Messi plans grandest exit; Yamal, who Argentine bathed as a baby, to announce he is the future

It is more than a little crazy Lionel Messi was once photographed bathing a baby Lamine Yamal and now they are meeting in the 2026 Fifa World Cup final.

You genuinely can’t make this stuff up.

Spain’s prodigy Yamal keeps breaking Messi’s records. The latest is his first World Cup final comes at 19. He will take the field at New York New Jersey Stadium on Sunday (9pm SA time) six days after celebrating his birthday in Dallas on Monday. He had cake in the morning, he and fellow birthday boy Víctor Muñoz, 23, ran a gauntlet of back slaps at training and Yamal addressed a press conference in the afternoon where he fearlessly told the world’s press he felt no pressure for the next day’s semifinal and France should fear Spain.

Spain went on to squeeze the tournament favourites out with anaconda-like constriction in a 2-0 win. Yamal, of course, played his part.

His coach, Luis de la Fuente, stressed ahead of the semi that his best match at this World Cup where he started slow, coming in from an injury, is yet to come. It might be in the final.

Yamal has one goal in the tournament but statistically has made a sizeable contribution as Spain’s main advantage creator in attack and crucially won the penalty against France that broke the deadlock. He was all over the field, even defensively, in one notable moment the Barcelona youngster tracking back to stop Real Madrid rival Kylian Mbappé with a sliding challenge.

The young left wing born to a father of Moroccan extraction and mother who moved to Spain from Equatorial Guinea notched another remarkable statistic reaching the final. Yamal has started all 12 matches across this World Cup and Euro 2024 — where he smashed more records, becoming the youngest player to play in a European Championship (16 years and 338 days), youngest to score and youngest to win, having turned 17 by a day when Spain beat England in the final. Spain have won every one of those 12 games. According to stats site Opta, no European player matches that 100% win record across the two major tournaments when starting.

By reaching the final at 19 and six days, Yamal has smashed another of Messi’s marks, who was 27 when he played in his first World Cup final in Brazil in 2014, where Argentina lost 1-0 to Germany. Yamal is the third-youngest ever — Pelé was 17 in 1958, Italy’s Giuseppe Bergomi 18 in 1982 and Mbappé takes fourth place at 19 and 203 days in 2018.

Messi is at the other end of the time scale. In another piece of symmetry with Yamal, Messi’s birthday was also at the World Cup, turning 39 on June 24.

The 2022 World Cup, where the little genius finally lifted the trophy after a stirring run to the final and classic match-up there against the France inspired by Mbappé’s hat-trick, was supposed to be the then 35-year-old’s grand international finale. He kept scoring and performing for Inter Miami in Major League Soccer (MLS) and changed his mind.

Now Messi, joint-top scorer going into the final with Mbappé on eight goals, can have an even more spectacular culmination. He could further write his name into immortality and challenge Diego Maradona for deity-like status in Argentina if he and his teammates in coach Lionel Scaloni’s superb combination lift the trophy again.

The photos where Messi bathed an infant Yamal in a plastic baby’s bathtub were shot in 2007. They were taken by Joan Monfort, freelancing for the Associated Press. The photoshoot was part of a Unicef charity drive partnering Barcelona sports paper Diario Sport, targeting working-class and immigrant families to enter a raffle to have their picture taken at the Camp Nou with a player.

Messi, born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1987, was the child diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency, who Barcelona took to Spain at 13 and provided with medical treatment, debuting at 17 and growing into the superstar who rivalled and eventually arguably eclipsed Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo as the greatest player in the world. He has won everything since his senior debut at the great Catalan club in 2004 — 10 La Liga titles, Ligue 1 twice, the MLS once, the Uefa Champions League four times, Copa America twice with Argentina. Winning the World Cup settled the contest with Ronaldo and history is already placing the Argentine somewhere in the vicinity of football deities Pelé and Maradona.

Yet this youngster in the Spain kit who inherited Messi’s No 10 jersey at Barça — he wears 19 for La Roja — has been eating up the Argentinian’s stats. And given how spectacular Messi’s career is, that’s fairly remarkable.

From being spotted for his extraordinary dribbling and spatial skills from just six, Yamal shattered age group records progressing at Barça’s famed La Masia academy after joining at seven, then at senior level. He played just seven minutes of one game in their 2022-23 La Liga title campaign, but in doing so became Barcelona’s youngest player (15 years, 9 months, 16 days), then the youngest La Liga scorer (16 years, 2 months, 25 days), youngest to reach 100 appearances and this year the youngest three-time champion.

He is Spain’s youngest player and scorer, debuting at 16 years and 57 days and scoring in a 7-1 Euro 2024 qualifying win against Georgia in September 2023. At 17 he became the youngest Ballon D’Or nominee in 2024 and youngest runner-up at 18 to France’s Ousmane Dembélé in 2025.

In 2022 Mbappé-inspired France and Messi-driven Argentina went at each other superbly in one of the great, if not the greatest, finals, which was eventually decided on penalties. In 2026 the clash between the tough Argentinians, with King Messi at times happy to pull the strings from further back rather than tearing through defences as in his youth, and the Spain of Crown Prince Yamal, looks set to be as absorbing.