Lamine Yamal was asked about his millimeter passes with the outside of his foot and he replied that all he had to do was press L2 on the game console controller, which would turn his shameless talent into a purely mechanical matter, football into a child’s game and life in a calendar that tears itself off the pages. Everything happens at breakneck speed when the epicenter of the action runs between the feet and head of this boy with the face of a teenager and an adventurous attitude, an almost abusive example of how youth continues to be that divine treasure to which Rubén Darío dedicated one of his most celebrated poems.
Yamal returned from the hells of the infirmary and returned to Flick’s Barça all the virtues that seemed forgotten during the last month of league competition. This is football, a team sport par excellence, a habitat of fragile balances in which the disappearance of a small insect causes the absence of rain. Modernity brings with it brutal tools for the analysis of each match and an excessive obsession with explaining the simplest aspects of the game with a grandiloquence that almost never usually marries with the overwhelming logic that accompanies geniuses. And so, in the midst of advanced statistics, algorithms, heat maps and some poetry, a 17-year-old boy emerges to teach us a new law of football that resembles the old ones: this Barça is a better team with Lamine Yamal over the playing field than without him, as it was in his day with Kubala, with Cruyff, with Ronaldinho, with Messi.
The results are evident, as well as its aesthetic contributions to a sport that feeds on strange fruits, not everything is going to be protein. The physique continues to have its importance at the peak of high performance. Also tactics, but no one’s eyes turn to the sporting discourse of a boy who runs like an ostrich, no matter how exuberant his stilts and even his plumage may seem to us. Or the one who pulls the sled without moving an inch from the course set by his coach. We value the effort and righteousness of many footballers because the world is not full of virtues, but it is the weightlessness and creative impulses of guys like Lamine that connect us with the very root of the game, with that almost childish need to feel amazed, of understanding magic without needing to know the trick, of the simple entertainment of cartoons.
Crude times will also come for him, who right now seems completely immune to the disenchantment of the most mundane setbacks. We see him draw parables with the hard part of support and it seems to us that Jesus Christ is talking about the good shepherd, the wheat and the tares, the mustard seed and even the prodigal son. We delight in their ready-to-wear cuts and embrace idolatry without blinking. Because by blinking you run the risk of missing the next wonder and because the tear that floods the human eye when it remains alert for too long is the same one that flows from the emotion of discovering the improbable.
“Just press L2, I guess,” that was exactly his response. And it is in that inconsequential assumption where part of the secret lies. At certain ages one is not ready for certainties or absolute truths, but assuming one can also reach one’s destination. Lamine Yamal, as it continues along this path, will force us, sooner rather than later, to draw new maps.
