You would forgive the good folk at Inter Milan if they were in a bit of a funk this weekend. No team since Bayern Munich in 1999 have gone away from home in the first leg of a Champions League semi-final and scored three goals. In going to Barcelona on Wednesday night and bringing a 3-3 draw back to the San Siro, they’ve done something 51 other teams this century could not.
And still, all anybody can talk about is Lamine Yamal.
“Gifted, like many champions, with a co-ordination and grip on the ball due to a superior performance of the motor cortex and the cerebellum, Lamine also possesses the ability of very few – in this case Messi – to be able to pre-read the movements of the opponent or the development of a game dynamic.”
That paragraph, admittedly, has been fed through an internet translator so it might be wise not to take it all as a word-for-word representation of the text. But you get the picture. You get the overblown, overwrought, no-hype-too-hyper thrust of the whole thing.
Heimir Hallgrímsson strikes positive note on Ireland’s World Cup qualification hopes
Ellen Molloy is learning to love football again and targeting Ireland return
Manchester United intend to keep Amorim even if they lose Europa League final
Dropping Alexander-Arnold following boos may be most palatable option for Slot
Most jarring of all, is the source of this paean to Yamal’s motor cortex/cerebellum/whatever. It’s not taken from the Barcelona bible, Sport. It’s not a Spanish paper or website at all, actually. It’s not even, given the weird focus on the inner workings of a 17-year-old kid’s brain during a football match, an extract from a medical journal. It is, in fact, from the Milan-based Corriere Della Sera.
That’s where we are with Lamine Yamal. Inter Milan go to Barcelona, pull off one of the greatest European results by an Italian team in modern football history, and even its hometown paper reacts by pushing its glasses up on its nose and peering behind the eyes of a young lad on the opposition team. And nobody finds it odd.
Youth does that. Yamal’s other-worldly display on Wednesday night would have been remarkable coming from the feet of anyone, regardless of their age. But if he was 24, it would have been more likely to go down as an eye-catching night of resistance in an otherwise disappointing result.
But Yamal was born in 2007. Some of us have T-shirts older than that. So we can’t help getting jiggy. If he’s capable of that now, what will he be like when he grows up? What wonders await on Tuesday night in the San Siro, on all the Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights and Sundays and other days to come? We could have him in our lives until 2040, maybe even 2045. Space age stuff, to infinity and beyond.
You’d think we’d know better by now. We spend so much time peering out at a sporting landscape littered with the carcasses of old new things, you’d imagine we’d be warier about it all. Slower on the trigger with the hype Uzi, a little more prudent on the megaphone.
Seventeen is so young. Ever since the photograph emerged during the Euros last summer of the infant Yamal being held by a then 20-year-old Lionel Messi in 2007, the comparisons between the two have been relentless. But even though Messi was the prodigy of all prodigies, he had nowhere near this amount of senior football played when he was 17.
Lamine Yamal is two months short of his 18th birthday and has played 100 senior games for Barcelona. When Messi was that age, in August 2005, he had appeared in just nine senior matches. He hadn’t played a full 90 minutes yet. He hadn’t played for Argentina yet. Yamal has already amassed 19 caps for Spain and was Young Player of the Tournament as they won last summer’s Euros. He will be eligible for the award again at Euro 2028.
He’s so, so young. It’s never wise to blithely pronounce upon these things from a distance but there’s no doubt that 119 senior men’s matches at his age is abnormal. And not just any old matches – this is the highest level of the world’s biggest sport, week after week for club and country. And not as a passenger or a kid to be nursed through for the future – he is the go-to player, the one everybody is looking to for inspiration.
Everything we know about sport and about youth tells us that there will be a reckoning somewhere along the way. It might be physical – so many matches in a developing body will surely extract a price eventually. Fame, family, finance – it could be any of them or all of them. Pro sport is such a grinding, unyielding machine and it has chewed up plenty more grizzled hopefuls than Lamine Yamal.
When the game was over the other night, you could see Yamal was knackered and annoyed. He had run himself to his last joule and for the first time all night, started to look his age. A full game against men is tough going for any 17-year-old, especially when your team keeps feeding you the ball at every opportunity.
And yet, even though it was obvious to anyone looking in that Yamal was spent, he was immediately corralled over to the side of the pitch and given a Barcelona jersey with his name on the back and the number 100 underneath. The whole team and extended squad horseshoed around him for a photograph to mark the occasion.
Yamal dutifully slapped on a smile and stood in for the picture. Another piece of content supplied for the Barca socials. Another morsel fed to the machine. Another slice of his life portioned out for the club, for the masses, for the media, for whoever. As if he hadn’t already spent the evening giving us all enough to remember forever.
In that moment, on one of the greatest nights of his life, it was hard not to feel sorry for him. And to wish, above all, that the world could back off and leave him alone for a while.
