Lamine Yamal has already won a European Championship and a World Cup, and he is only 19. Sitting in a first-floor office in Las Rozas, surrounded by tactics boards and stats sheets, with a Spain keyring hanging from the door and a second star on his shirt, the Spain and Barcelona winger still describes himself the way a kid would: as someone who simply wanted to keep playing.
Spain beat Argentina 1-0 after extra time in the World Cup final in New Jersey on 19 July, and Yamal pinpoints the moment he knew the trophy was theirs. It came when Enzo Fernández was sent off in the third minute of second-half stoppage time, with the score still 0-0. “We knew it was impossible they would score,” he says, “and with the ball against 10, very difficult for us not to.” The surprise, he admits, was that Spain had not scored already. The breakthrough arrived on 106 minutes, when the ball reached his feet. Pedro Porro’s cross was headed back by Nico Williams and Ferran Torres, who had struggled throughout the tournament, scored. “We knew Ferran needed it,” Yamal says. “Well, everyone needs a goal in a World Cup final. If Unai Simón had scored, great. When it goes in, it’s spectacular, you feel you’re champions. You can’t explain the emotion.”
He also explains the part he played in the build-up. Yamal recalls three plays around minutes 60, 70 and 80 in which he took on the full-back, and each time Alexis Mac Allister came across to help. Rather than attacking at speed, he carried the ball more slowly, so Mac Allister had time to reach him, Porro could arrive behind him, and he could play it back. A little space was made, and from it came the goal.
For Yamal, the duel with the one, two, three players facing him is “very psychological”. He describes the full-back as a robot, programmed by a coach with instructions on how to stop him. “Robots can be almost perfect but a human will have something a robot doesn’t,” he says. “Football is mechanised but there are players like me, Pedri, many others, who have that special spark.” He watched countless videos of a signature Neymar move — the stop, the fake, the shift the other way — and tries to ensure opponents cannot mechanise him, cannot know where he is going.
Yamal does not shy away from the Ballon d’Or conversation. Spain’s candidate for the award would be the youngest winner ever, even if Kylian Mbappé has support in Madrid. “Being completely honest, it’s not just this year I’ve been at a Ballon d’Or [winning] level, but longer,” he says. “I think people think: ‘Lamine is 19, he’ll win it at some point, so let’s say someone else…’ I just have to win, win, win, and there will be a time when there’s no debate.” Luis de la Fuente, the Spain coach whose office is next door, has likened him to Salvador Dalí and Michelangelo, and Yamal does not mind saying he is a genius.
At the final whistle he embraced Lionel Messi. “I said thank you for everything you gave football,” he says. “I don’t do things to look nice for the photo; that came from inside.” The symbolism was hard to miss — a 19-year-old hugging the 39-year-old who had bathed him as a baby. The photograph of that moment was kept out of circulation for 17 years, and Yamal says that was his doing. “Because I told him not to,” he says of his father. “He put it on Facebook once and I told him to take it down. Comparisons were too easy, that was all people would talk about. I wanted to be Lamine; I didn’t want to be Messi.”
The records underline how early all of this has come. No one had ever won a Euros and a World Cup younger: Yamal was 19 years and six days. He went to Euro 2024 at 16, a schoolboy sitting exams, and the World Cup at 18, and won both. He already has three league titles. By contrast, Messi was 35 when he won the World Cup, Diego Maradona was 25, and Cristiano Ronaldo never has. His family, he laughs, do not know what losing feels like. “I told them: ‘Calm down, there will be plenty more World Cups.’ I have to play more and win more.”
Yamal says he first felt some sort of fame at 13. Now a global social phenomenon whose image was everywhere at the World Cup, he insists nobody really knows him — only his inner circle knows what he thinks — and that keeping things quiet is a habit he grew up with in his barrio. He frames it as responsibility rather than pressure: his mother struggled so that he could play football, his father collected scrap metal so that he could eat. “In football there’s no fear,” he says, and that is the only fear he allows. He plays, he says, for the fun of it — to dribble, to play one touch or two, to make a teammate who has not scored score, to hear the olés. “I get home and I say: ‘I’ve had a great time.'”