Lamine Yamal: Is Barcelona’s ‘New Messi’ Already the World’s Best Player?

Lamine Yamal is a Barcelona wonderkid rapidly emerging as one of Europe’s brightest young talents, who is recently drawing comparisons to Lionel Messi. Lamine Yamal became Barcelona’s youngest-ever debutant at 15 and Spain’s youngest-ever goal-scorer at 16, which earned him the “next Messi” label among fans and pundits. Yamal’s current form and achievements for club and country in EURO 2024 solidify his status as a potential breakout star for Barcelona and Spain.

Read about Lamine Yamal’s rise, records, and comparisons to Lionel Messi, as The Game Magazine writer Andy Murray explores the question fans around the world are asking: Is Lamine Yamal really the new Messi?

Is Barcelona’s ‘New Messi’ Already the World’s Best Player?

By Andy Murray

If Mounir Nasraoui himself hadn’t posted the photo on Instagram in July 2024, no one would’ve believed it was true. “The beginning of two legends,” read his caption for the picture in which a 20-year-old Lionel Messi, shoulder-length curtains nestling on a white sweatshirt, helps a young mother bathe a months-old baby in a plastic blue tub full of soapy water. In another shot from the same 2007 UNICEF photoshoot, for a calendar of first-team players interacting with fans and places from the local area, Messi (nervously) cradles the baby in a blanket.

The Argentine had just announced himself as football’s next big thing, and the UN children’s charity, Barcelona’s shirt sponsors at the time, wanted to take advantage. They commissioned a raffle in Rocafonda, a neighbourhood notorious for its high-rise tower blocks, high immigration, and poverty in Mataro, some 30km north-east of the Catalan capital, to be part of the Messi month. Nasraoui and his then-partner Sheila Ebana, the aforementioned young mother, won and it was decided their newborn son should be the subject.

The day after Nasraoui alerted the world to the photoshoot’s significance, his son set up Spain’s opening goal en route to a EURO 2024 quarter-final defeat of Germany. Four days after that – and four days before his 17th birthday – this young winger’s sinuous equaliser in the semi-final victory over France was so ethereal it later won goal of the tournament. In the final against England, he laid on Nico Williams’ opening goal in a 2-1 win. All this on top of a breakthrough season for Barcelona.

Lamine Yamal could neither vote nor drive, yet he’d just played the most significant of roles in delivering La Roja’s fourth European crown. More than 16 years had passed since Messi gave Yamal a bath in a photoshoot that could hardly have proven more prescient, with one left-footed, La Masia-reared wonderkid almost literally anointing his successor before he was even on solid food, let alone out of nappies, but the game has increasingly recognised the game.

“Messi is a pretty introverted guy, he’s shy,” said photographer Joan Monfort, who took the picture he calls “a one in a million. “He was coming out of the locker room and suddenly he finds himself in another locker room with a plastic tub full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated. He didn’t even know how to hold him at first.”

Messi, of course, couldn’t have known it at the time but the GOAT contender sees Yamal as the member of the next generation who most resembles himself. “If I have to choose someone, because of the age and because of the future that he has,” he told Forbes in late 2024, “I’ve heard that they have chosen Lamine Yamal and without doubt [it’s him] for me too.”

His ascent has been stratospheric. Fresh from scoring four goals for Spain U17 at that summer’s European Championship, Yamal had only just turned 15 when Barcelona manager Xavi invited him to train with the first team at the start of the 2022/23 season. The following April, he made his senior Blaugrana debut, aged 15 years, nine months and 16 days, the club’s youngest player in more than a century. One game into the 2023/24 season, Barça were suddenly in need of a winger. Los Cules had sold Ousmane Dembele to Paris Saint-Germain that summer, and Raphinha received a red card in the opening day goalless draw at Getafe. Xavi had Ferran Torres and Ansu Fati as options, but instead gave a first start to his teenage sensation, who kept his place against Villarreal and laid on an assist in a man-of-the-match display.

Immediately called up to Luis de la Fuente’s senior Spain squad that September, Yamal scored in a 7-1 defeat of Georgia to become la Roja’s youngest player and goalscorer. By the end of his breakthrough season, seven goals and nine assists hinted at the outrageous talent that lay within. “Maradona, Messi, and now Yamal,” said Lothar Matthaus of the passing of generational genius.

“Lamine is a kid,” says De la Fuente, “but with a talent that only the chosen ones have. It’s like he has been touched by the wand of God. Very few have that quality, that incredible ability.”

EURO 2024 catapulted Yamal to stardom. That goal against France, cutting inside Adrien Rabiot to curl a mesmeric effort in off the post, made him the youngster goalscorer in European championship history at 16 years and 362 days. He was already the competition’s youngest debutant and had spent much of his downtime throughout the tournament revising for school exams. Comparisons to Pele, whose extra-terrestrial skill lit up the 1958 World Cup as a 17-year-old, weren’t as far-fetched as may be expected.

That quiet, humble countenance shone every bit as brightly as that goal of the tournament and four assists. Part of the Barcelona system since he was six, he scored 357 goals in 244 youth-team games for the club, yet has never been big-time. Plenty of academy players where they team tracksuits everywhere – not Yamal, who simply wanted to be part of his local community.

