Meet Lamine Yamal – the teenage sensation primed to shatter England’s Euro 2024 dream

One of the most extraordinary and refreshing stories of Euro 2024 has been the meteoric rise of Lamine Yamal, who continues to break new ground and demolish record after record in Germany.

The more casual fan may not have heard of Yamal heading into this summer’s tournament but the teenage sensation has put his name up in lights with a string of magnificent performances and is on the cusp of national hero status in his native Spain.

Luis de la Fuente’s men – or, in Yamal’s case, boys – have stood head and shoulders above the rest over the last month and the Barcelona starlet has been their MVP at the, quite frankly, absurd the age of 16 (Yes, SIXTEEN). Just let that sink in.

To put that into some sort of perspective, Yamal has had to do homework in between Spain’s matches and still requires parental authorisation in order to travel overseas with the national team.

The adage, ‘If you’re good enough, you’re old enough’, hardly does Yamal’s situation justice considering the breathtaking manner in which the teen has taken the tournament by storm.

After all, it was the youngster’s dancing feet and stunning, staggering, swerving, whatever-you-want-to-call-it strike that kick-started Spain’s fightback in a pulsating semi-final against France in Munich on Tuesday evening.

The jaw-dropping effort saw Yamal become the youngest ever scorer at either a Euros or a World Cup, eclipsing the previous record set by a 17-year-old Pele back in 1958. This evening, he is set to make the history books once again by becoming the youngest player to feature in the final of either tournament.

Once the dust settled on England’s semi-final triumph over the Netherlands, Gareth Southgate will have been busy doing homework of his own to ensure Yamal is denied the chance to give the Three Lions a schooling in Berlin.

With Yamal turning 17 the day before the final, the Spaniard said the only way he wanted to celebrate his birthday was to ‘win, win, win and win’. It’s up to England to spoil his party.

BACKGROUND

Yamal was born on July 13, 2007 in Esplugues de Llobregat, situated in the Barcelona metropolitan area of Catalonia, Spain. At the time, Rihanna sat atop the charts in the United Kingdom with Umbrella. Sigh.

His Equatorial Guinea-born mother, Sheila Ebana, was a waitress and his Moroccan father, Mounir Nasraou, was a painter. Fatima, Yamal’s grandmother, emigrated to Spain from Morocco in 1988.

In 2010, Yamal moved with his mother from Mataro to Granollers, where he began playing football for local team La Torreta. This is where his god-given talent and deep love of the beautiful game began to cause a stir and truly blossom.

A Barcelona scout spotted Yamal’s raw ability at the age of six and invited the precocious youngster to train at the club’s fabled La Masia, where he would later sign in 2014. The rest, as they say, is history.

FIRST-TEAM BREAKTHROUGH AT BARCELONA

Yamal was widely tipped for superstardom while rising through Barcelona’s youth ranks and made the step up to the club’s Juvenil A team ahead of the 2022/23 season.

In April 2023, the baby-faced winger became Barca’s youngest ever first-team player when he debuted in La Liga at the age of just 15 years, nine months and 16 days, coming on as a late substitute for Gavi in a 4-0 win over Real Betis.

It was Yamal’s one and only appearance for the Catalan giants that season but Xavi made no secret of his sky-high aspirations for Yamal and the attacker established himself as a regular the following campaign.

Last term, Yamal made a total of 50 appearances in all competitions, racking up seven goals and seven assists to become a fan favourite at the Camp Nou – and it’s not hard to see why.

Barcelona’s newly appointed head coach Hansi Flick will no doubt be watching on with interest this summer and licking his lips at the enormous talent he will have at his disposal next term.

RECORD FOR CLUB AND COUNTRY

Yamal scored five goals in his first full season for Barcelona, which is no mean feat for a player who had only just blown out their candles on their 16th birthday cake when the campaign got underway.

He still has a year to wait before he can legally swig an Estrella on La Rambla, for goodness sake. Spanish fans will have done more than enough of that malarky on his behalf over the last month, though.

It should be mentioned that only 22 of Yamal’s league appearances came as starts last season. The winger also chipped in with five assists in the Spanish top flight as Barca finished as runners-up behind Real Madrid.

Just three players, Ilkay Gundogan (13), Raphinha (11) and Robert Lewandowski (9), registered more assists than Yamal (7) in all competitions for the Catalan outfit across the 2023/24 campaign and he was subsequently named La Liga’s Under-23 Player of the Season.

Yamal has carried his club form into international football like a duck to water, notching up three goals and six assists in his opening 13 appearances for Spain. Today, he will make just his tenth start for his country.

