By his 19th birthday Messi had scored 11 career goals and won La Liga and the Uefa Champions League once each.
Having turned 19 on Monday, Yamal has already scored a whopping 56 goals and won La Liga three times and the Copa del Rey once, as well as Euro 2024.
Yamal is not actually the player’s surname, but the second of his two first names.
His full name is Lamine Yamal Naraoui Ebana, and he wears the former two on the back of his shirts for both Barcelona and Spain as an homage to two people who helped his family around the time of his birth.
It has been widely reported in Spanish media that Yamal’s father promised to name him after two friends who assisted the family financially, helping them to pay their bills at a time when money was tight.
Lamine is a common male first name in Arabic, which can be translated to English as honest or trustworthy, while Yamal is a variant of Jamal, meaning elegance or beauty.
He grew up in Rocafonda, a working-class neighbourhood in Mataro, 20 miles north of Barcelona.
The area was built in the 1960s to house migrants from other regions of Spain, and when they began to move to more well-off areas, migrants from other countries arrived in the 1990s.
Yamal has celebrated some of his goals by making a 3-0-4 gesture with his fingers, referring to Rocafonda’s postcode.
“What my mother has done, what my father has done, I couldn’t have done that for anyone who is not my child”, Yamal told El Pais in earlier in the tournament.
“If you don’t have money, it’s very hard to help your child play football. And my parents managed to make all that happen. It’s something I’ll never be able to repay them for.”
