It’s hard to place Lamin Yamal among the top players in the world today. I guess it’s no surprise that a teenager resists stability, since he’s in a stage of life that’s defined by constant growth and change.
The difficulty is twofold. On the one hand, you don’t want the allure of new things to rob you of perspective. How can you call Lamine the best player in the world, because what he has done in the last six months is similar to what Kylian Mbappe has done. he does For the past six years? On the other hand, you can’t let your attachment to the past prevent you from properly assessing the current situation. Yes, he’s only 17, and he’s been playing like this for most of this calendar year. But in that brief time Lamine has already achieved feats that are only within reach of the game’s generational talents. How can you deny that what you see from him on a regular basis is a testament to the game’s ability to excel in both the field and the field? of Barcelona in colour and Spain’sDoes this place them in the highest tier of the player hierarchy?
Of course, lists and rankings and hierarchical levels are not real. What is real is what happens on the field – both what Lamine (I take this opportunity to remind everyone once again that Yamal is not his last name, so he should not be called “Yamal”) does on the field and how his opponents react. There, on the objective reality of the field, Lamine’s importance is most evident.
We can take their most recent match as an example. On Sunday, Barcelona visited Villarreal, which was one of the toughest tests for Barca this La Liga season, both because of the quality of the opponent as well as the depleted state of their roster, which produced a starting XI consisting of six players who would not even be seen on the field as substitutes with Barcelona at full strength. (And this is First Marc-Andre ter Stegen injured his knee midway through the match.) Barca’s generally The formidable press was disorganised. Clear passing lanes and wide open spaces were like a country highway at midnight, through which Villarreal’s speedy attackers were constantly racing towards the penalty box. As weak as Barca’s goal was, the Yellow Submarine only managed to get the ball there once. Part of this was down to some defending, offside-trapping and last-minute defending. Blaugrana Defence. Part of it was Villarreal’s poor finishing. Perhaps the biggest part was the ruthless, demoralising effectiveness of Barcelona’s attack, which had rattled the home team’s net five times by the end of this hardly spectacular performance. The main demoraliser, and the game’s finest player, was Lamine Yamal.
As Lamine does in his best performances – which is every performance of his at the moment, such is his peculiar consistency – the Moroccan-Equatoguinean-Spaniard was everywhere and did everything from the first minute to the last. But for the sake of brevity, let’s leave out the “everything” and focus on just a few things. We won’t even need his whole blessed left foot, the sole of which is the birthplace of the little monsters he is constantly releasing onto the pitch in the form of crosses and shots. Let’s just look at what he did with the little toes on the outside of that foot, because the pass that resulted from it was truly a miracle:
For those counting at home, it’s a 40-something-yard through ball, hit on the run and off the outside of Lamine’s foot, which travels from the outside edge of Villarreal’s half of the field to the penalty box, and hits Raphinha, who takes an effortless first-time redirection that bounces over Villarreal’s goalkeeper. There’s a common analogy in sports that compares a player’s efforts to a video game, but the most special players are able to do things that can’t even be predicted in a video game. Lamine is already that special type. If someone made a pass like that against you in a video game, you’d probably quit the game in anger, write an angry review about the game’s unrealistic physics and guided-missile pass assist, and then do your best to recreate the move yourself.
One thing that also shows up from video games on the real pitch is the tendency to throw in a fit of rage when an opponent does something that looks so good that it seems unfair. That’s what happened in Sunday’s match. Barcelona broke Villarreal’s spirit with a goal from Pablo Torre in the 58th minute. Prior to this, Villarreal had fought more or less to a draw with Barca, and only the aforementioned defending and inaccurate shooting prevented Villarreal from at least tying. BlaugranaThey were leading 2-1. But then Toure scored to make it 3-1, restoring Barca’s two-goal lead and dashing Villarreal’s hopes of getting anything out of the game. After taking 12 shots before Toure’s goal, five of which qualified as big chances according to statistics, Villarreal managed only one crack at Barca’s goalframe for the rest of the game.
If the first three goals sapped Villarreal’s will to compete, it was Lamine’s brilliance that really filled them with impotent rage. Just minutes after making it 5-1 with one of the most memorable moments of his career, Lamine found himself on the wing with the ball and just one defender around him. This is a situation that usually spells doom for a defender, and sure enough, Lamine shaped and then easily outpaced left back Sergi Cardona. Cardona responded to this helplessness and the gulf between his and Lamine’s brilliance by mercilessly kicking the winger in the thigh:
A few minutes later, another Villarreal player, this time winger Ilias Akhomouche, also tried to vent some of his team’s pent-up frustration by launching a needless kick at Lamine’s legs:
Very few players are technically and constitutionally capable of delivering passes near Lamine’s level of assists. That number drops even lower when you combine it with Lamine’s consistency with which he performs brilliantly throughout matches that include but are not entirely limited to solid contributions to the scoresheet. (In seven games in La Liga and the Champions League this season, Lamine has four goals and five assists. Starting with Spain’s round-of-16 match against Georgia at the Euros, Lamine has five goals and nine assists in 13 competitive matches for club and country. He has failed to score a goal or assist in any of those 13 games.) I can think of only one other Europe-based player—Vinicius, the favorite to win this year’s Ballon d’Or—whose enormous talent is so offensive to opponents, who are playing a completely different game by comparison, that they attempt to turn football into MMA by physically attacking players who are better than them.
So yes, feel free to put Lamin Yamal first or fifth or tenth or wherever on that little list you have in your head. But recognize that almost no one else can do what he does, nor be treated the way he is treated. What’s even crazier is the fact that, at just 17, he’s just getting started, he’s only 17 but already doing everything it,