Lamine Yamal is ‘better than Messi’

As Inter Milan defenders trooped off the Barcelona pitch, exhausted, they were still able to gather themselves for a common sentiment.

“He’s better than Lionel Messi.”

You don’t have to ask who the “he” is. One Inter player was so taken aback by Lamine Yamal that he was immediately messaging people with that exact line. They now have to figure out how to limit him for the second leg.

Yamal already looks like he can almost deliver Barcelona to the Champions League final on his own. He is a unique talent, that is symbolised in how he tries unique things.

The performance in that remarkable 3-3 first leg was so good that it’s almost impossible not to reach for precedent, and compare to teenage talents that have also just seized the world on such a stage.

There was Messi himself for the same club against Chelsea in 2005-06, and Wayne Rooney against France at Euro 2004. While such comparisons are entirely understandable because it’s an attempt to put rational context on a performance that simply inspires joyous exclamations, they’re also almost as futile as trying to stop Yamal.

Really, there’s just nothing in football like a young talent doing this. It’s the awe of what is happening and the promise of what might be next. You are witnessing something special.

Of course, this is hardly an “announcement” either.

We are talking about a teenager who was one of the stars of Spain’s Euro 2024 victory, having scored an outstanding goal in the semi-final, before setting up the first in the final. People knew what was coming. The point is what is now being delivered.

If it obviously wasn’t an announcement game, though, it was an ascendancy game.

There was that sense of Yamal going from precocious talent to dominant star – already. Another level. You only had to look at how Barcelona were trying to give him the ball at every possible opportunity.

So, before his 18th birthday, he’s repeatedly offering something that football hadn’t previously seen in its 150-year history. And this was all after an expressive run that would otherwise elevate the standard of a goal on its own. This is not a player to be told to just play a possession pass in a positional game.

That joyous pure dribbling similarly produced an individual highlight reel that many players would be proud to have from an entire career.

As has often been the case with greats – like Pele’s shot from the halfway line – one of the most jaw-dropping moments was a near miss. Yamal sent Federico Dimarco careering into the wrong direction with one deft twist of his foot, before then smashing a shot that Yann Sommer turned onto the crossbar. Again, the only possible response was exclamation. Yamal repeatedly displayed this extraordinary capacity to open the entire pitch from the tightest of spaces.

There was then that second-half chip onto the top of the bar. The instinctive interpretation as it was happening was that it was a mishit cross. That was only because Yamal was trying something that fell outside football’s usual expectations and parameters.

He was seeing openings that no one else could, and then executing it in a way no one else could.

Many of these words were of course used to describe Messi himself over the years, and none of this is to say that Yamal is going to be better.

He has already done a lot more at the same age, but that is because Yamal is more physically developed than Messi was at the same point. The one concern now is being overplayed as he still matures, but how do you bench a player like this? The rationale in this instance has to actually be to look at Messi, and how he was able to evolve into the most complete player of all time.

What is maybe most remarkable with the Messi parallels is that the same club has enjoyed this in the same way, two decades on. Other clubs almost have this feeling that they don’t deserve it. Those within the game are keen to point out, however, that Barcelona are one giant club that will always bring through young players, no matter the circumstances. There remains a purity to La Masia, despite all the other controversies surrounding the club.

Yamal is going to bail Barcelona out of holes off the pitch, just as he does on it, given their huge financial issues. They were already deep in debt, with Joan Laporta re-elected as club president, when Yamal was just a whisper in 2021. They now have the game’s new great star, a commercial powerhouse, even if that feels entirely the wrong way to look at it. Those are the concerns of modern football, but this is a player of unprecedented pure talent.

By the summer of 2022, as he grew that bit more, senior figures in football were starting to message each other. “Barcelona have another.”

Yes, they do. We’re already at that point where you barely have to say his name, because people instantly know who you are talking about.

Except, Yamal is clearly going to dominate discussion for a decade. He has already dominated one leg of a Champions League semi-final.