plenty of players to dazzling effect during his gilded managerial career, from Javier Mascherano at Barcelona to Philipp Lahm at Bayern Munich and Oleksandr Zinchenko at City.
But turning O’Reilly – who rose through City’s academy ranks as an attacking midfielder and even played a season as a false nine – into a swashbuckling left-back has been one of his most enriching experiments.
O’Reilly only turned 21 the day before that man-of-the-match showing against Arsenal, but he is already proving a man for the big occasion and would appear a shoo-in to win the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) Young Player of the Year award. He collected the Premier League’s academy graduate of the year award this week.
Arsenal have the advantage in the title race, despite O’Reilly’s towering display in City’s 2-1 victory over the Premier League leaders at the Etihad Stadium last month, when he set up the winner for Erling Haaland.
But it has been an extraordinary season for a player who has featured in all but six of City’s 57 matches and one that many will want to see Thomas Tuchel start at left-back for England at the World Cup finals this summer.
‘I dreamt of this all my life’
Spend some time in O’Reilly’s company and it becomes easier to understand how and why he seems so unruffled by the pressure. “I’m pretty laid-back, just chilled out,” he says. “I don’t like too much drama.”
Yet that softly spoken, relaxed demeanour masks a fierce ambition and will to succeed that has only hardened in the company of serial winners like Guardiola, Bernardo Silva and Rodri, the 2024 Ballon d’Or winner.
On the inside of his right forearm, O’Reilly has a tattoo of himself as a young boy, with “Nico 10” on the back of his shirt, standing next to his mother. Together they are looking at a football pitch positioned in the centre of a big eye.
“That was my first tattoo,” he explains. “That was always the vision I had from when I was young: to be a footballer. It’s what I dreamt of all my life, what I wished for and it’s slowly all falling into place. But I’ve always got more goals and dreams to try and achieve. So I’ll always go for more.
“That [attitude] is something I’ve picked up more being in and around the players in this team and the manager. They’re all so hungry to just win more, to win everything. It does stem from the manager. He drives us, he’s very passionate about winning. But I’ve always had that in me, it’s something that’s coming out more being in the first team.”
O’Reilly grew up on an estate on the border of Collyhurst and Ancoats, within walking distance of Manchester city centre. He went to the same Collyhurst primary school, St Patrick’s, as Brian Kidd and Nobby Stiles, two of the finest footballers Manchester has produced.
Stan Bowles, the maverick former City and QPR forward, was also born in the area, so O’Reilly is continuing quite a production line.
His tattoos are a shrine to those beloved roots. Taking pride of place next to the 0161 – the Greater Manchester area code – on his left bicep is a “NO BALL GAMES” sign.
Any person who has grown up around inner-city council estates and seen playing fields sold off or grass areas ruled off-limits will appreciate the sentiment.
“I grew up playing football on the streets and you’d see those signs on people’s walls so it just refers back to my upbringing and experience really,” O’Reilly says.
Getting kicked off was not uncommon, then? O’Reilly chuckles. “Yeah, all the time,” he replies. “When you’re a kid and you see a ball, you’ve just got to kick it. There needs to be somewhere where kids can play because that’s where you learn the most really and where you actually get into it.”
Paradise for O’Reilly was a pocket of grass near St George’s Youth and Community Centre on Bothwell Road. “The youth club had a blue cage but because the cage was concrete we actually always used to play on the grass,” O’Reilly recalls.
“We’d set up a pitch and play big games as soon as we got back from school till the lights came on at night. It was all the time. There would be loads of us. But they’ve knocked all those grass areas down and built over them. We used to love it.”
‘Family over everything’
There are plenty of men O’Reilly’s age who would think it uncool to name-drop their mum in interviews. But Holli is never too far from his thoughts and he often seems at his happiest talking about her and his sister, Nixie Bleu.
On the front of his left hand reads the words: “Love Yourz”. “It’s a song by J. Cole [the American rapper],” O’Reilly says. “That’s my mum’s favourite song. She was always playing it so it reminded me of her.”
On his right bicep are the words: “STAY HUMBLE, HUSTLE HARD”. “So my mum’s always told me just to stay humble and work hard and I saw that design and I liked it,” he adds.
O’Reilly was first spotted by Garry Riley, a well-known talent spotter in Manchester football circles who had gone to watch the six-year-old on the recommendation of Joe Yates, a colleague in City’s scouting system.
A year later, O’Reilly would be watching at home with his cousin when Sergio Agüero scored the dramatic stoppage-time winner against QPR that would seal City’s first league title for 44 years and usher in a period of extraordinary success.
From there began Holli’s endless journeying to and from matches and training over the next decade and beyond. The tattoo on his lower right forearm, just above his wrist – “Family Over Everything” – pays tribute to his mum’s sacrifices, without which he is adamant he would not be where he is today.
“The sacrifices she made in her life to get me in the position I am now is something I’ll always be grateful for,” O’Reilly says. “Just the advice and upbringing she gave me and managing to get me from game to game and all the trainings. It’s good to have people like that around you who want the best for you.
“As a kid you don’t realise and understand that, it’s only when you get older that you realise how much they’ve done for you and how much hard work they’ve put in for you to get where you are.”
From false nine to City’s leading left-back
It should be no surprise O’Reilly looks so natural in and around the penalty area given he spent most of his time as an attacking No 8 rising through City’s academy – and even as a false nine in his first year with the under-18s, following an injury to Liam Delap. “They had no one to go there so just threw me in,” he says.
Little could he have known that Guardiola would one day have a very different role in mind. It was in the final training session before City’s FA Cup tie against Salford in January last year that the Spaniard told O’Reilly he would be playing left-back and he has never looked back.
“I’ve had help from the defenders with the defensive side of my game – Josko [Gvardiol] and Rúben [Dias] have helped me a lot, when to pick my moments to go, when to stay, keeping a high line – but then the attacking side, that’s what I’ve been doing all my life,” he says.
He has no trouble identifying his breakthrough moment. “I’d say when I came on at Bournemouth in the FA Cup last season and got two assists and turned the game,” he says. “That put me out there a bit. That’s when people realised I can do a bit.”
In December, he scored at the Bernabéu in a 2-1 victory over Real Madrid and, while his return to the Spanish capital four months later was not as happy an experience, he considers it all part of the learning curve.
Just as he has done with Guardiola, O’Reilly has wasted no time in winning over Tuchel. He became the 1,296th player to represent England (naturally, he has a tattoo of the number to show for it) when he made an impressive debut in the 2-0 win over Serbia in November.
He appears well placed to start his country’s opening World Cup match against Croatia in Dallas on June 17.
“It’s everyone’s dream to play in a World Cup, it’d be an amazing experience and I’d love to go,” he says. “He [Tuchel] has just said, ‘Stay grounded, keep going’ and make sure I keep working hard so I’m involved in these big games and show what I can do.”
On his left bicep, O’Reilly has a tattoo of two chequered flags with the letters TMC written inside one of them. “It stands for ‘The Marathon Continues’ and means just don’t stop, just keep going.”
It is a motto by which O’Reilly has always lived his life.