Will Lamine Yamal Succeed Lionel Messi At Fifa World Cup 2026

Last March, Lamine Yamal posted a picture of a word file on a laptop, the dimming lights from Barcelona’s fading night flickering in the background. The laptop’s screen and background are black, The only visible words are the title of the file: “Chapter 1: My Inner Abyss,” and the opening words: “I would like to be what everyone wants me to be.”

The world wondered at the cause of his melancholy. He was 18, a star already, a European Championship winner, a multiple league champion with a mantlepiece stacked with trophies of personal glory, a millionaire, an inspiration for millions of migrant children in Spain’s nondescript backyards.

But despair was gnawing inside. A sports hernia had afflicted him at the start of the season. It continued to haunt him. Towards the end of the season, it recurred, putting his World Cup participation in jeopardy at one stage. He had logged in nearly 8,000 hours of football before turning 18; the club and country blamed each other for mismanaging his workload.

Maybe, Yamal felt burned out; maybe, the implacable burden of being painted the best player in the world crushed him. But the reason for his melancholia, he said after brightening his mood with a hat-trick against Villarreal – his first in the league, was not meeting his own expectations. “I wasn’t happy on the pitch and I think you could tell. I didn’t feel like smiling on the pitch,” he admitted.

The numbers are glittering for a self-evaluated bad season. Yamal scored 24 goals, half of them cutting from the left and flashing his willowy yet rubbery left leg towards the goal, making humiliation-GIFs and memes out of defenders. He assisted in 18 goals in just 45 games. Yet, he was dejected, because the standards he has set himself are higher. He is too young and unpretentious to feel that he is already great.

But he knows what greatness looks like; if not, there are men and objects around him, every blade of grass at Nou Camp and corners of the dressing room, to tell him how footballing greatness looks. It measures five feet seven inches, but its stature and scale are immeasurable. The shadow of Lionel Messi casts itself on his spiritual heir from Barcelona to North America, where Yamal strides out for the biggest tournament yet in his life.

The moment Lionel Messi strolled in as a substitute in Argentina’s 6-0 rout of Serbia and Montenegro at the 2006 World Cup, the only question that mattered was when he would hoist the World Cup and fulfill the purpose of his footballing life. The Argentine had to wait till his fifth tournament to do it, wore the heaviest burden and anguish for 16 years, endured heartbreaks, suffered criticisms and injuries, retired several times, and saw the moment nearly stolen by Kylian Mbappe.

Yamal has already helped Spain win the European Championship, not least with his incredulous strike against France in the semifinal in Munich, a strike barged into football’s consciousness. But it’s the World Cup that would define him, one that would trench his legacy. “I have lifted it a thousand times, in my room or when we won a match at the sports centre in my neighborhood,” he jokes in an interview with the Spanish Football Federation. He was referring to a replica trophy in his uncle Abdul’s bakery in their hometown Rocafonda.

His days on the streets are long gone; his journey from Rocafonda to Nou Camp was swift. But the sceptre of expectations and the anticipation of the magical will be suffocating, as it was with Messi, his idol Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo. Every step he takes will be watched and dissected; his victories glorified, his failures criticised. He becomes a plot device in himself.

Yamal has a lightness that great sportsmen have, a frictionless pull to the arclights. It’s not the exuberant bravado of late-teenage that rings in him, but a preternatural awareness of his gifts. He is not worried about what the world thinks of him. “My only enemy is myself, I want to get better than myself,” he once told Marca.

Yamal possesses not only a magic wand of a left foot but a discernible heart that embellishes his aura. He has conquered Spain and Europe. Now, to the world.