Lamine Yamal's Journey: From Crown to Flag in Barcelona
Lamine Yamal began the season wearing a crown. He ended it carrying a flag.
On the first night of 2025-26, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager given the shirt of Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi – struck with the last kick against Mallorca. His first goal as an adult. His own coronation, arms wide, La Liga’s title race cracking into life.
Nine months later, the bus crawled through Barcelona’s streets and the same kid, now 18, stood on the top deck with a Palestine flag in his hands. Lamine Yamal, “touched by God’s wand” according to Spain coach Luis de la Fuente, now touching something far more volatile: politics, identity, the weight of adulthood. Hansi Flick admitted he didn’t love it, but he let it stand. “He’s old enough: he’s 18,” the coach said. Old enough to choose. Old enough to hurt.
The season had carved into him. Injuries. An “internal abyss”, as he later called it. But he stepped off that bus with a third league title. Flick, the father figure whose own dad died the morning Barcelona clinched the league – a grief he chose to share with his “other family” – had his second. Someone asked if he had ever felt so much love. “No, never,” he replied.
Barcelona had crushed the suspense long before the mathematics caught up. The real kill shot came against Espanyol, the city derby that turned into a coronation rehearsal with seven games to spare. Lamine Yamal surged towards the line, arms stretched like Usain Bolt in Beijing, already contemplating the others in his wake. They made it official in week 35, the first time in 94 years that a clásico sealed the title.
Three days after Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni had swung at each other in a dressing room fight that ended with Real Madrid’s vice-captain in hospital, stitched up and diagnosed with “craniofacial trauma”, Marcus Rashford landed the punch that really counted. Barcelona’s win made it 11 victories in a row, 23 wins in 25 league games since the previous clásico 600km west. They had played in three different homes and won in all of them. Nomads, but ruthless ones.
Back in late October, this script looked impossible. Flick was warning that “ego kills success”. Rayo had found “The Flick Line” and sliced through it. Sevilla opened them up. Madrid then beat Barcelona 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabéu to go five points clear. That night, Jude Bellingham mocked Lamine Yamal’s words as “cheap”, posting Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation” as the soundtrack. Dani Carvajal added the jibber-jabber hand gesture for good measure.
Madrid, though, had their own noise to deal with. Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left that night. Xabi Alonso insisted he wanted to focus on what really mattered. It turned out that was what really mattered. With the coach isolated, the cracks widened. The season began to slip.
Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico closed a chapter Alonso felt had started too soon and ended too soon. He left for the Club World Cup with a team that no longer believed. His replacement, Álvaro Arbeloa, talked about empathy and openness, invited players to share their feelings on his grey sofa, brought doughnuts as rewards. It sounded warm. It played soft. “I’m not Gandalf,” he said. Madrid needed a wizard. They got a life coach.
By the time the rivals met again in May, Madrid were out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and almost out of their minds. Divided, drained, just wanting the ordeal over. Ninety minutes later, they were out of the title race too, 12 points behind with nine left to play, staring at a second straight season without a trophy. Kylian Mbappé, the star who had hovered over them for years, was simply gone, off to Sicily. “Let’s go Madrid!” he posted as they trailed 2-0. It felt like a taunt more than a cheer.
Two days later, Florentino Pérez reappeared in public for the first time in more than a decade and went full chaos. An incoherent, Trumpian press conference that said nothing and somehow said everything. He did at least identify the real enemy: ABC newspaper. Subscription cancelled. Problem solved.
Barcelona, meanwhile, finally received a trophy on the night they actually won the league. No bureaucratic delay, no awkward wait. They rode it around the city, the Super Cup tucked on board as well. The one they truly wanted, the European Cup, stayed out of reach. Madrid’s too. Their best nights still came in that competition, but they weren’t good enough this time. Villarreal and Athletic didn’t even survive the league phase, although San Mamés did at least become the only stadium where champions PSG failed to score.
Atlético Madrid went furthest of the Spanish clubs, knocking Barcelona out of both domestic cups. They had long since surrendered the league, yet they still found a way to fall short. Arsenal eliminated them in their first Champions League semi-final for a decade. In their first Copa del Rey final for 13 years, they were “Matarazzoed” by Real Sociedad on penalties. A backup goalkeeper made the decisive save, kissed a former ballboy on the cheek, and watched him score the winner. Álvaro Odriozola, who didn’t even play, declared he wouldn’t swap this for “anything in humanity”. Atlético ended with nothing. Real Sociedad ended with everything.
Next season, Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and Villarreal – who finished third – will go again in the Champions League, joined by Betis, who claimed the new fifth spot. Below them, cup winners Real Sociedad head back into Europe alongside Celta Vigo and Getafe. That last name might be the most remarkable of all.
