Omar Meziane: The chef behind World Cups, Olympic Golds and FA Cups

Omar assembling a meal during his time at Manchester United (Photo credit to Manchester United)

I spoke to Omar Meziane about his varied career as a performance chef for multiple high-level sports organisations. From winning a World Cup with England Under-21s to the heartbreak of Euro 2020's final, cooking for Olympic gold medal winners and international footballers at Manchester United, Omar has spent nearly 15 years perfecting his craft and employing an athlete's mentality to stay at the top of his game.

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While Omar has reached the heights of the Premier League and international teams, his career had to have started somewhere...

It's quite an interesting type of story. In around 2006, 2007, I was still working at hotels and restaurants, still kind of plugging away at a hundred hours a week, and I just felt really, really dissatisfied and that I wasn't achieving as much as I wanted.

So, I made the ultimate decision to put my knives away and hang out my chef jacket and just step away from cooking altogether. I actually started my own recruitment business, recruiting and supplying chefs and hospitality staff back into the industry. It was very successful, but the financial crash in 2007 really destroyed my business, as it did with many others.

Around the same time, it just so happened that I got a call from Wycombe Wanderers. They're my football team, I've supported them since I was a young boy, and they were asking if I could supply some chefs for matchdays.

I just said to them, "Well, I can't supply chefs plural, but I can supply a Chef"

So I turned up and I just had a wonderful relationship with those people. Then, a position opened up at London Wasps (because, at the time, Wanderers and Wasps were owned by the same gentleman) to become the training ground chef for London Wasps. To be honest, I jumped at the opportunity, and that was my real first foray into the world of sport.

After getting a small taste with Wycombe Wanderers and London Wasps, Omar realised that the satisfaction gained from the job was different then he had experienced before...

I really fell in love with it because when you cook for a living, you end up with almost immediate satisfaction when you have happy customers. However, this was something way more powerful because you were working all week to actually witness, hopefully, the result of your good work. I loved that sense of achievement.

I've always said that the performance chef is a tiny cog in a part of the machine but, just recently, I've stopped myself from saying that because we are quite a big cog. You know, we are pretty important. You become very important around training grounds and on training camps and so on, because you are working with these guys constantly, the performance staff, the medical staff, you are essentially living with the players. You see them far more than you see your family, and so that connection with whatever sport you happen to be working in is incredibly strong.

I was with the Wasps for, in and around, three seasons, and the only reason I ever left was because there was a little bit of financial difficulty with the club, and I was offered up at other opportunities.  They took me slightly away from sport for a short period of time. I got involved as a consultant for various organisations, and I was doing a lot of menu writing for the RFU (Rugby Football Union) and the ECB (England and Wales Cricket Board), trying to develop those relationships.  I think at that point, I had decided that I wanted to be involved with sports somehow.

I think you don't have to work in it (sport) very long, especially for team sports like football and rugby, where you do feel like a part of the team very, very quickly. It becomes really self-absorbing ,and you have to know more, you want to help more, and I really loved the idea that what I was doing would have a significant, significant impact on performance and recovery, so if I had a bad week, that could really affect the result on the weekend.

It's the best feeling in the world when you win, as much as it is short-lived, but you really feel that despair that the players feel, that the fans feel, when you lose. You feel slightly responsible because you are slightly responsible.

I have to say that about every Association, every Club, every team that I have worked with, you would be very hard pressed to find a member of staff that don't feel or care the joy when you win or also the pain when you lose.

Following his work with the Wasps, Omar moved to a sport he knew little about, but would gain a lot of newfound respect for - rowing...

I then joined the British Rowing team. This was just after the London Olympics, in the cycle for Rio and again, it was incredible. I had never really given any thought to rowing, and then I started working with these guys who are absolute behemoths; they are giants. I'm only five foot eight and quite stocky, so these guys would just tower over me.

Again, you can't help but fall in love with the sport. I know what they say about rowing, "it's only important for six and a half minutes every four years", and maybe that is true, but the dedication, the hard work, the pain, the misery is immense. They are working six or seven days a week for that cycle, to get them ready for championships or qualifications, and then for the big one, obviously, the Olympic finals.

It was going from a relatively privileged background in professional sport, and then seeing these Olympians work their socks off for next to no money, having part-time jobs in the evenings or studying medicine part-time, doing whatever it may be in the hunt for that Olympic gold medal. It blew my mind. It really supported that relationship with me wanting to support athletes.

