Twenty years apart, and the young one bowed first
Spain beat Argentina in the 2026 World Cup final. Lamine Yamal is Spanish. Asked who the best player of the tournament was, he named a man who lost it.
Movistar put the question to him on Friday. The Barcelona winger did not hesitate over Lionel Messi. “Even if everyone knows he’s the greatest of all time, nobody expected a World Cup as legendary as the one he delivered, in every match, carrying a team all the way to the final,” the 19-year-old said.
Messi was 39 during the tournament. Yamal is 19. The gap is two decades, and it is the teenager going out of his way to salute the veteran.
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A Barca kid talking about his Barca No 10
None of this comes out of nowhere. Yamal is Catalan, raised on Barcelona, raised on Messi in blaugrana. The crowd at the Camp Nou has cast him as the successor for years now and he has never once flinched from the comparison.
“Argentina have good players, but Leo was always there in the big moments,” he went on. “For me, he was the best player at the World Cup for everything he stands for and everything he produced.”
Then a line that explains why Spain still watches Messi the way it does: “Nobody expected a player Leo’s age, even if it was Leo, to do things at that level.”
A strange week to be praising someone else
The Ballon d’Or vote is live. Yamal is one of the declared favourites, and only days ago he was explaining why the PSG contingent had not earned it.
Now he is handing the summer to Messi. Support for the Argentine’s candidacy has quietly grown in Spain since the final. Yamal cast no public vote. He simply said out loud whose tournament it was.
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