Some players take years to arrive at a World Cup final. Lamine Yamal is getting there before he can legally drink in the country hosting it.
The prodigy
Yamal, who turned 19 in mid-July, is a right winger for Barcelona and Spain, and by Sunday he will be the third-youngest player ever to appear in a World Cup final, behind only Pelé and Italy's Giuseppe Bergomi. He was scouted by Barcelona at age 6, debuted for the senior team at 15, and this season inherited the club's fabled No. 10 shirt, once worn by Lionel Messi, the very player he will line up against in the final.
He arrives on a remarkable run of form. Yamal was named the best young player at last year's European Championship, which Spain won, and, as Al Jazeera notes, he has yet to lose across his tournament appearances for Spain. For a teenager, the composure has been the surprising part, the sense that the biggest stages do not shrink him.
A changing Spain
Yamal's story is also his country's. He grew up in Rocafonda, a working-class neighborhood in Mataró, near Barcelona. His father emigrated from Morocco and his mother from Equatorial Guinea, and Yamal has become, as commentators across the sport have observed, a symbol of a Spain reshaped by immigration. He is not alone on the team in that: his frequent partner on the wing, Nico Williams, is the son of Ghanaian parents. Together they represent a national side that looks more like modern Spain than the ones that came before.
That symbolism has not always come easy. Players of migrant background across Europe have faced racist abuse, and their prominence has become a flashpoint in debates about national identity. Yamal's rise, and his stardom, cut against that current simply by being undeniable.
Sunday, and Messi
The final carries an irony too good for the sport to ignore. In 2007, the year Yamal was born, a young Messi posed holding a baby at a charity photo shoot in Barcelona; that baby, it later emerged, was Yamal. Nineteen years on, they meet as opponents in a World Cup final, one chasing a last piece of glory, the other announcing himself as the game's next era.
For Spain, the stakes are a first men's World Cup title since 2010. For Yamal, it is a chance to complete a European and world double before turning 20. And for the many Spaniards who see themselves in a kid from Rocafonda whose parents came from across the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Guinea, Sunday is bigger than a match. It is a mirror.
