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Lamine Yamal, Barcelona and Spain’s 17-year-old football sensation, was about to sign a new contract with his club when he realised his grandmother wasn’t there and said they couldn’t go ahead if she wasn’t in the photo along with his agent, the FC Barcelona president and the rest of his family.
Lamine Yamal, who has won hearts and minds not just with his talent on the pitch but for his humility, credits Fatima, his paternal grandmother, with keeping his feet on the ground after his parents separated when he was three years old.
The contract, which will keep Lamine Yamal at Barcelona until 2031, when he will still be only 24, is in fact a pre-contract as the player is still a minor. He will officially sign when he turns 18 in July, with Fatima in attendance. The contract has a buyout clause of €1bn (£840m)
Fatima left Morocco in 1990 and arrived in Barcelona accompanied by her five children, among them Lamine Yamal’s father, Mounir Nasraoui. She played a key role in Lamine Yamal’s upbringing after his mother, Sheila Ebana, from Equatorial Guinea, and Nasraoui separated.
When Lamine Yamal offered to buy Fatima a house she refused, saying she preferred to stay where she was in Rocafonda, the working-class neighbourhood in Mataró, a coastal town north of Barcelona.
True to his origins, Lamine Yamal celebrates his goals with his hands forming the numbers 304, the Rocafonda postal code.
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Already rated by many pundits as the best player in the world, he signed for Barcelona in 2014 when he was six years old, and was raised in La Masia, the club’s famous school-cum-football academy. He made his first-team debut in 2023.
At the Uefa European Championship last year he became the youngest player to appear in the competition, scoring the goal of the tournament against France in the semi-finals.
During the competition, which was held in Germany, Spain’s use of their young star was constrained by local labour laws that forbid anyone under 18 to work after 8pm.
Last year Lamine Yamal became the youngest player to be nominated for the coveted Ballon d’Or, winning the Kopa Trophy for best young player. At 16 he broke the record held by his Barcelona teammate Gavi as Spain’s youngest goalscorer.
