Lamine Yamal is doing something that demands attention, and the evidence is mounting with every single Barcelona performance this season.
The Lionel Messi comparisons have followed Yamal from the moment he burst onto the scene, often feeling unhelpful given the burden they place on a teenager carrying the legacy of the greatest of all time.
Yet with every passing year of Yamal’s career, Messi as a reference point becomes increasingly unavoidable rather than unfair or premature.
Messi himself was already brilliant before Pep Guardiola arrived at Barcelona in the summer of 2008, having lifted the Champions League and finished runner-up on the Ballon d’Or podium that year, coming second to Cristiano Ronaldo.
The talent was unmistakable back then, visible in the way Chelsea’s Asier del Horno resorted to kicking Messi out of a Champions League game when the Argentinian was still a teenager.
Messi notched 13 goals and 16 assists for a trophyless Barcelona side in 2007-08, then took the biggest leap of his career under Guardiola, becoming the undisputed star of a treble-winning team.
“Messi is the best player in the world by a distance, he’s the No.1,” Xavi Hernandez said ahead of the 2009 Champions League final, adding: “There is nobody at all like him.”
“The world can see that he’s the boss. I’ve never seen anything like it. In a game, in the training sessions, never. I wouldn’t swap him for any player,” Xavi continued.
Yamal is a few years ahead of where Messi was at the same age, and these early breakthrough years are arguably even more eye-catching than Messi’s were at a comparable stage.
The La Masia wonderkid has already won a European Championship and a World Cup, played a starring role in back-to-back La Liga title triumphs, and finished runner-up in the Ballon d’Or.
His performance against Inter in the Champions League semi-finals, when he was only 17, produced that same sense of otherworldly awe that Messi generated when scoring his first career hat-trick against Real Madrid.
“He has the quality to win the Ballon d’Or. The question is when he will win it,” Feyenoord manager Giovanni Van Bronckhorst told reporters ahead of Yamal’s Champions League masterclass.
There has been a gap, however, between Yamal’s achievements and the sheer weekly output associated with the very best, given he only scored one goal at the World Cup and his numbers remained some way off prime Messi.
That gap now appears to be closing rapidly, with three braces in as many La Liga games suggesting a great leap forward is unfolding in real time.
The statistics offer a striking frame of reference here, given Messi averaged above an 8.00 WhoScored rating in every single La Liga season between 2009-10 and 2020-21, twelve years of sustained dominance.
Last season, only one player in all of La Liga managed that same benchmark, and it was Lamine Yamal, whose 8.23 rating was still lower than Messi’s worst score of 8.34 in 2013-14.
Yamal’s WhoScored ratings in La Liga this season have read 7.87, 10, 9.89, and 8.69, averaging out at 8.63, with another perfect 10 recorded against Feyenoord in the Champions League.
There is no Guardiola arriving to trigger a tactical revolution, but there is growing chemistry with Raphinha and Fermin Lopez, plus additions like Rodri that give Yamal the platform to take centre stage.
Watch Barcelona routinely put four or five past opponents with Yamal pulling the strings, and it is impossible to suppress that same feeling from the Guardiola era: that we are witnessing the beginning of something historic.