Lamine Yamal Is Already On Top

It's hard to pin down Lamine Yamal's place amongst the top players in the world today. I guess it should be no surprise that a teenager resists fixity, being in that stage of life defined by constant growth and flux.

The difficulty is twofold. On the one hand, you don't want the allure of the new to rob you of perspective. How can you call Lamine the best player in the world for what he has done over the past six months, when, for instance, Kylian Mbappé has been doing what he does for the past six years? On the other, you can't let your attachment to the past prevent you from accurately assessing the present state of things. Yes, he's only 17, and he's only been playing like this for the better part of this calendar year. But in that brief time Lamine has already achieved feats within the reach only of the game's generational talents. How could you deny that what you routinely see from him, both in Barcelona's colors and in Spain's, earns him a place in the highest tier of the player hierarchy?

Of course, lists and rankings and hierarchy tiers aren't real. What is real is what happens on the pitch—both what Lamine (let me take this opportunity to remind everyone once again that Yamal is not his last name, so he should not be called "Yamal") does on it and how his opponents react. There, out on the objective reality of the field, Lamine's magnitude is most clear.

We can take his most recent match as an example. On Sunday, Barcelona visited Villarreal for what looked like one of the sterner tests Barça would face this La Liga season, due to the quality of the opposition and also to the depleted state of its roster, which produced a starting XI featuring six players who would not see the field even as substitutes were Barcelona at full strength. (And that's before Marc-André ter Stegen did his knee halfway through the match.) Barça's normally formidable press was ragged. The clear passing lanes and wide-open spaces were like a country highway at midnight, through which Villarreal's zippy attackers continually raced toward the penalty box. As vulnerable as Barça's goal was, the Yellow Submarine only managed to stick the ball in there once. Part of that was thanks to some ass-saving, offside-trapping, and last-ditch defending from the Blaugrana defense. Part of it was Villarreal's errant finishing. Maybe the biggest part was the ruthless, demoralizing effectiveness of Barcelona's attack, which by the end of this hardly stellar showing had rippled the home team's net five times. The chief demoralizer, and the game's most outstanding player, was Lamine Yamal.

As Lamine tends to do in his good performances—which at this point is his every performance, such is his freakish consistency—the Moroccan-Equatoguinean-Spaniard was everywhere and did everything from the first minute to the last. But for brevity's sake, let's leave aside most of the "everything" and focus on just a couple things. We won't even need the whole of his blessed left foot, the instep of which is the birthplace of the little demons he's constantly unleashing onto the pitch in the form of crosses and shots. Let's just look at what he did with the smaller toes on the outside of that foot, because the pass it produced was a genuine marvel:

For those counting at home, that's a 40-something-yard through ball, struck on the run and with the outside of Lamine's foot, which travels from about the outer edge of Villarreal's half of the field all the way to the penalty box, and hits Raphinha in stride, allowing for a simple little first-time redirection that bounces over Villarreal's keeper. A common simile in sports is to liken a player's efforts to something out of a video game, but the most special players are capable of things impossible to approximate even in a video game. Lamine is already of that special ilk. If someone made that pass against you in a video game you'd probably ragequit, write an angry review about the game's unrealistic physics and guided-missile pass assistance, and then try desperately to recreate the move yourself.

One thing that does translate from video games to the actual pitch is the urge to ragequit when an opponent does something so good that it feels unfair. This appeared to be what happened in Sunday's match. Barcelona broke Villarreal's spirit with Pablo Torre's goal in the 58th minute. Before then, Villarreal had fought Barça more or less evenly, and only the aforementioned ass-saving defending and inaccurate shooting kept Villarreal from being at least on equal terms with the Blaugrana, who were leading 2-1. But then Torre scored to make the score 3-1, restoring Barça's two-goal lead and shrinking Villarreal's hopes of getting anything out of the game. After taking 12 shots prior to Torre's goal, five of which qualified as big chances according to the stats keepers, Villarreal mustered only a single crack at Barça's goalframe for the rest of the game.

If those first three goals were what sapped Villarreal's desire to compete, it was Lamine's genius that really stoked them with impotent rage. Just a couple minutes after adding to his career highlight reel with the pass that made the score 5-1, Lamine found himself with the ball on the wing with just one defender near him. This is a scenario that typically spells doom for a defender, and sure enough Lamine sized up and then effortlessly skipped right on past left back Sergi Cardona. Cardona responded to this helpless position and the chasmic distance between his and Lamine's talent by unceremoniously kicking the hell out of the winger's thigh:

A few minutes after that, a different Villarreal player, this time winger Ilias Akhomach, also sought to release some of his team's pent up frustration with a gratuitous kick to Lamine's legs:

Only a vanishingly small number of players are technically and constitutionally equipped to execute a pass even approaching the class of Lamine's assist. That number gets even smaller when you combine it with the consistency with which Lamine pulls off entire matches full of the kind of brilliance that includes but cannot be wholly contained by concrete contributions to the scoresheet. (Through seven matches across La Liga and the Champions League this season, Lamine has four goals and five assists. Starting with Spain's round-of-16 match against Georgia in the Euros, Lamine has five goals and nine assists in 13 competitive matches for club and country. He's only failed to notch either a goal or an assist in one of those 13 games.) I can think of only one other Europe-based player—Vinícius, the favorite to win this year's Ballon d'Or—whose gargantuan talent is so offensive to opponents, who by comparison might as well be playing a completely different sport, that they attempt to turn soccer into MMA by physically attacking their betters.

So yeah, feel free to rank Lamine Yamal first or fifth or tenth or wherever on that little list you keep in your head. But recognize that almost no one else can do what he does, nor gets treated the way he does because of it. The only thing crazier than the fact that, at just 17 years old, he's only getting started, is that he's only 17 but is already doing all this.