When photographer Joan Monfort arranged for a shy 20-year-old Lionel Messi to bathe a five-month-old baby in a plastic tub inside the away dressing room at Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium in 2007, nobody in the room could have imagined what Sunday would bring.
Nineteen years later, that baby is Lamine Yamal, 19-year-old superstar of the Spanish national team, and the man who bathed him is the greatest footballer the world has ever seen, preparing to face each other in the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Football, as millions of fans have noted this week, has a remarkable way of coming full circle.
What We Know So Far
The photographs were taken in the fall of 2007 as part of a charity calendar produced in collaboration with the FC Barcelona Foundation to benefit UNICEF, which at the time was the official shirt sponsor of the club. Monfort, the Catalan photographer who organized the shoot, told the Associated Press that parents in the Rocafonda neighborhood of Mataro, a working-class area 20 miles north of Barcelona, were given the chance to enter a raffle run by Catalan newspaper Sport to have their baby photographed at Camp Nou with a first-team Barcelona player.
Yamal’s parents, Mounir Nasraoui and Sheila Ebana, entered. They won. And on the day they arrived, they were paired with Messi entirely by chance.
“UNICEF did a raffle in the neighbourhood of Roca Fonda in Mataro where Lamine’s family lived,” Monfort told the Associated Press. “They signed up for the raffle to have their picture taken at the Camp Nou with a Barca player. And they won the raffle.”
The resulting photographs show a long-haired Messi holding and appearing to bathe a chubby, smiling infant who would grow up to follow in his footsteps more closely than anyone could have anticipated. Monfort recalled the complications of the session with evident warmth.
“Messi is a pretty introverted guy, he’s shy,” Monfort said. “He was coming out of the locker room and suddenly he finds himself in another locker room with a plastic tub full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated. He didn’t even know how to hold him at first.”
The photographs were published in the UNICEF calendar in 2008, with 50 percent of sales going to projects promoting children’s rights. Other Barcelona players who participated in the calendar that year included Xavi Hernandez, Ronaldinho, Carles Puyol, and Samuel Eto’o, ABC confirmed.
The images were largely forgotten for nearly two decades until July 2024, when Yamal’s father posted one of them on Instagram during the European Championship, captioning it “The beginning of two legends.” The post spread rapidly across social media as Yamal, then 16, became the youngest goalscorer in European Championship history and helped Spain win the title. By the time the World Cup arrived, the photograph had become one of the most discussed images in football.
What The Photographer And Players Are Saying
Monfort, now 58, described the improbability of what destiny had produced in terms that resisted straightforward journalistic framing.
“It is a true miracle of destiny,” he told BBC Sport. “It is serendipity, when you find something extra special, so much bigger than you ever thought. If you wrote this in a film it would not seem possible.”
He added that the photograph had become the defining work of his career. “It’s the most famous photo I’ve taken in my life, by a long way. So many people have been interested, again during this World Cup now. I’m just really happy it happened. It’s especially nice in today’s football, when so much is to do with money and power.”
Messi himself acknowledged Yamal’s extraordinary trajectory when asked in December 2024 which young player reminded him of himself. “If I have to choose someone, because of the age and because of the future that he has, I’ve heard that they have chosen Lamine Yamal, and without doubt it’s him for me too,” Messi said, ABC confirmed. “He’s the present and without a doubt has a huge future.”
Yamal, whose full name is Lamine Yamal Nasraoui Ebana, was shown a photograph from the original shoot after Spain’s semifinal victory. He grinned. “I hope to face him in a final,” he said. That wish is now reality.
Why This Matters
The story of the photograph is irresistible on its own terms as a piece of sporting coincidence. But its deeper resonance comes from the parallel paths the two players have traveled since that afternoon in a Barcelona dressing room.
Both came up through La Masia, Barcelona’s celebrated youth academy. Both wore the number 19 for the club before switching to the number 10. Both are left-footed forwards who broke into professional football at an unusually young age. Both have built their games around intelligence, creativity, and a natural capacity to influence matches that their respective generations have rarely seen equaled.
The BBC drew the appropriate historical comparison: it is as if a photograph existed of Muhammad Ali holding a baby Mike Tyson.
Yamal’s numbers at 19 are extraordinary. By his birthday Monday he had already scored 56 career goals and won La Liga three times, the Copa del Rey once, and Euro 2024. At the same age, Messi had scored 11 goals and won La Liga and the Champions League once each. Yamal is, on the raw statistics, already ahead of the trajectory that made Messi the greatest player in history.
The personal background that shaped Yamal is equally compelling. He grew up in Rocafonda, the same working-class neighborhood of Mataro where his family won the raffle that produced the famous photographs. His parents had little money when he was born, and Yamal has spoken publicly about the sacrifices they made to support his football. He has said he could never fully repay them. He wears his name, rather than his surname, on the back of his shirts for Barcelona and Spain as a tribute to two friends who helped his family financially when times were difficult, BBC confirmed.
“If you don’t have money, it’s very hard to help your child play football,” Yamal told El Pais during the tournament. “And my parents managed to make all that happen. It’s something I’ll never be able to repay them for.”
For Messi, Sunday’s final carries a weight that extends beyond football. At 39, this is almost certainly his last World Cup. He has won everything the game offers at club and international level, with the 2022 World Cup title completing the collection that had eluded him for most of his career. A second consecutive World Cup title would cement a legacy that most analysts already consider unreachable.
The match itself will be the first World Cup final between the reigning champions of Europe and South America, and the first time the two top-ranked teams in the world have contested the sport’s ultimate game since FIFA rankings were introduced in 1992, ESPN confirmed.
What Happens Next
The FIFA World Cup final takes place Sunday, July 19 at 3 p.m. Eastern time at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Monfort will be watching the match with feelings he struggled to put into ordinary words. “I think we are closing the cycle of their story,” he told BBC Sport. “It is a happy end. For Messi it is perfect if he can finish his career winning the World Cup for the second time. I think he deserves it. And for Lamine he has a lot of time to win trophies like the World Cup. But if he wins it now, it would be worth more than his other titles.”
Whatever the result, Sunday will produce the second photograph of these two players together. The first was taken in 2007, when one of them was a shy young man who did not know how to hold a baby and the other was a baby who did not know he would one day stand on the same pitch as a legend at the sport’s greatest occasion.
The chances of all this happening, as Monfort told USA Today, were like winning the lottery.
USAToday/BBC/ABC/TheWashingtonPost
