The most surprising aspect of watching teenage sensation Lamine Yamal play for the first time is not his technique, although he accepts and moves the ball with grace and effortlessness, eyes up, exploring the changing shapes of the game around him.
Nor his lightning speed, although UEFA’s speed gun clocked him at 31.6 km/h during his impressive Euro debut and a blistering second-half counterattack sparked panic in the Croatian ranks.
Yamal, who will be in the spotlight again when they face Italy in Gelsenkirchen on Thursday night, is supremely talented and yet the real secret to making this abundance of natural talent work in elite international football at the age of 16 is his temperament. He does the simple things well, a blessing for any coach.
Think back to Cristiano Ronaldo’s arrival in Manchester in 2003. At 18, he was desperate to show the world his extravagant talent in a series of step routines, which he eliminated from his game as he became one of the truly great machines. soccer goal
Yamal doesn’t seem the least bit interested in showing off. He is composed and his attitude is professional when he could be forgiven for being different. He glided through the game in Berlin and rarely made a bad decision. Like being content with throwing a pass to winger Dani Carvajal or throwing a short pass towards Pedri and moving for the return while he had to grab the ball and run towards Josko Gvardiol.
Lamine Yamal’s greatest attribute is not his rhythm or his technique but his temperament
The 16-year-old became the youngest player to play in a European Championship against Croatia.
Yamal has none of the superfluous deceptions and boasts of a young Cristiano Ronaldo (Pictured: Ronaldo in 2003)
The fact that he could do any of these things is what made it difficult for Gvardiol. Yamal is not easy to read. Despite being a predominantly left-footed right winger, he has the confidence to attack from the outside, but he is selective and has the ability with the ball to threaten one action and carry out another.
The teasing cross for Spain’s third against Croatia, deflected from the right with his left foot for Carvajal, had echoes of Chris Waddle on Sheffield Wednesday, unstoppable even when everyone present knew exactly what he wanted to do. However, this was the ultimate Waddle, master of his craft after the years in Marseille. At the age of 16, Waddle had not even joined Tow Law Town.
Yamal’s advanced maturity is the most surprising aspect of his game. None of this is likely to surprise those who have followed his extraordinary rise to prominence in Spain.
Yamal is a native of Rocafonda, an urbanized residential neighborhood in Mataró, a city of about 120,000 inhabitants located 20 miles off the northeast coast of Barcelona.
His father Mounir is from Morocco and his mother Sheila from Equatorial Guinea (he wears each country’s flag sewn onto his personalized boots) and he maintains strong ties to his home, where his uncle’s bakery is now adorned with a graffiti mural of Yamal doing his characteristic goal celebration, which consists of forming the numbers three, zero and four with his fingers to represent the Rocafonda postal code 304.
It’s a proudly multicultural, yet private neighborhood with little to shout about until Yamal put it on the map by breaking a series of records in Spanish football, since then journalists have regularly flocked to find out its backstory.
How he honed his skills on a concrete field. How he was always shy and reserved but smiling and happy. How he ‘does not seek recognition’. How it didn’t take long for those with an eye for football to realize there was something special about the boy.
One look at seven convinced a local headhunter to call someone in Barcelona. One test and he was already packing his bags for La Masia, the acclaimed academy where he houses his most precious talent. A cameo in the first team and there was no way to get him out.
Despite being a predominantly left-footed right winger, he has the confidence to attack from the outside, but remains selective when doing so.
The teenager’s performance was reminiscent of Chris Waddle (pictured: Waddle in Marseille in 1991).
Yamal underlines his strong roots in his hometown, forming the numbers three, zero and four with his fingers to represent Rocafonda’s zip code 304.
Yamal underlines his strong roots in his hometown, forming the numbers three, zero and four with his fingers to represent Rocafonda’s zip code 304.
In April last year, Yamal made his debut for Barcelona at the age of 15 years and 290 days, becoming the youngest to play for the club in more than a century.
Inevitably, there were instant comparisons with Lionel Messi, a prodigiously talented left-footed striker whom coach the players most likely to win the games.
Yamal had played 50 games last season for his club, almost 3,000 minutes, raising concerns among those who have seen Ansu Fati, Gavi and Pedri affected by injury problems once exposed to a heavy workload at an elite level. when they were teenagers.
Still, with Morocco circling, Luis de la Fuente gave him his debut for Spain in September, being the youngest footballer to represent the country at 16 and 57 days old, scoring on his debut against Georgia.
‘Touched by a magic wand’ was De La Fuente’s assessment, which has remained fixed because it sums it all up so beautifully. There is something magical about him. It was on Saturday that he threw down another challenge without hesitation.
Yamal dealt with it without problems and more challenges will come and they will surely be more difficult because once identified as a serious danger, video analysis teams will spend hours poring over replays to stop him.
Yamal’s debut for Barcelona came at the age of 15 years and 290 days, the youngest at the club in over a century.
Luis De La Fuente described Yamal as ‘touched by a magic wand’ when choosing him for his debut at 16 and 57 days
“Yamal receives the ball high up the pitch and gets the ball to his feet,” Italian coach Luciano Spalletti said ahead of tonight’s Group B match. “The two wingers like to play one on one and go from back to front very quickly.
“One issue when we dominate the game is to be in the correct position on the ball, because they are absolutely lethal on the counterattack.”
Jorge Mendes wasted no time and rushed to sign him with his former agent Iván de la Peña, a former Spanish international. Money-making opportunities come with another kind of pressure: the pressure to profit and make money while the sun shines.
With fame and fortune comes another set of challenges, although La Masia graduates seem better adapted to all of that than most.
In fact, Yamal admitted at the start of the tournament that he intends to focus on his studies during the downtime while at the Euros. “I brought my homework here because I’m in fourth year,” he said. ‘I also have online classes and they are going well. I hope the teacher doesn’t get angry with me.’
Then there are the physical tests that come with playing elite men’s soccer on a young, still-developing body. Yamal said he gained eight kilos in weight and grew two centimeters over the course of last season.
Yamal even brought his homework to the tournament and admitted that he has “online classes”
Spain will face Luciano Spalletti’s Italy on Thursday night in a fight for first place in Group B.
There are a lot of moving parts to survive if Yamal is to thrive and produce the stellar career that seems inevitable when we see him so coolly step onto a stage like Euro 2024. Nothing is certain, but his skill is there for all to see and his attitude . He appears to be healthy.
There’s nothing wrong with being excited about what happens next.