Barcelona were cruising to a restorative win, and the game was in its embers: three minutes of normal time remained, as well as whatever additional period the referee deemed appropriate. Hansi Flick, Barcelona’s coach, would have assumed that substituting Lamine Yamal at this point could not possibly be remotely controversial.
Alas: seeing his number called, Yamal trudged across the Camp Nou pitch, his head bowed. He paused, briefly, to chat with Fermín López and Ferran Torres. His body language suggested exasperation. He started walking again, unravelling the tape that binds his right wrist as he did so, as if channeling his frustration. He walked past Flick without a word, slumped into a seat, and sat there, brooding.
Yamal being Yamal and Barcelona being Barcelona, this perfectly rational decision – allowing a key player a break in a game that was won – was naturally the focus of much of the post-match discourse. Flick was peppered with questions about Yamal’s visible disaffection, challenged as to why he had removed him. He took it seriously for a while, but only for a while. “You give too much importance to everything Lamine does,” he replied, eventually.
As far as Flick is concerned – as far as every manager is always concerned, it really shouldn’t cause any confusion any more – it is perfectly normal that Yamal wanted to stay on the pitch. Nobody likes being substituted. But that is not the only factor to consider; his manager, like any manager, has to take a slightly longer term view.
In Yamal’s case, that is particularly true. He is in that phase of his career where almost every week seems to bring another astonishing milestone. Sunday’s win against Levante, for example, was his 100th victory as a Barcelona player.
Like all of his achievements, it was celebrated breathlessly by Barcelona’s social media accounts. He is, the club stressed, still only 18. As ever, the implication was that this is evidence of truly generational talent. And it is, of course. There is no question that Yamal is a player of rare and precious quality: certainly the finest teenaged player on the planet and, perhaps, already the best of any age in the world.
Whenever I see one of these statistics, though, the thought occurs that there is a much darker reading available. Part of the reason that Yamal is breaking all these records, setting all these high watermarks, is because he plays so much.
He is 18. He is in his third full season as a senior player. In his first, 2023-24, he played almost 3000 minutes for his club. He ended that campaign winning the European Championships with Spain. The following year, he started 51 games for his club alone, a workload of 4532 minutes, according to FBRef. He has already managed 2,750 this season. None of those figures include his international commitments.
It is not hard to understand why Barcelona want him to play so much; it is not hard to understand why Yamal himself is so eager to remain on the pitch whenever possible. But it is also not hard to see what the risk might be. The greatest obstacle to Yamal fulfilling his potential, to establishing himself as the defining player of his era, is burnout.
Given the club he plays for, given the talent he has, the riposte to that fear is always the same: Lionel Messi was a central part of Barcelona’s side as a teenager, too, and he is busy getting ready for a World Cup at the age of 38. But this is, in truth, a thin argument. Even leaving aside the fact that Messi has always been one of one, the numbers do not really align. Messi did not play more than 30 games in a season until he was 19. He did not reach the 4,000-minute mark until he was 24. By Yamal’s standards, Messi was a slow-burn.
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Besides, Messi’s career progression is hardly typical; building rules around exceptions rarely ends well. This weekend brought a far more apposite example. A couple of hours after Yamal had stamped across the Camp Nou pitch, Raheem Sterling was coming on for his debut as a Feyenoord player in Rotterdam. It was the first competitive appearance he had made since May.
The effusive reaction to his presence inside De Kuip was stirring; Sterling, after all, has spent much of the last year in purgatory. As much as his ostracism from Chelsea’s squad has always seemed economic as much as sporting, it is hard to argue that his performances had not dipped prior to that. At Chelsea, and on loan at Arsenal, he looked diminished, etiolated.
That maybe should not be a surprise. He played almost 2,000 minutes for Liverpool as a 17-year-old. His final campaign at Anfield, as he entered his 20s, involved more than 50 appearances. In seven years at Manchester City, he played more than 45 times every year. It is an intense burden from a young age; it is easy to suspect there is a price to pay for it.
The fear is that Barcelona may be risking much the same thing with Yamal: that by asking so much of him now, they are curtailing how long he might last.
Photograph by Pablo Rodriguez/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images