Pepe Bordalás said qualifying for Europe would “go down in football history”. That was a stretch. But the journey wasn’t. Getafe began the season with 13 senior players, two of them goalkeepers. By the halfway point, they were in the relegation zone and so desperate they played full-back Allan Nyom up front. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Bordalás said – and this is a man who has inflicted some fairly grim afternoons on opponents. In January, four little-known loanees arrived. By June, Getafe were seventh.
They did it their way: second fewest goals scored, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. Pure Bordalás. Ugly, efficient, unyielding. Brutal and brilliant at once.
On the final day, their pitch invasion turned into someone else’s survival vigil. Mixed into the blue wave were a dozen or so Osasuna players in red, phones and iPads in hand, waiting for other results to decide their fate. The captain called those minutes “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”. When safety finally came, they jumped around with the Getafe fans and Nyom, who stayed out there until he knew they were safe before slipping into the dressing room. “It’s been … weird,” said their coach, Alesio Lisci. No one could argue.
Osasuna had already celebrated survival once, a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla a month earlier sparking what they thought was the great escape. They never imagined needing a second one, clambering clear not through their own points, but through others’ failures.
It was that kind of year. At the top, the same five or six teams circled each other, the twists relatively few. At the bottom, chaos. Sudden falls, wild resurrections, salvation and damnation separated by a single bounce of the ball.
Only Real Oviedo sank early. Back in the first division after 24 years, with Santi Cazorla finally making his Primera debut for the club he joined at eight and rejoined at 38 on the minimum wage, they arrived with romance and left with a thud. They scored nine home goals all season. They had more managers (three) than away wins (two). The storybook closed quickly.
The rest fought to the last breath. The race to avoid the other two relegation spots turned savage. In a league where good teams suddenly went bad and bad teams suddenly became brilliant, the gap between Europe and the abyss stayed tiny. Nine clubs entered the penultimate round still trying to dodge the drop. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia climbed clear then, but five remained entangled on the final day.
Elche and Girona faced each other at Montilivi in a straight shootout. All or nothing. A late Thomas Lemar shot crashed off the bar, the margin between Girona staying up or falling through the trapdoor. Four points from their last eight matches dragged them under. Two years after challenging for the title and a season after playing in the Champions League, Girona dropped to the second division with 41 points – a total that would have saved them in any other campaign this decade.
Mallorca went with them, victims of a three-team mini-league tiebreaker with Osasuna and Levante after all three finished on 42 points. They had a striker with 23 league goals, a mark unmatched in 26 seasons, and still went down.
“This hurts,” said their coach, Martín Demichelis. “Football has been cruel,” Girona’s Míchel Sánchez added. Elche’s Eder Sarabia looked around at the wreckage and simply said: “This league was really crazy.” His team, somehow, had survived.
And still, there was one more story. The best, in its way, left for last.
Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, the team forever out of place and perfect for it, reached their first ever European final, in the Conference League. They went to Germany, to Leipzig, and came back without the trophy. Which, like everything with Rayo, felt wrong and yet absolutely right.
At the end, a banner stretched across their end said more than any cup could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat.” That was the point. That was Rayo.
The season then scattered into its little awards, the snapshots that tell you what a league really was.
Rayo’s president Raúl Martín Presa took “Most charming president” by calling his own fans “drunk, brainless and idle”. Oviedo owner Jesús Martínez claimed “Most optimistic” by demanding talk of Europe, not survival, in week eight, two days before his team dropped into the bottom three and never climbed out. The best atmosphere? San Mamés, of course – but not for Athletic. It roared for Euskadi vs Palestine.
Atlético’s fans finally found a use for the pandemic hoarding, unleashing a bog-roll shower that turned the Metropolitano into the Monumental. Sevilla copied them. UEFA and La Liga responded in the only way they know: fines.
Rayo again owned the best post-match singalong, roaring through “A Pirate’s Life” with the CD Yuncos players they had just beaten. The best party, and the worst hangover, belonged to Copa del Rey winners Real Sociedad. Kick-off at 10pm, extra-time, penalties, leaving the stadium at 2am. Hotel disco at 2.39am. Taxis to a club at 4.45am. Onto a bus to the airport at 10.15am without sleep, duty-free cracked open mid-flight. “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time,” shouted the liveliest of them. They did. That day, the next, and the next, looping the city on an open-top bus, sunburnt, drunk, adored by hundreds of thousands. Then they stumbled into training the following afternoon to prepare for a league game they just wanted to survive. The opponent? Getafe. Of course.
Lionel Messi quietly slipped into the Camp Nou alone one cold Sunday in November, the most nostalgic fan of all. Somewhere else, a Betis supporter went viral as the unluckiest. Desperate for Cédric Bakambu’s shirt after a 3-0 win over Mallorca, he sprinted down the stand, tripped over the barrier and landed at the forward’s feet. Perfect timing, perfect pratfall. No shirt. Bakambu just stared, bemused.
