World Cup: Messi-Yamal’s first meeting goes viral again on the eve of final

Photos of a 19-year-old Lionel Messi cradling and bathing a five-month-old Lamine Yamal first resurfaced two years ago during Euro 2024, captivating football fans worldwide. Now, as defending champions Argentina prepare to face Spain in the World Cup final in two days, the iconic images are once again breaking the internet.

Call it serendipity, but the first meeting between football’s reigning deity and one of the biggest challengers to the throne took place 19 years ago, in 2007, in the away dressing room at Camp Nou. Messi was just one World Cup away from becoming a global icon and was beginning to make his mark for Barcelona. Lamine’s parents — Morocco-born Mounir Nasraoui and Equatorial Guinea-born Sheila Ebana — got the opportunity to have a photo session of their eldest child with a “Barcelona first-team player”.

Lamine’s parents had entered a raffle run by Catalan newspaper Sport in partnership with Barcelona’s shirt sponsor and international children’s charity UNICEF, and Lamine’s photo was among the winners. “I had no idea it was Lamine in the photo until one of my friends called me in 2024 and told me his father had posted it on Instagram,” said Joan Monfort, the photographer who captured the timeless images.

Recalling Messi’s photoshoot, Monfort told the BBC in an interview: “Messi is a really introverted guy, very timid and shy. He came into the dressing room and suddenly had to take these photos with a little baby — not even a kid, a proper baby — and his face changed as if he had no idea what to do.”

“It is difficult for a young man, but Lamine was a very happy, smiley little baby. His mum Sheila helped us. She was a young girl, and they were a very poor family, but they were very nice to work with,” he recalled. By his 19th birthday, Messi had scored 11 career goals and won La Liga and the UEFA Champions League once each.

Yamal, who turned 19 on Monday, has already scored a remarkable 56 goals and won La Liga three times, along with the Copa del Rey once and Euro 2024.

Incidentally, Lamine is not his surname but the second of his two given names. His full name is Lamine Yamal Naraoui Ebana, and he wears the first two names on the back of his shirts for both Barcelona and Spain — a tribute to two people who supported his family around the time of his birth.

He grew up in Rocafonda, a working-class neighbourhood in Mataró, 20 miles north of Barcelona. The area was developed in the 1960s to house migrants from other regions of Spain. As those residents began moving to more affluent areas, migrants from other countries arrived in the 1990s.

If you didn’t know why Lamine celebrates some of his goals by making a 3-0-4 gesture with his fingers, it is a reference to Rocafonda’s postcode. “What my mother has done, what my father has done, I couldn’t have done that for anyone who is not my child,” Lamine told El País earlier in the tournament.