Yamal celebrates every goal by crossing his hands over his chest and using his fingers to spell out the numbers 304, the last three digits of the Rocafonda post code (08304), the neighbourhood in the city of Mataro in which he grew up.

Walk around Rocafonda and ‘304’ graffiti is everywhere, from building walls, bins and post boxes, in a nod to the pride 12,000 locals feel for a working-class neighbourhood they feel is unfairly maligned in the Spanish press and politics – “forgotten, isolated and stigmatised” is how daily paper El Pais describe it. Housing associations put half the residents at risk of poverty and eviction, while a high immigrant population makes Rocafonda one of many communities targeted by far-right parties, who stigmatize such neighborhoods with divisive rhetoric often employed by similar populists worldwide.

Yamal is a standard bearer not only for his neighbourhood but for countless others across the country. Across one set of steps at a central squad reads the graffiti: “In the Rocafonda neighbourhood, more Lamine Yamals, fewer evictions.” Too often are the poorest residents, often from immigrant backgrounds like Yamal himself, are forced onto the streets. Murals of the neighbourhood’s most famous son now adorn most shop frontages.

Born in Esplugues de Llobregat on Barcelona’s outskirts, he spent some of his childhood in nearby coastal town Granollers, but it is Rocafonda that has marked the luxuriously gifted teenager more than anywhere else. Father Mounir is a painter-decorator from Morocco, and mother is a waitress born in Equatorial Guinea. That it was Yamal and Nico Williams, whose Ghanaian parents undertook a perilous journey across the Sahara Desert before making their way into Spanish territory through Melilla in North Africa, who provided the creative spark in Germany and continue to do so going into the 2026 World Cup in North America is vital for a country still wrestling with how it talks about immigration.

“As a country, it gives us strength, it makes us greater,” he replied. “They are Spaniards and we are happy that they are.” Irene Montero, an MEP for the party Podemos and former national equality minister, went a step further.

“Spain is Lamine Yamal,” she said after France’s goal. “I think it’s very important that, on days like today, we remind people who say that Spain isn’t big enough for everyone, or that there’s a problem with immigration and that immigration brings crime, of Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal.”

On the pitch, Yamal has gotten even better in 2024/25. The dazzling dribbles remain but are now allied with even greater end product – by the end of April, the 17-year-old had more than 35 goal involvements and led La Liga for assists, successful take-ons and shot-creating actions amid myriad other division-high creative metrics.

He scored in the 4-0 Clasico mauling of Madrid in October, another in the 5-2 victory in the Supercopa de España, yet his general importance to Barcelona extends even further. It’s no coincidence that los Cules have picked up just one point from nine in the three Liga games Yamal missed through injury this season. The Blaugrana held a four-point lead over bitter rivals Real Madrid with seven games remaining.

A first major honour for Barcelona was inevitable. Two goals and four assists (in just four outings) guided the Catalans into a Copa del Rey final where they beat Madrid 3-2 in a spicy Clasico as Yamal kept a cool head while all around him were losing theirs. Four days later, Yamal went stratospheric. The teenager’s four goals and as many assists had helped Barça into a first Champions League semi-final after five seasons away, but against Inter Milan, Yamal put on a recital.

His side was 2-0 down after a little more than 20 minutes, Yamal won the ball back on the right wing. Swarmed by Nerazzurri defenders, the No.19’s peroxide blond curls danced past three on the diagonal into the box and curled a delicious effort past goalkeeper Yann Sommer into the far corner. He later hit the bar, having sent wing-back Federico Dimarco for a hot dog with a sublime turn, and it was Yamal’s dummy that helped set up Raphinha for an equaliser to leave the first-leg score at 3-3. Without him, Barcelona would have been all but out. Inter were by far the better team, lacking in only one department – a genius.

“Lamine Yamal is a phenomenon born every 50 years,” said Inter boss Simone Inzaghi after the final whistle. “We started well, but they created a lot of problems: he created a lot of problems. He is a player I had not seen live before. We had to double up on him. We managed it better in the second half and could even have won.”

Hansi Flick, Yamal’s own manager, couldn’t help but agree. “He’s a genius,” said the German. “It is unbelievable how he does it. At 17 years old, he’s an unbelievable player, and for me the important thing is he keeps going. He was so important to us in the first half. He created a lot of things and scored the first goal. He does it always in the big games.”

Next summer comes a first World Cup, a tournament at which he will turn 19 and where Spain will likely start as favourites along with defending champions Argentina. It feels instructive that the USA are the principal host for the pride of Rocafonda’s first crack at the big one, with Messi, still Albiceleste captain, in his autumn years at Inter Miami and dominating the football conversation Stateside.

For the first time since that bathtub in 2007, master and apprentice will be within touching distance of each other, in the same tournament at the same time. Footballing artists of rare compare, this Messi and Yamal will bring deft brushstrokes and creative genius to the beautiful game’s pre-eminent tournament. Raphael or Pinturicchio? Who wins?

Cover photo: IMAGO / DeFodi Images / Xavi Bonilla