Osasuna’s Sergio Herrera offered the opposite energy in Palma, collecting all his team’s kit and hand-delivering it to the stands, no tumbles required. In Valencia, Real Oviedo’s game at Mestalla was postponed 24 hours because of torrential rain, stranding fans. The club flew them home on the team charter. Lovely. Until a mum in Asturias saw the photo online. “Hey, Real Oviedo,” she wrote, “please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home.” He was supposed to be at his gran’s.
Celta’s fans and players painted their nails in solidarity with Borja Iglesias after he received homophobic abuse for doing the same. Zaragoza’s plight was summed up in the bluntest headline: “Zaragoza are going to shit.” Sadly accurate.
Down in the Copa del Rey, tiny Inter de Valdemoro from Spain’s ninth tier found themselves 8-0 down to Getafe with half an hour left. On came Borja Mayoral, finally given the chance to stick it to his older brother Kity, playing in Inter’s midfield. Mayoral scored twice more in an 11-0 demolition. Their goalkeeper, Busy, had the best name of the season and a long, painful night.
Granada’s Jorge Pascual produced the most memorable red card, dismissed for calling the linesman “fucking moustache-face” and, as the referee’s report carefully noted, “pointing to his upper lip to simulate said moustache”. Just to be sure the message landed.
Sevilla, under Matías Almeyda, turned hand-me-downs into a metaphor. “You haven’t got any trainers, you lack the clothes you need, and someone from your family says: ‘Would you like your grandad’s trousers?’ ‘Yes please, I could use them.’ ‘Would you like your cousin’s T-shirt?’ ‘Sure, give it to me’.” That was his team: patched together, oddly stylish.
Real Betis went for a “scratch and sniff” shirt made of oranges that smelled of oranges too. At least before kick-off. Dani Cárdenas became the handiest goalkeeper, saving a Kike García penalty and rescuing the Vallecas nets. Hugo Hard took “best teammate” for accepting the bench. “If I’m not a starter any more,” he said, “it’s because [Umar] Sadiq is playing like Pelé.”
Vedat Muriqi took “most modest” for laughing off a Lewandowski comparison before facing Barcelona. “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.” Cucho Hernández offered the funniest apology, saying sorry to Levante after scoring against them, thinking they were his former club. He had never played for them. He had played for Huesca. Same colours, different badge.
On the touchline, Luis Castro slipped over on his debut at Levante and then barely put a foot wrong, leading a miracle escape. At Real Sociedad, president Jokin Aperribay asked ChatGPT if Rino Matarazzo was a good coach. The answer: no. Four months later, Matarazzo had delivered a historic Copa del Rey.
Bordalás described himself as a pencil worn down to a stub. “They say I get results from not much, always find a way to get points, but this is like a pencil: you sharpen it and sharpen it, and keep sharpening it, and in the end there’s no pencil left.” Somehow, with just that stub and the rubbery bit, he still dragged Getafe into Europe.
At Sevilla, sporting director Víctor Orta complained that presenting new coach Luis García felt “like a funeral”. Six weeks later, García had resurrected them. Eder Sarabia, at Elche, said: “Some teams have bazookas and tanks, and we’re there fighting with a catapult.” They stayed up, catapult and all, and played good football doing it. Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini impressed again. Hansi Flick, of course, finished champion once more.
But the manager of the year? Villarreal-bound Iñigo Pérez. Through endless problems – no pitch to play on, nowhere to train, no hot water to wash with – he led Rayo Vallecano to their highest-ever league finish and their first final, never once losing his composure. “It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. Rayo proved him right.
As for the player of the year, plenty had a case. Levante’s Carlos Espí scored 10 goals in the last 14 games – the only matches he started all season – and might have been the single most decisive footballer in Spain. Levante fans joked about giving him the Ballon d’Or. Vedat Muriqi twirled a finger at his temple and called them crazy, but one more point and the Kosovan might have taken this award and survival.
Joan García’s “science fiction” save in the derby against Espanyol left Lamine Yamal gasping: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!” Yet the season still belonged to the teenager himself. Twenty-four goals, 11 assists in all competitions. A kid who said: “I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” and then played like he might just manage it.
The team of the season reflected that shift in power and personality: Joan García in goal for Barcelona; Marcos Llorente, Florian Lejeune, David Affengruber and Carlos Romero across the back; Fermín López, Luis Milla and Pablo Fornals in midfield; Lamine Yamal and Alberto Moleiro either side of Vedat Muriqi up front. A bench stacked with stories and stars: Aaron Escandell, Eric García, Pedri, Isi, Mikel Oyarzabal, Abde, Espí, Mbappé, Arda Güler, Tchouaméni, Griezmann and more.
Lamine Yamal started the season by claiming the No 10 shirt and the spotlight. He ended it with medals, scars and a flag in his hands, standing above a city that has already decided he is its next great obsession.
The question now is not whether he can carry that weight. It is how far he plans to take it.
