By his 19th birthday, Messi had scored 11 career goals and won La Liga and the UEFA Champions League once each.
Lamin Yamal, who turned 19 on Monday, has already scored a whopping 56 goals and won La Liga three times and the Copa del Rey once, as well as Euro 2024.
In fact, Yamal is not the player’s last name, but the second of his two names.
His full name is Lamin Yamal Narawi Ebana, and he wears the first two names on the back of his jerseys both in Barcelona and in Spain, as a tribute to the two people who helped his family during his birth.
It was widely reported in Spanish media that Lamin Yamal’s father had promised to name him after two friends who supported the family financially, helping them pay bills at a time when money was tight.
Lamin is a common male name in Arabic that can be translated into English as honest or trustworthy and Yamal is a variant of Jamal which means elegance or beauty.
He grew up in Rocafond, a working-class district of Mataro, 20 miles north of Barcelona.
The area was built in the 1960s to accommodate migrants from other regions of Spain, and when they began to move to more prosperous areas, migrants from other countries arrived in the 1990s.
Lamin Yamal celebrated some of his goals by making a 3-0-4 gesture with his fingers, referring to Rockafonda’s zip code.
“What my mother did, what my father did, I couldn’t do for anyone other than my child,” Yamal told El Pais earlier in the tournament.
“If you don’t have money, it’s very difficult to help your child play football. And my parents managed to do all this. I can never repay them for this.”