All the signs were there as Yamal rose through Spain’s age groups and the Catalonian finished as the joint-top scorer with four goals at last year’s European Under-17 Championship in Hungary.

Yamal matched an incredible La Roja record with his assist to help Spain knock Germany, the tournament hosts, out of their own tournament at the quarter-final stage.

The perfectly weighted cross saw Yamal join an elite club of just four players to register three assists in a single European Championship for Spain. Only Cesc Fabregas, David Silva and Dani Olmo – the man he set up – have reached the milestone previously.

A goal in Berlin would make Yamal the youngest ever scorer in a Euros final, with Pietro Anastasi holding the current record after his volleyed effort in Italy’s 1968 victory over Yugoslavia at the age of 20 years and 64 days.

STYLE OF PLAY

Yamal has a wand of a left foot, as France discovered to their detriment at the Allianz Arena, and his lethal concoction of silky dribbling, deadly accurate passing and raw pace is enough to elite fear in the most hard-nosed, experienced defender.

The teenager has been deployed as as a centre-forward, an attacking midfielder and as a winger, most notably on the right flank, which allows him to cut inside and curl the ball into the far corner.

Lionel Messi comparisons have been inevitable given Yamal’s frightening combination of dancing feet and lightning speed, plus the fact he just so happens to play for Barcelona.

Amid the unavoidable hype, photos of Messi posing with a six-month-old Yamal – part of a 2007 photoshoot at the Camp Nou – have spread like wildfire across social media. Perhaps it was this brush with genius that has propelled him into a similar realm.

Yamal has often cited the eight-time Ballon d’Or winner as a major influence on his own game, along with former Barca star Neymar, and there are undoubtedly shades of both players in his style and mannerisms.

WHAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT YAMAL?

If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

Adrien Rabiot learned the hard way that it’s probably best to just keep one’s mouth shut after he decided to call Yamal out leading into France’s semi-final with Spain.

‘He has a lot of quality. However, it’s always difficult to handle a semi-final in a tournament like this,’ the France international said in the build-up.

‘It’s down to us to put the pressure on him, to not let him be comfortable and to show him that in order to play the final of a Euros, he’ll need to show much more than he has until now.’

Yamal clearly got wind of Rabiot’s comments and took great pleasure in prancing around the midfielder and unleashing an audacious bending strike beyond Mike Maignan to cancel out Randal Kolo Muani’s header opener in Munich.

After his man-of-the-match performance, Yamal needed no second invitation to remind Rabiot of his pre-match remarks, yelling ‘Speak now! Speak now!’, straight down the lens of a nearby TV camera.

It’s difficult to know where to start when it comes to players, team-mates and pundits praising the record-breaking teen, with the likes of Rio Ferdinand, Toni Kroos and Gerard Pique falling over themselves to wax lyrical over his ability.

‘It’s the calmness with which he plays,’ ex-England and Manchester United defender Ferdinand told BBC Sport.

‘He plays like somebody who’s been playing for a long time. He makes quick decisions and he just picks the right pass at the right moment.

‘Nine times out of ten, young players, you see them at some point in the game where they overcook it or overpass it or he’s tried to do too much with it.

‘We’ve not said that once about this kid. Invariably, he makes the right decision nine and a half times out of ten. At 16. The question is, how do you stop him? That’s the conundrum now for his opponents.’

Ahead of Germany’s quarter-final defeat to Spain, Kroos said of Yamal: ‘In recent years players seem to be better now at younger ages, it’s really incredible.

‘Yamal was Barcelona’s most dangerous player last season. We know what he’s capable of and will try to keep him and Nico Williams as quiet as possible.

‘To be that good at the age of 16 is simply unbelievable.’

In an interview with BILD ahead of the European Championship, Spain and Barca legend Pique backed Yamal to go on and ‘define an era’.

‘There is a generational happening in the Euros… new players are emerging,’ he added.

‘Players like Lamine Yamal here in Spain, [Jamal] Musiala in Germany and, in England, they have [Jude] Bellingham.’

Spain head coach De la Fuente, meanwhile, is aware he has a potential ‘genius’ on his hands but has been keen to temper expectations in order to keep Yamal’s ‘feet on the ground’.

‘We saw a touch of genius from a footballer who we all need to take care of,’ he said in the wake of Spain’s semi-final victory.

‘I would like him to work with the same humility, keep his feet on the ground, keep that same maturity that he shows on the pitch.

‘Fundamentally I celebrate that he’s on our team, he’s Spanish, and we hope we can enjoy him for years to come.’