Six more years of Lamine Yamal: What can we expect?
Six more years of Lamine Yamal as a Barça player is reason to celebrate, and also to let the imagination fly. Although his career is only just beginning, at 17 he has already completed his second full season at the elite level. In that time he has helped win team trophies and collected prestigious individual honours such as the Golden Boy award, the Kopa Trophy and the Laureus Breakthrough Athlete of the Year.
Yamal himself is always more focused on the next victory than on talking about past ones, so the time has come to look ahead and wonder what he might achieve by 2031. Because if, in 2025, his name is already among the frontrunners for every major individual prize, it’s hard not to dream about what lies ahead.
Leading a winning team
In 2031 he’ll still be only 24, yet he will have spent eight seasons with a Barça side now building a project designed to win everything each year, with him as its figurehead. The blueprint is already taking shape: three domestic titles this season and a run to the Champions League semi-finals. Winning that competition is the big goal for the coming years. And to have a winning Barça, you need a star-mode Lamine Yamal, playing as he has been, but with the natural scope for improvement that an adolescent still enjoys.
What position in 2031?
Who knows whether his role on the pitch will evolve over time. Without inviting Messi-style comparisons, Yamal has begun his career as a right-sided winger, skilful, starting wide on the flank but often impacting through the middle. Perhaps that will never changes and he will simply go on to perfect everything a winger can do. Or perhaps he'll shift his position inward so that his zone of influence sits closer to goal? Who knows! Only time will tell.
More goals
Goals are precisely where his game has developed most at the business end of the season just ended. He scored in three of the last four matches, including El Clásico and the title-clincher away to Espanyol. Across all competitions he bagged 19 goals. That's a fine tally, but raising it would make him still more decisive.
Big dreams
Few of those 19 strikes were anything short of beautiful. The next step, surely, is to add more routine goals, the kind that don’t all belong on a Puskás shortlist, another award that might one day be his. Expecting even more from a player who disrupts and creates in every attack is a tall order, but if we’re going to dream, let’s dream big.