Pau Victor, 22 years old, a boy who had not even made his debut in the First Division, was the most veteran player on the Barça bench at the Estadio de la Cerámica. On the pitch, there were no grey hairs either. Sergi Domínguez (19), Gerard Martín (22), Pablo Torre (21), Pedri (21), Marc Casadó (21) and of course, Lamine Yamal (17). The previous Sunday, in Montilivi, the boy approached Héctor Fort (18) and pretended to give him a cigarette with his hands. He had just scored two goals, but in his head, he was on the street, in Rocafonda dribbling a dog – that’s how he learned to dribble, he said in France Football —, making fun of his teammate for not giving it to Lewandowski. “He smoked it,” he had to explain later to the Pole (35 years old), who could be his father and who looked like he didn’t understand anything, because some things are only understood by those who are old enough to experience them.
The average age of Barça players is 23.9 years, the second lowest behind Valencia. The club has three of the youngest players in the league (Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsí and Marc Bernal). In an environment like this, the codes are different. And that’s the beauty of it. Lamine is a normal boy, born in Rocafonda, a poor neighbourhood in Mataró where many, like him, and like a large part of Spanish society (one child in three), are children of immigrants. He is a real, stimulating and unfiltered mirror. He is what many other boys could be. It is normal, as much as the fact that he is already the Barça player who sells the most shirts and soon, probably, also the Spanish national team.
Time is often a merciless mirror. But footballers, like the shrimp cocktail, always seemed older than their legs. Tato Abadía, Pardeza, Calderé, Zubizarreta or Joseph Minala, that Lazio player who at 17 looked at you with the melancholy that permeates life at 55. It is not clear whether time weighs twice as much when you spend the day running, or that throughout their careers we were younger than them, but one always forgot their age when watching them jog around the field or say obvious things in the mixed zone. There was distance. We admired them, but we were never them. Then, from time to time, the youth team worked a miracle and you identified with someone because they were born the same year as you or not far from your house. And what the hell, if he was still playing, why couldn’t you do it too? Xavi and I, although he never knew it, lived our football careers in parallel: me on the sofa and him on the field. But until the day he retired I thought he still had a chance to be called up some weekend.
Identifying with a player from your team had become difficult for boys and girls – almost impossible for girls – who watch matches at the weekend. Not only because of age. But something has changed and football has been rejuvenated, managing to connect again with those generations that Florentino Pérez considers incapable of enduring 90 minutes watching a match on television or in a stadium, no matter how modern and soundproof it may be. It is clearly seen on the shirts on the street, also among girls. And the best example is Lamine, a minor, with the appearance of a child – he is a child – who finishes secondary school in the middle of the Euro Cup, sets up a team in the Kings League and on Sunday sows terror in rival defences or scores a stratospheric goal pass with the outside of the ball from 40 metres. Apart from that, he is similar in almost everything else.
