Steffen Korell, who was head of scouting at Borussia Monchengladbach at the time, told Kicker that the club had tracked the Norwegian from his earliest appearances for Strømsgodset and had held substantive conversations with his camp.
Ødegaard had debuted at 15 in Norway's top flight in March 2014 before becoming the league's youngest scorer — from that moment, every major European club was watching.
"We had the feeling that Martin and his family were genuinely and seriously considering a move to Mönchengladbach," Korell said.
He described Gladbach's standing as a developer of young talent — citing Marc-André ter Stegen, Marco Reus and Granit Xhaka as examples — as a genuine selling point for the Ødegaard family.
Real Madrid won the competition for the player's signature in January 2015, paying €2.8 million for the then-16-year-old. The move proved complicated. Ødegaard made just 11 first-team appearances for the Spanish giants across six years, spending time on loan at Heerenveen, Vitesse Arnhem and Real Sociedad before Arsenal signed him permanently in 2021 for £30 million.
Korell acknowledged Gladbach considered a loan approach in the years that followed, but it never materialised.
"The scenario of a loan stayed in the back of our minds, but the door never really opened for us later on."
The context of the revelation is the Champions League final on Saturday, in which Ødegaard captained Arsenal against PSG in Budapest — the peak of a career that took a very different path from the one Gladbach had mapped out.