Laurence Dollimore
SPAIN’S Lamine Yamal will be hoping to make history tonight as the first 16-year-old to score at the Euros.
All eyes are on the rising star as he joins his compatriots in the quarter final against hosts Germany from 6pm.
It comes after the teen’s father took to Instagram last night to share an old snap of his son with Lionel Messi.
The photo, from December 2007, shows the Argentinian legend playing with a baby Yamal, who is being bathed in a little blue tub by his mother.
The trio are all smiling in the snap, which was taken for a charity calendar organised by the Catalan newspaper SPORT, in which the-then Barca first team players paritcipated – including Messi.
The image has today gone viral, with fans joking that Messi ‘blessed’ Yamal with his football talents.
It is actually the first of several photos of Messi and Yamal.
When Yamal joined the Barcelona youth team at the age of seven, he crossed paths with his idol several times, until the Argentinian’s departure from the club in 2021.
Yamal grew up in the impoverished Rocafonda neighbourhood of Barcelona, recently dubbed a ‘multicultural s**thole’ by far-right politicians.
He was born and raised in the Catalan capital by his Moroccan father and Equatorial Guinean mother.
It is believed Messi and other Barcelona stars met with locals in the poorer areas that surrounded their training ground as part of the 2007/8 charity calendar.