For Omar, the vast difference in diet and meals wasn't just from rugby to rowing, but within the categories of rowing itself...

The Head of Nutrition there at the time was a lady called Wendy Martinson, arguably one of the best practitioners in the country. She was very, very specific because you've essentially got four groups of athletes: Open-Weight Men, Open-Weight Women, Light-Weight men and Light-Weight Women. So all of these athletes have vastly different training plans. For example, the heavier men during a Race season can be eating up to 10,000 calories a day, and then the lighter men and women need to weigh 63 kilos. The disparity is huge.

It's probably the most technical I've ever had to be, where I think about how I have to feed these athletes while also making sure I think about the human emotion of what they eat. These guys will go out in the depths of Winter, minus six outside, the lake will be frozen, and you just see these guys going out on the water at 7 o'clock in the morning to row 30 kilometres. 

The British Eights show off their gold (Photo Credit to British Rowing)

I worked with those guys until Rio 2016, where they were incredibly successful as the Men's 8 got gold. It was incredible for people like Pete Reed to really cement their names in Olympic history; it was very special.

 For me personally, it was "do I stick around or is there something exciting and new?". And actually, without even really having to make that decision personally, I was contacted about eight months after Rio by the FA.

From being behind the fuel responsible for a gold medal, Omar's next journey would see him return with not just a medal, but a World Cup as well...

I can remember it was a Wednesday evening and I had a phone call to say, "Do you fancy going to Korea?". I remember thinking 'I could be tempted'.

The guy at the end of the phone said, "Well, we need a performance chef with the Under-20s team out to Korea for their World Cup".

I was like, "Yeah, when do we leave?" and he said, "Sunday!"

So, I turned to my wife to say that I've just been offered this and when I go away. But I remember saying, "It's England, so I'll be home in two weeks". At that particular time, England would never get out of the group stages, and if you did, it would be home after the final whistle of the round of 16 game. And yet, 45 days later, we came home with a big shiny trophy and a gold medal.

It was my first real football experience, and there were some incredible players within that team who have gone on to huge success.  I absolutely fell in love with the way I had to operate, which was 'okay, we're in the hotel now for three days, you go in, you take over, you produce some great food for them, and then you move on to the next hotel'. It's exciting because you were on the other side of the world, experiencing things that money cannot buy in many circumstances. To be part of that team, which was the first team to win anything in 51 years, I think, it was incredible.

The Under-20s Squad lift their trophy. Several high-level talents were in the squad, such as Dominic Solanke, Ademola Lookman and Dean Henderson. (Photo Credit to Sky Sports)

As you can imagine, we had a bit of a party, which was on a sixteen-hour flight! I was hungover like I had never been hungover before, mainly because Dean Henderson (who was the goalkeeper on that tour) got me too drunk during the night. I remember I got home at five o'clock in the morning, I put my suitcases inside the house, and then jumped in the car to start the first day at work for Harlequins Rugby Club. It was one of the hardest first days of my life!

After just a short time at Harlequins, Omar received a mysterious call in a Waitrose that would forever change his life....

I'd been in that job for probably about four weeks when I was shopping in Waitrose, and my phone rang from an unknown number. I answered, and the voice on the line just said;

"Hello, this is Gareth."

"Gareth who?

"Gareth Southgate, how are you?"

I was so shocked. Why the hell is this man calling me? That phone call was one of the greatest phone calls I have ever received in my life. Essentially, he said, after the success and the great reports of everything in Korea, would you consider working with the senior team?

What I wanted to do was play it cool, let me have 24 hours to think about it. But I didn't do that, I said yes immediately, it would be the honour of a lifetime. So I joined as a member of Gareth's team and had the most incredible seven years of my life. It was some massive, massive highs as well as some really, really devastating lows, but to meet people and to work with truly the best people in their class and to work with the level of player that we did, it was incredible.

I was there for the entirety of the Russian World Cup, which was it was the most exciting thing in the world. Firstly, because it's Russia and it was a bit like being in a James Bond film! But of course, we absolutely did so well, and I genuinely think Gareth is arguably the greatest leader of people that I have ever borne witness to. It was a massive turning point. I think before any tournament, England were written off, and it was the same during the beginning of that tournament.

I think Gareth's ability to lead us as a group of people was remarkable. Players and staff sit on the team buses and in that drive to the game, in the dressing room, there's only 55 or so of us, and he had this incredible ability to connect with every single one of those people on a personal level and make sure personally we would feel special and that we would do our part. Just an incredible human being and absolute joy to work for. There are very few people that you work for, and you have such a clear sense of loyalty. It was an incredible time. I was obviously there for the Euros as well, where we lost to Italy in the final, and I can still remember the night before. 

