Sometimes it is a matter of genius: the curling left foot that tore France apart in the semi-final of the last European Championship, the moment that sent Spain towards another continental crown. Sometimes it is simply a matter of being there, at the right time, in the right place: the American World Cup two summers later, where Lamine Yamal is just another piece in a Spain side completing a second triumph for the ages. And asking for more would have been asking too much. The Barcelona star arrived after a serious injury had placed his tournament in doubt, returning only at the last possible moment and still far from his sharpest, far from those bursts that make him different. One goal in the group stage against Saudi Arabia, and that is enough. Yet at 19, no footballer in the world has a brighter road ahead. On the pitch and beyond it. For Yamal, there is only one missing piece: the Barcelona coronation, the Champions League that will come sooner or later – there is too much time ahead for it not to. And still, he has already won what many of the game’s greatest names never even managed to touch, doing so with a speed and timing that feels almost unfair. This is why those working in the world of sports marketing see a World Cup victory at such an age as something capable of changing everything: “Lamine is no longer football’s future. He is the present.”
A player who has already become a global business, with a scale that could soon overtake Mbappé, Messi and CR7. Not because of some pointless debate about who is greater on the pitch – there is no need to go there. Simply because timing matters. Yamal has arrived in football at the precise moment when the sport has become an economic universe without limits, with revenues rising and numbers still moving upwards. According to Sportico, Yamal earned 43 million dollars last season through salary, sponsorships and image rights. Cristiano Ronaldo reached similar figures only in 2012–13, when he was 28. Already a superstar, already at the centre of football’s global marketplace, with an influence on the game far beyond what Lamine has built so far – and naturally so. The difference is the era. Yamal belongs to the 2020s. Go further back, through previous generations – Ronaldo Nazário, for example, who never went beyond 25 million dollars a year even after adjusting for purchasing power – and the distance only grows. Yamal is already a sponsor’s dream: Adidas, Visa, Coca-Cola, Powerade, Konami, Beats by Dre, Oppo, UNICEF, American Eagle. A World Cup won this early could produce an effect even greater than Mbappé’s – the teenager who scored in the 2018 final and suddenly became the face of football’s next generation.
Because Lamine has already won a European Championship. Because he plays for Barcelona – a club with a global pull that PSG, even that PSG, has never quite matched. Because football’s commercial machine has grown so large that it now shapes the careers of its brightest stars as much as the game itself. As industry observers put it: “The biggest brands are not signing an athlete for one campaign. They are investing in a teenager who could define the next three World Cups.” It is already quite something. Without even wondering what else Spain might still go on to win.