NEWYou can now listen to Pakinomist articles!
After a 2-1 win over England, defending champions Argentina booked their place in the World Cup final against European champions Spain, setting up a generational match between Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal.
Although Sunday’s final in New Jersey is the first time the 39-year-old Argentine veteran and the 19-year-old Spanish winger have played against each other, it is not their first real meeting.
The duo’s history goes back almost two decades, when a 20-year-old Messi first crossed paths with an infant Yamal during a promotional photo shoot in Barcelona.
At the end of 2007, a charity raffle organized by the Spanish sports newspaper Diario Sport and the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF, Yamal’s family earned a place in a promotional photo shoot with a young Lionel Messi.
The raffle offered local families in Catalonia the opportunity to take part in a campaign calendar photo shoot with professional footballers from FC Barcelona. The family of Lamine Yamal, who was only six months old at the time, won one of the raffles.
The resulting photo session took place inside the Camp Nou stadium dressing room. A twenty-year-old Lionel Messi, then establishing himself as a key player for Barcelona, was paired with the infant Lamine Yamal.
The photo session included Messi holding Yamal in a blue plastic baby bathtub. At the time of filming, the contestants had no connection other than the raffle and the images were archived after publication in the 2008 charity calendar.
A picture from the shoot went viral after it was posted on Instagram by Yamal’s father, Mounir Nasraoui, along with the caption: “The beginning of two legends” after Euro 2024.
Almost 20 years after that photo shoot, the baby from the picture and the legend himself are destined to meet on the international stage.
The connection between the two athletes extends beyond their shared history in Barcelona and will now reach the biggest stage in sport, the World Cup final.
