Sports expert Erkka V. Lehtola confused in Portugal last winter.
The head coach of Finland’s under-17 national team was watching the tournament of four top European countries. There were many potential players on the field, but one of the boys from Spain’s team born in 2006 stood out.
– I thought, oh my God, what’s really weighing on the right side? Unconscious guy! I also noticed that he is a year younger than the others, Lehtola recalls.
– It’s rare among the very best to get the feeling that someone is still at a completely different level than the others.
However, that’s the way it is. Spain has a new diamond again. Lamine Yamal is football’s latest “youngest” – i.e. legendary record breaker who plays at the top before he can drive a car.
The winger represents Barcelona. In less than a year, he has risen from the promise to the representative team. Against all odds, he is also in the Spanish men’s European Championship team.
When the final match of the tournament is played, Yamal is 17 years and one day old.
– His ability to make decisions is exceptional. Of course, he is not perfect, he is 16. However, the kind of mark he leaves on the field at such a young age tells what kind of player he can become. His development this season has been sickening, the Barcelona head coach Xavi said in May.
A single second on the field in these games makes Yamali the youngest player in the history of the European Championships, with a difference of about eight months. Even that doesn’t seem to be enough To Luis de la Fuente.
The prodigy is the culmination of internationalism in its background. Yamali’s father is from Morocco and mother from Equatorial Guinea. He himself was born in Esplugues, known as a celebrity residence in Catalonia, and lived as a child in Rocafonda, just over half an hour from Barcelona. He represents Spain, although the Moroccan Football Federation was keeping an eye on the situation.
Yamal joined the Barcelona academy at the age of 15 from the small club La Torreta. The club had supported the pursuit of low-income players like Yamali, but then he hit Barca’s radar.
Barcelona organized a car ride for their selected academy players to training. Spanish clubs are forced to include a buyout price in their contracts, so Yamali’s first professional contract was priced at a billion euros.
More games, harder games
Barcelona’s famous player academy La Masia is doing well, although the representative team has struggled with many financial and sporting challenges.
Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Sergio Busquets, Alejandro Balden and players like Yamal.
Gavi, still growing and developing top promise, is only 19 years old. Still, even after him, new, even younger products have already entered the national team.
There are more, but unfortunately their journey to the top serves as a warning example. Yamal is also aware of that. He has also been taken to the Olympics at the end of the summer.
The physical demands of football are tougher than ever. Still, the number of different competitions and matches is only increasing.
In the future, for example, eight matches will be played in the Champions League in the first round instead of the current six. The World Cup tournament for club teams will expand from seven teams to 32 next year and will be played in the summer.
The same applies to national teams: the number of teams in prestigious competitions has been increased. The World Cup in Qatar, played in the middle of the season next year, is still paying a price.
If Yamal continues to the Paris Olympics, the player’s season will last at least until the end of July. Spain will play its final Olympic group game on July 30, the same day that Barcelona will already play its first training game of the upcoming season in the United States – 401 days after Yamal came on as a substitute last July in the first training game of the season.
There are no proper breaks, not to mention holidays.
– The players are pushed into a tight spot. When you’re young, you can handle more and recover faster. At the same time, you have reached the world you have dreamed of, and the desire to be involved as much as possible is strong. You may not even recognize your own symptoms or limits, and everything is so attractive that it’s hard to hit the brakes, says Erkka V. Lehtola.
– At some point, all the physical load also hits the inside of the head and starts to turn into a mental load. It’s unlikely to get any lighter if we talk about the “new Messi”.
“The machine grinds rougher all the time”
Born in 2002 Ansu Fati was Barcelona’s teenage sensation in the late 2010s. He made it to the representative team in the fall of 2020. A couple of months later, he got injured, and a knee injury kept him on the sidelines for nine months. In the following season, it was the turn of the hamstring and a three-month absence.
A year younger Peter quickly took a place in Barcelona’s midfield and played 53 matches in his rookie season. After that, he went to the European Championships, then the Olympics. In less than a year, Pedri played 73 matches. Repeated hamstring injuries followed.
Only 19 years old, Gavi has been playing in Barcelona since 2021. In 2022, he was awarded as the best young player in the world. From his debut in August 2021 to last autumn, Gavi played 111 matches for Barca – more than anyone else.
Last fall, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee in a national match. A serious injury ended the young player’s season and will also keep him out of the European Championships.
– Usually, the load slowly accumulates over the course of a year or a half, and it’s not like one or two bull weeks will do wonders. It builds up gradually and may be noticed too late. If you ask young people, they rarely say they can’t do it or don’t like it. They want to play all the time, says Lehtola.
The British Professional Players Association has estimated that the best players may play up to 86 matches next season. The amount of stress is especially questionable in young people, when their physical characteristics are just developing and the stress should be gradual rather than explosive.
A study by Fifpro, the international umbrella organization of football players, last year reported that, for example, the French captain For Kylian Mbappé accumulated 48 percent more playing minutes than his compatriot by the age of 24 For Thierry Henry.
– The machine grinds harder all the time, and more events accumulate for the best players. Breaks and recovery have been tightened. At the same time, the game has become more demanding. Although Henry already played in the modern era, now we go even harder, says Lehtola.
Fati, Pedri and Gavi each rose to the role of Barcelona’s next star player. However, Yamal has already been painted much more at a young age, even the position of the front picture of the entire national team.
Both Barcelona’s Xavi and Spain’s de la Fuente have mentioned patience in their speeches, but then rushed to extol the ready-to-go super promise.
De la Fuente’s sentence combining “temperance” and “Maradona” was an example of the wildest end. The head coaches of major clubs are not always the best at evaluating the best of an athlete, especially if the price of composure is counted in victories.
“We have to take care of him because he is still a child”
Yamal has been with his parents for at least a couple of years since he was 13, and in the national team since he was 15. On Barcelona’s traditional and carefully honed player path, he exceptionally skipped a couple of age groups and took a shortcut to the oldest juniors.
– He belongs to the group of extremely talented boys who have the ability to play at any level. He has all the qualities. Of course we have to take care of him because he’s still a kid, an ex-player coaching Barcelona juniors Rafa Marquez said last year to Mundo Deportivo.
In the winter, Barcelona needed width on the right wing. In his very first training match, Yamal scored three goals against Tottenham.
Show spots started to come during the series as well, and the performances didn’t stay in practice matches either. Three times in Barcelona’s starting line-up was enough for the first call-up to the A national team. There is no end in sight. Yamal ended up playing 50 matches in Barcelona’s shirt this season, scoring seven goals and assisting ten.
This was hardly Barcelona’s original plan. The club played themselves into the bag, when good displays together with the player situation led to a bigger role than intended. The packages were opened ahead of time and when a diamond was revealed in the package, the box was no longer dared to be stuffed into the drawing box.
– We have received offers of 200 million euros from players like Lamine Yamali and refused. We trust the boy and he is the future of the team, the president of Barcelona Joan Laporta told Marca in Marchunderscoring crushing expectations.
The left-footed Yamal is a full-back’s nightmare. Fast and agile, technically stylish ball tamer. Even a small space is enough for dangerous concentrations, and most of Yamali’s most endearing moments have been based on setting up goals.
Space is everything for a player who is still shaky, so Yamal prefers to play as wide as possible to make room for himself already.
Through the most important development targets – especially fighting power and other physical qualities – he could grow into the best winger on the planet. The question, however, is what kind of conditions he will eventually get to develop these qualities.
Most future top players of Yamali’s age are still years away from a place at the top of Europe.
Exhaustion has flashed on the youngster’s face numerous times already during the season, and the looming stress rush of the summer does not at least lighten the rhythm.