In perhaps the biggest game for England's Men's team in fifty years, the 2020 Euros final saw them lose on penalties to a strong Italian side....

Do you remember when you're just cognizant of when Christmas is tomorrow, and that feeling of sheer, sheer excitement and all of my wildest dreams are going to come true tomorrow because Santa is going to put presents under my tree? That's how I felt the night before the Euros final.

It became even more exciting because that tournament was partially through lockdown, so we didn't have the ability to see our families or anything. You're away from home for eight weeks, nine weeks nearly, and I think the excitement is that as soon as tomorrow night's done, the very next day, I'll be going home. That is exciting, but it was really that feeling of we can do this, we are going to win this trophy. 

I can vividly remember getting on the team bus. On that team bus, everyone has their specific seat; you never swap seats! My seat was always right in front of Jordan Pickford, and I was behind the doctor. I can't put it into words, but being on that bus driving to Wembley, it was like the entire country stopped. You're not really aware of that whilst you're inside, it was only when you got onto the motorway and cars were just stopped on either side to let us drive through the middle of the motorway. 

The England Team Bus arrives at Wembley (Photo Credit to AFP)

It became this really emotional, surreal thing, 'oh my god, this is huge, this is the biggest thing in the world, this is almost beyond me'. Then you pull into Wembley, and despite it being something that everyone on this bus was very used to doing, we had never seen it like that, never. There were people everywhere, a sense of 'we are going to achieve something right now, we truly are going to achieve something right now', and then we didn't. 

I still think the achievement was to get to that final, to get to that sense that we can do this. It's one of those experiences that, as a little boy, if you had told me that I would be part of that, I would have thought you were crazy. It was such a significant thing to have done with my life and one that I will forever be proud of.

After stepping away from England just before Qatar, Omar's journey took him to Pakistan, to once again make history...

I think that sometimes with these very big, important jobs, I personally believe you can hold onto them for the wrong reasons. I think for me personally, creativity slows down, the progress slows down because you feel comfortable, and I never like to feel too comfortable in what I'm doing.

I like that pressure because it makes me better.

So I decided to step away from that and took a little bit of time out. I was contracted a few months later by ECB, with whom I had done some work previously, to see if I fancy to go to Pakistan.

So, at the end of 2022, I went to enjoy working for the England cricket team for the first Tour of Pakistan in 20 years. They won that, and it was singularly the best 40 days of my life. I absolutely enjoyed every minute of it.

I won't lie, I wasn't much of a cricket guy. Yeah, it's a good day out, a good evening out definitely, but the idea of test cricket, the idea of sitting there for five days seemed so far removed from who I am as a human being. 

But being around players like Stokesy (Ben Stokes), James Anderson, all of those boys for that amount of time, I absolutely fell in love with it. The understanding that it's actually a bit like a game of chess, it's incredibly strategic.

 It's such an exciting thing to be around and to actually see behind-the-scenes into what that strategy actually is and how quickly that strategy can change to try and win the game.

What's really interesting is that you're always around the dressing room with cricket, so there is always something to do, you can always have an impact on something, even if it is just chatting to someone.

I cannot speak highly enough of the guys at the ECB; that group of players that I was with looked after me, made me feel so incredibly welcome. I came away, again, being victorious, which always helps, but I came away from Pakistan with this kind of renewed dedication to what I do for a living, which is in support of players to achieve on our behalf. Being a sports fan as staff is an incredible thing, and to have that impact that I did and to be part of that group was very, very special.

Omar's success in Pakistan was followed by a move to one of the world's biggest football clubs, Manchester United....

It was the absolute honour of a lifetime to work for that club, and it's not really until you step into the doors of that football club and you realise that it's very special, it's a very, very special place to be.

You walk around Old Trafford and it's all so inspiring because of its size, because of what's happened there, the players that have played on that pitch. It is an incredible place to be with incredible people.

What I really loved about the club, at the time, was that although it's the biggest football club in the world, it felt very small when you were inside it. Around the first team, where I was working, it's a very small team of people.

I think it was absolutely a culmination of nearly 30 years of hard work to get to that point and it was a very, very tough decision to walk away from that football club as well. Not be part of that team because it is so exciting to travel the world. Being a part of that football team, to be able to walk out of the tunnel at Barcelona and God knows where else. You get to experience things, like running onto the pitch as we won the FA Cup, that you'll remember forever.

