Luck, chance or perhaps fate put a little Lamine Yamal, barely five months old, in the arms of Barcelona star Leo Messi 17 years ago. A charity photo for the newspaper’s calendar Sport The 2008 photo taken in collaboration with the Barça Foundation and UNICEF has sparked a frenzy. “Lamine was very friendly. He won Messi over with two smiles,” confesses Joan Monfort, the creator of the photo that has revolutionised social media almost two decades later. Oriol Canals, then head of marketing for the sports newspaper, was present there. “He was more impressed by the baby than the camera,” recalls Canals of the shy Leo Messi, who was just beginning to stand out after making his debut with the first team four years earlier. A brief memory at the Camp Nou, with a rubber duck that sparked smiles and a more than fortuitous encounter.
End of 2007. Sport The club organised the second edition of a charity calendar in which each month a Barça player posed for a photo with children. The sports media, in agreement with the club, chose FC Barcelona players to take part in the project. Between October and November, the photographs were taken – normally one footballer per day – in the away dressing room at Camp Nou. Canals and Monfort prepared the set and waited for the players to appear. In the first edition, the planning was dominated by haste. “We had the idea for a long time. But the first calendar was made in five days. It was crazy, and also with all the particularities of the players,” recalls Canals. At that time, the children who took part in the photo sessions were acquaintances or family members.
The second time around, it was different. “The next time we had more time, we asked UNICEF to provide us with the children,” Canals recalls. Mounir Nasraoui and Sheila Ebana, Lamine’s parents and residents of the Rocafonda neighbourhood (Mataró), decided to enter their son into the draw for the NGO’s initiative. Perhaps it was luck or perhaps it was fate. Lamine was one of the chosen ones. And perhaps it was a coincidence that he appeared in the arms of Leo Messi. Just as 17 years later, the young footballer’s father found the photos again and posted them on his social networks. The image has gone viral.
Days of hard work, last-minute changes and a lot of waiting, Canals remembers. On one of those, Leo appeared. Although they were not very long sessions, the Argentine footballer was not there for a short time. “I think it was after a training session. Messi was extremely shy, somewhat tense and very cautious, and it even cost him to pick up the child. Or so I perceived. But when Joan took out a duck, they started to laugh and everything was easier. Now, with three children and twenty years older, it would be different,” Canals explains. Behind the camera, concentrated on his work and these days with his memory in tow, was Monfort. The photographer did not remember these snapshots until a colleague from Sportwhere he worked at the time, wrote to him on Thursday night and sent him the image. “I didn’t see that it was Lamine, it could have been any child. At that moment I saw that he was with Messi, who at that time was not yet what he is now,” Monfort emphasises.
“It was a complicated photo. Messi used to be even more shy than he is now. But he is very professional and made it easy. He was calm, patient, happy. Holding the child was not his speciality, but he did it very well,” the photographer confesses over the phone. In front of him, Messi with the very young Lamine in his arms and in a bathtub. The idea came up the previous afternoon while he was thinking about how a baby just a few months old and the footballer should interact. Perhaps an idea as fortuitous, or consensual, as the meeting at that time of a promising footballer and now a star, and the player who is now showing promise and who is being one of the revelations of the Euro Cup held in Germany. Monfort was bathing his daughter. “Why don’t I bring the basin and let him bathe her?” he asked himself. “The image was then in my hands,” he recalls. He brought the small bathtub – he doesn’t remember, as a result of the passing of the years and the number of photographs behind him, if it was his own or he went to buy one – and got to work.
Lamine’s mother was there. “Caution” and “shy,” Canals recalls. Her presence “helped a lot,” Monfort adds. “It was a coincidence of life. At that moment you can’t imagine what it will be like almost 20 years later. It’s a conjunction of things that only happens once,” the photographer confesses. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing this weekend, in which he has had to recap and look back 17 years to an innocent coincidence that brought together destiny.
You can follow Morning Express Sports onFacebook andXor sign up here to receiveour weekly newsletter.
