Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but Lamine Yamal is awfully old for his age.
The 16-year-old winger is so precocious, he somehow became the youngest player to debut for Barcelona in La Liga the week before becoming the youngest to play for their second team, Barcelona B.
Barely a year out of the academy ranks, he’s already the youngest goalscorer in the history of La Liga, Copa del Rey and the Spanish Super Cup — not too bad for a kid who still shows his braces when he smiles.
Should we talk national team records? Yamal is the youngest player ever to represent Spain. The youngest to score for Spain. The youngest to provide an assist for Spain. The youngest to receive a standing ovation for Spain — in the Bernabeu, no less — at a match against Brazil in March where he set up three goals and outshone the Ballon d’Or favourite Vinicus Junior.
When Yamal finished third in the voting for last year’s Golden Boy trophy for the best young player in the world, an Italian newspaper made up a new award just to recognise him for being nominated at an earlier age than anyone in history. The name of the prize made it official: Yamal is the youngest to be The Youngest.
When Spain take the pitch at this summer’s European Championship, Yamal will likely break age records in that competition, too. But the fixation on his youth, which suggests all the things he could possibly achieve in the next 15 or 20 years, has the odd effect of underselling the player he is right now.
Yamal isn’t just his country’s youngest player — he may already be their most important.
Yamal has already broken a number of records (DAX Images/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Though Spain have been the best possession side in international football for as long as Yamal has been alive, their famous tiki-taka that won two straight Euros and a World Cup between 2008 and 2012 has slowly fossilised. For the last decade, each new tournament has been deja vu all over again: lots of passes, not enough goals and a disappointing exit.
La Roja sparkle in the first three quarters of the pitch but their slow build-up play pushes opponents back against their box, squeezing the air out of the game. When they need a creative flourish to break down the defence, Spain — a nation better at producing midfielders than attackers these days, perhaps due to the “Dostoquismo” that teaches players efficient team play over individual risk-taking — often look short on ideas.
Yamal is schooled in the Spanish positional game. He still lives and studies at La Masia, Barcelona’s academy, which he entered at the age of seven. Stylistically, though, his game bears traces of the concrete courts where he first learned to dribble in Rocafonda, an immigrant-rich neighbourhood half an hour outside the city, whose postal code he flashes on his fingers during every goal celebration.
“When you learn to play football in the street, it gives you more resources,” Yamal told Spanish GQ recently. “It makes you more mischievous than someone trained in an academy.”
That dash of mischief is exactly what Spain have been missing. Yamal’s job for the national team, like at Barcelona, is to receive the ball out wide at the end of a long, slow possession and conjure up something spectacular, the kind of thing you can’t learn in school, to break down a bunkered defence. He’s the one guy with the freedom to try pretty much whatever pops into his head.
Taking on multiple defenders from a standstill is one of the hardest skills in football. Even wingers who excel at beating their man up the sideline or timing a cut inside on a fast break struggle to pull it off in a closed game. The rare talents who can dribble through an organised defence, like Yamal or Vinicius Jr, can go either way: try to force them wide and they’ll blow around you to the goal line, but drop off and they’ll swerve inside on their stronger foot to pass or shoot.
You can see the defender’s dilemma in the direction of Yamal’s progressive carries after receiving the ball on the wing. Half go to the inside on his left foot, the other half around the outside or straight toward goal. There’s no right way to stop him, only a multiple choice quiz full of wrong answers.
As unpredictable as it is, there’s not a lot of randomness in Yamal’s game. He breaks down defenders methodically, almost algorithmically, less like the bouncy, free-running teenage Lionel Messi to whom he’s wrongly compared than to the mature playmaker version who seemed to have decoded the game into a chain of if-then statements.
“Yamal is left-footed, he comes inside. There are flashes of Messi, but we’re talking about the best player of all time, so it’s best not to compare them,” his former Barcelona manager Xavi warned.
When receiving on the wing, Yamal will control the ball with the outside of his left boot, pausing for a moment to let team-mates time their attacking runs while he checks to see which way his marker will play him. Usually he’ll turn to the left, opening his body to pass back into midfield or dribble inside. It’s only when opponents close him down near the corner of the box, hoping to trap him against the sideline or seal off the penalty area, that he’s likely to go right.
He rarely uses his weaker right foot. To get around the edge of the defence, he’ll show his marker the ball and invite a tackle before knocking it upfield with his left instep, or else he’ll start to carry inside, drawing the defence that direction, then spin in a tight circle and take off the other way. The dribble-inside-spin-outside move is his preferred way to find Dani Carvajal or Jesus Navas on the overlap when they push up from right-back to join Spain’s attack.
When cornered, he’ll sometimes whip out Zinedine Zidane’s Marseille roulette or Andres Iniesta’s zig-zag croqueta, slick two-footed tricks to make defenders disappear. Even when he’s cutting clips for the next “Lamine Yamal CRAZY skills” video, there’s something calm and matter-of-fact about it, as if dark magic was simply the logical path to goal.
Beating a man or two is only step one of the job. Barcelona have tried other pure dribblers in his position, and Spain have one on the opposite wing in Nico Williams, but what makes Yamal special is his gift for reading the game instantaneously and picking the best follow-on pass or shot on the fly.
“He almost always makes the best decision,” Xavi marvelled at the start of last season, when Yamal had barely begun to learn the professional game. “That’s the hardest thing in football. He’s extraordinary.”
You can almost picture the decision tree in his head. If his marker shows him outside, Yamal will get to the goal line for a cutback or curl a left-footed trivela behind the defence.
If the lane is to the inside, he’ll roll onto his strong foot and run down a sequence of passing reads, lane by lane, like an NFL quarterback checking his routes: a clever back-angled through-ball to a runner in the seam, a cushioned pass to the striker’s feet, a curled ball over the top, a slide-rule pass behind the striker’s run to uncover a winger arriving behind him, a lobbed switch to a player holding width on the far side. He has all of these in his bag.
Very few players combine the technical ability to time and weight those passes in traffic with the presence of mind to find the best option in a matter of seconds. It’s not just his age and his club that make reporters keep reaching for the world’s most unfair comparison.
Yamal is Spain’s youngest ever player and goalscorer (Rafa Babot/Getty Images)
“Trying to imitate Messi in that way is hard. But yeah, sure, the player I remember doing those (interior passes) was him,” Yamal told Spanish outlet Mundo Deportivo. “And if it can be like that, well, I’ll try.”
One piece of Messi’s game that Yamal hasn’t picked up yet is the darting run immediately after the pass, the instinctive one-two off a team-mate to slip through the back line and break free on goal. He rarely finds shots in front of the penalty spot and isn’t a high-volume scorer yet.
Part of what opens up all those passing lanes for him, though, is Yamal’s shooting threat off the dribble. When he cuts inside, he’s equally comfortable curling a shot to the far post or slipping one inside the near post, which makes it hard to know which way to play him.
Like any teenager, there are areas of his game that still need developing. Xavi has made a point of calling out his defensive awareness. Yamal isn’t much of an off-ball runner yet, and at times he could combine more with his team-mates. One of the interesting subplots of the Euros will be watching his chemistry with Real Madrid’s Carvajal, who plays a much more attacking role than the right-back Jules Kounde at Barcelona.
But there will be plenty of time to learn. When Yamal talks about growing up, it’s a good reminder that adulthood is still two more Euro cycles away. “When I’m 25 years old, I want to be a responsible person and know who I am,” he says.
Everyone else may know who he is much sooner than that.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)