When Lamine Yamal scores he usually celebrates by making the number 304 with his fingers — they are the last three digits of the postcode of Rocafonda in Mataro just outside Barcelona, where he grew up.
On Wednesday night in the Olympic Stadium he forgot the tribute to his old neighbourhood — there was too much going on.
He had just scored arguably his greatest goal yet on the occasion of his 100th match for Barca, with his team reeling from conceding twice in the first 21 minutes of their Champions League semi-final with Inter Milan.
The teenager flashed a grin to the stands and then appeared to point back to the Barcelona half as he made his way there for the restart. There was a tie to salvage and he was leading the mission.
The boy with the golden hair is heading for a golden ball sooner rather than later. He looked like the best player in the world on Wednesday, as he has done all season as Barcelona threaten to pull a treble out of the ashes of their financial meltdown.
The Spanish Cup has been won, they are four points clear in LaLiga with five games to play and on Tuesday in Milan they will seek to secure a place in the Champions League final.
Lamine Yamal usually celebrates by making the number 304, a tribute to his hometown of Rocafondo in Mataro
But on Wednesday night he forgot his tribute after scoring in stunning fashion on one of the biggest stages there is
The teenager celebrated his 100th Barcelona game – at just 17 years old – in emphatic style
A 3-3 draw at home in the first leg is not ideal but Yamal plays with the same nerveless bravado away as he does at home. Barca have beaten Real Madrid 4-0 and Atletico Madrid 4-2 on the road this season and he scored in both games. The San Siro will not intimidate him.
‘I left fear behind in the park at Mataro,’ he said this week in another reference to where he grew up. ‘You have to think about enjoying yourself on the pitch. If you do that there is no pressure.’
If Yamal does win the Ballon d’Or this year, he will do it four years before Lionel Messi managed to lift the first of his eight.
Being ahead of the Messi curve will be nothing new. Messi scored his first goal for Barcelona 20 years ago yesterday, aged 17 years and 10 months.
At the same age Yamal has already played 100 times for Barcelona. He has won a Euros with Spain, scoring that brilliant equaliser last summer against France in the semi-final, and has been involved in 68 goals (26 goals and 42 assists) between club and country. Messi had not yet made his debut, much less scored for Argentina, at the same age.
When Messi scored his first Barca goal he climbed on the back of assist man Ronaldinho, and in those first seasons there was a sense the Brazilian was the Argentine’s big brother.
There is no Ronaldinho figure for Yamal — he is the leader of this team and already seen as a cultural icon too. His importance goes beyond football.
He is the focus of a documentary called Revolution 304 — another nod to that postcode — all about his childhood neighbourhood. The streets are full of murals in his honour after his success with Spain last summer and kids swarm around the cameras doing his 304 celebration.
Earlier this week the 17-year-old claimed he had ‘left fear behind’ in the park in his hometown
Where Lionel Messi (left) had Ronaldinho to learn from, there is no such figure for Yamal
Local teacher Ignasi Mangue says: ‘I can think of very few young sportsmen who have made this sense of belonging to the place they grew up in such a big part of their identity.’
Son of Moroccan father Mounir Nasraoui and Equatorial Guinean mum Sheila Ebana, Yamal is a symbol for the fight against discrimination on the pitch and in society, and he has accepted the role with the same calm as he has the call to be Barca’s talisman.
His competitive nature has helped him with the latter and it was on display at the end of the draw with Inter.
Team-mates surrounded him to give him a commemorative shirt for his 100th match while several tugged at his face to try to force a smile, but he was having none of it knowing that conceding three goals at home had made next week’s second leg more difficult.
He recovered his smile for the post-match television interview with Thierry Henry, charming everyone in English and Spanish and promising Henry his shirt at the league ‘Clasico’ against Real Madrid on May 11, provided Henry brings an Arsenal one.
Will we ever see him wear an English club shirt competitively? He has taken English classes to complement the finishing of his formal education, but Barcelona president Joan Laporta only just survived losing Messi to Miami.
Neither he nor any subsequent club president would survive losing Yamal.
The kid with the braces on his teeth will come of age very soon. His contract runs out next year but it will be renewed once he has turned 18 on July 13.
Joan Laporta only just survived losing Messi to Inter Miami – his aim now will be to keep Yamal
Yamal has already won the Copa del Rey this season as one of this three club trophies at Barca
His salary will increase from £1.7million to something closer to the £25.5m paid to Barca’s top earner Robert Lewandowski. Yamal’s buy-out clause will be set at £850m. Adidas made sure they signed him to a 10-year deal after he won the Euros. They did so with help from Messi, who sent a ‘come and join our family’ message in a promotional video.
Now Barcelona need to make sure they, too, tie him down for the long term.
Agent Jorge Mendes has already begun negotiations and although Barcelona are still operating in a financial straitjacket after years of mismanagement, it would be far costlier to lose Yamal than to keep him. As the world witnessed on Wednesday night, he is their golden ticket.
Barca were blessed with Messi for so long and now they sense that once again the best player in the world is theirs.