I had only been there a few weeks when we won the League Cup, and we got to the FA Cup final that season as well. It was something to be proud of.

To work under that manager, Erik Ten Hag, was an honour. Again, I would put him into a very similar bracket to Gareth. A completely different management style, but one that I absolutely adored. To me personally, he was absolutely the best with an incredible coaching team, Mitchell Van der Gaag and Steve McLaren.

It was a crazy place. You would open the doors, and suddenly, you would bump into Sir Alex. Rio would be popping in, I knew Wayne from England already, and he would pop in as well; you eventually become a bit blasé to it. Van Persie, who would come over to do some CPD stuff with the manager, and you'll just like be like "Hi Robin, nice to see you, how are you doing?" It is surreal that it's just an everyday occurrence.

I remember on my first day being at the training ground, and there was Brian Robson. When I was growing up, Brian Robson was one of my heroes! And after a while, you just think 'yeah, all right Brian, how are you doing' or having a drink with Andy Cole in Las Vegas for a night out. It's a club of such massive magnitude and size; it was great.

I don't think I've ever been happier than I was the moment we won the FA Cup final. The feeling to just run on that pitch, and to be around the party afterwards!

Omar posing with the cup (as well as Rasmus Højlund and Christian Eriksen) (Photo Credit to Omar Meziane)

 I do remember Rasmus Højlund picking me up and carrying me around at one point! It's just things that money can't buy. That feeling of belonging to something that is so much bigger than yourself, it's very special, and it's highly addictive. I think that's why a lot of us continue to do it, and one of the biggest honours of my life was to be around those people to look after those particular players.

And it was big for the manager as well because at that point, the new ownership had set huge amounts of pressure, and it was just so good to see him truly happy, and to just see him, for a few hours at least, with pressure lifted from his shoulders.

My philosophy has always been that you don't end up in these organisations by chance. Anyone working in the Premier League, you're there because you're arguably some of the best in the world at doing what you do.

I think to then, possibly, have an ownership group that comes in and speaks to the press and tells you, actually, 'you're not all that good', I think to then go out and win an FA Cup, it kind of proves that wrong.

I wish Manchester United nothing but luck. I think it is an incredible football club and I can't wait for the new stadium. I can't wait to go back there one day soon and watch the game of football, but actually as a football fan, as opposed to thinking about post-match food or training tomorrow and all those millions of things.

Omar's departure from Manchester United even earned his very own Fabrizio Romano post. Perhaps a world first for a chef!

Omar makes sure to emphasise how he values flavour as much as nutrition, but has seen a few quirky diets over the years...

I don't know if I've had any very strange requests from players, but there was a member of staff, a physio who will remain nameless, at England, and he had a very bizarre relationship with food. He would put his whole meal in a glass and blend it and drink it because 'that's all happened in my stomach'.

Like, for breakfast, he would have an omelette consisting of smoked salmon and avocado, which is very nice. Maybe he'd have some yoghurt and kiwi, a few strawberries, a few blueberries, a bit of this bit of that. All of which would end up in the blender! I personally couldn't stomach it, but he enjoyed it.

Perhaps the secret to Manchester United's FA Cup wasn't just tactical brilliance and players' skill, but a vat of rice pudding...

Every night before a game, I used to do a huge, huge amount of rice pudding. It was something I brought over from England. So the idea is that the players get as much carbohydrates the night before the game as possible. Some of the players, especially the boys from England, like Luke Shaw, Harry Maguire, Mason Mount, and Jadon Sancho, when he was there, loved it. The moment I walked through the doors, "Are we having rice pudding?! Are we having rice pudding?!"

It became a part of a tradition for us, and then we had Bruno Fernandes, Diego (Dalot) Casemiro, Anthony, all of the Portuguese and Latin American players; they would have their own special rice pudding that I would make separately for them. It was a Portuguese recipe that Diego gave me.

The first time I made it, he showed me the recipe and I said, "That's not gonna work", but then I made it and I had to say, "Wow, this is really delicious! Not as nice as mine, of course, but still very nice".

Food is a massive part of Diego Dalot's life, and he was great at sharing it. If he wanted me to try something or if he found a butcher or something, he would hand the number to me. It was a big, big part of his life. I think sometimes the tradition of food, especially in Spain and Portugal, is so important. It becomes a part of a massive thing for them, especially if they've been living abroad.

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