Historical photo

Messi bathes Spain’s European Championship youngster Lamine Yamal!

Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal

(Bild: ASSOCIATED PRESS; twitter.com/LamineeYamal)

Consider yourself lucky if you can call such treasures in your photo album your own - a photo showing Spain's young European Championship star Lamine Yamal together with soccer legend Lionel Messi is currently going through the virtual roof! Why? It's simple: Yamal was just 6 months old at the time of the snapshot and was being bathed in a small tub by 20-year-old Messi ...

It may sound strange, but it was quite harmless - at the end of 2007, a photo shoot for a charity calendar for the newspaper "SPORT" resulted in a whole series of pictures with Messi, little Lamine Yamal and his mother Sheila Ebana.

The calendar was a joint project between the Barca Foundation and the UN children's charity Unicef, which FC Barcelona promoted for some time. The idea was that for each month there should be a picture of a player with a child.

A great coincidence
The fact that Messi and the future Spain team player were paired up as a "duo" was a great coincidence: the calendar organizers held a lottery to select babies/children - and little Lamine, registered by his parents, won.

"Messi was very shy back then!"
So on a December day in 2007, they met at the Nou Camp stadium, where the parents had never set foot before, in the visitors' dressing room for the photo shoot.

Joan Montfort, one of the two photographers involved, said in an interview with 'The Athletic' that it was very difficult to take the photo. "Messi was very shy at the time - and suddenly he was asked to take photos with a strange baby in the bath. But in the end it turned out to be a good picture."

And now, over 16 years later, Lamine Yamal is preparing to follow in Messi's footsteps - both as a player at FC Barcelona and at international level ...