The precocious rise of Lamine Yamal, swifter than either Pelé’s or Lionel Messi’s so far, is shattering the norms of football.
On Saturday Yamal turns 17. On Sunday the rightwinger will be Spain’s chief attacking hope in the Euro 2024 final against England.
He is breaking the mould of Spanish society too. Yamal and his fellow winger and friend, Nico Williams, are two of the Spanish team’s first black heroes of immigrant origin. Yamal’s father was born in Morocco, and his mother in Equatorial Guinea.
After they separated, Yamal lived with his mother in a poor immigrant neighbourhood of Mataró on the Catalan coast. He celebrates goals by signing the number 304 with his hands, in honour of his home district’s postcode.
Last week, photographs surfaced of the baby Yamal being washed in a bathtub by Messi in 2007. Taken for a charity calendar, the pictures now assume a new meaning. The Argentine great looks to be anointing his footballing heir.
Nico Williams’ parents came to Spain from Ghana. They walked barefoot through the Sahara, after being abandoned by people traffickers. The burning sands did lasting damage to his father’s feet. The couple scaled a high fence to enter Spain’s north African enclave of Melilla; his mother was unknowingly pregnant with her oldest son.
Detained in Melilla, they were advised by a lawyer to tear up their Ghanaian papers and say they were refugees from the Liberian war. Once in Spain, they named their newborn child Iñaki after a Basque priest who helped them.
Poverty forced the father to spend years working lowly jobs in London, including as a security guard at Chelsea — one of the top football clubs now reportedly chasing his son Nico.
The Williams brothers grew up speaking Basque and Spanish, and joined Basque-only club Athletic Bilbao, where Iñaki set a Spanish record by playing 251 consecutive matches. He represents Ghana in international football. Nico joined him in Athletic’s first team aged 17.
At 15, Yamal became Barcelona’s youngest debutant. This was partly because he is brilliant, and partly because Barça are desperate.
The debt-ridden club, unable to afford big stars, leans increasingly on its famed youth academy. Three of the club’s five youngest players — Yamal, Gavi and Ansu Fati — have debuted for Barcelona since 2019.
The worry is that their immature bodies may not be ready for the intense workload demanded of elite players: Fati has suffered repeated injuries, and now, aged 21, appears unwanted at Barcelona; Gavi missed the Euros after tearing his anterior cruciate ligaments.
A knee injury in the quarter-final also ruled out a fellow Barcelona player, the frequently hurt Pedri. Spain hopes that Yamal, visibly still a child with braces and a cherubic face, will hold up better.
The left-footer became the country’s youngest debutant last September, aged 16 years and 57 days. He and Williams, who turned 22 this Friday, look like La Roja’s missing links.
Spain fluffed the World Cup in Qatar playing fruitless sideways passing football. The duo give the team forward penetration. Defenders stand off them, terrified of their pace, granting them space to act.
Yamal, in particular, possesses the three-asset package of a great forward: he can dribble, pass or shoot. He and Messi were the only players in Euro 2024 and the 2022 World Cup to record “15+ chances created, 15+ shots and 15+ dribbles”, according to data provider Opta.
Spain build attacks over the left or centre, luring in the opposition before switching the ball right for Yamal to finish them. His 20-metre drive against France in the semi-final made him the youngest scorer at a Euros or World Cup. The second youngest, in 1958, was Pelé.
Yamal plays like a child for whom football is self-expression without stress. During victory over Georgia, he and Williams played a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide who would drink from a water bottle first.
Most Spanish fans welcome the duo. Celebrations of them as symbols of the country’s increasing diversity have predominated.
At Dragones de Lavapiés, a Madrid neighbourhood club with players from more than 50 countries, Victor, 22, said of Yamal and Williams: “They were born here, they grew up here. If you question their nationality or their childhood, you are depriving that person of having a culture and a nation. Because if they’re not from here, where are they from?”
But anti-immigrant sentiment is powerful in Spain, too. Yamal’s father was fined €660 last year after throwing eggs at a campaign tent of the far-right Vox party, punching a party supporter.
Similar tensions pervade Spanish football. After Atlético Madrid fans made monkey noises at Williams in April, the club escaped punishment because Spain’s football federation ruled the “isolated incident” was unpreventable.
On racist insults, Yamal told GQ magazine: “Before, it was taken as something normal, which is something I can’t understand, but it can’t happen any more . . . to be insulted because of your skin colour, I don’t see the point.”
Now social media has become a platform for sporadic assertions that the duo aren’t “real” Spaniards. Rosa Aparicio, sociologist at the Ortega-Marañón foundation, said research showed that children of non-European immigrants face discrimination at school and in the labour market.
But she was hopeful Yamal and Williams could help change perceptions. “These kids are in part the future. They’re not criminals. They’re not everything else that is said about them.”
In the micro-universe that is football, the diverse new Spain is forecast to triumph on Sunday.
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela