Lionel Messi stood at a Fanatics Fest panel in New York on Friday, July 17, two days before the 2026 World Cup final, and tried to wrap his head around a timeline that doesn’t seem possible. “I did the photo when he was a baby and to face him in the World Cup, it’s crazy,” Messi said. He shared the stage with Argentina teammate Emi Martínez, coach Lionel Scaloni, Spain captain Rodri, and Spain coach Luis de la Fuente — the two sides set to meet Sunday in Atlanta for the trophy.
The photo in question is nearly two decades old. In 2007, when Messi was a 20-year-old rising through Barcelona’s ranks, the club raffled off charity photoshoots with players for local families. The images would populate a calendar raising funds for UNICEF, whose name sat across the front of Barcelona’s shirts in those years. Lamine Yamal’s family won a slot. Baby Lamine, five months old, was paired with Messi. The resulting frames show Messi cradling the infant and assisting Yamal’s mother during a bath.
Those pictures stayed buried until 2024, when Yamal’s father posted one on Instagram during the European Championship — right as his son became the youngest scorer in Euros history and racked up four assists en route to Spain’s title. The image tore across the internet then, and it has circled back now that Argentina and Spain have converged on the same World Cup final.
Messi, for his part, isn’t treating the reunion as a novelty. “He’s without a doubt one of the best of the world right now,” he said of the 18-year-old who has become Spain’s most dangerous attacker. The gap between the photoshoot and the final is almost 19 years — long enough for a kid in a washtub to grow into the player Messi has to scheme against on the sport’s biggest stage.
A separate claim circulating online this week suggests Yamal also served as Sergio Ramos’ “mascot” — a child escort walking out with players before kickoff — ahead of a Barcelona match in 2016. The Reddit post describing the anecdote labels it an “El Clásico” between Barcelona and Sevilla, though El Clásico refers specifically to Barcelona versus Real Madrid, not Sevilla. Ramos was at Real Madrid in 2016, which would make a Barcelona–Real Madrid fixture the plausible setting if the anecdote holds. The post could not be independently verified, and no major outlet has confirmed the details.
What is confirmed is the 2007 afternoon at Barcelona — a club raffle, a UNICEF calendar, a twenty-year-old and a five-month-old, and a set of photographs that nobody on set could have known would become a World Cup final subplot. The film doesn’t lie, even when it takes nineteen years to tell you what it meant.
Sources:
- Yahoo Sports — Messi says it’s ‘crazy’ he met, bathed baby Lamine Yamal
- r/popculturechat — Lamine Yamal was not only held by Messi as a baby, he was also Sergio Ramos’ “mascot” (unverified)