The Baby Messi Bathed In 2007 Is Playing Him For The World Cup
A random charity raffle in 2007 just became the wildest subplot of the World Cup final.
Okay, so by now you’ve probably seen the photo. Twenty-year-old Messi, looking mildly terrified, holding a naked, soapy baby over a plastic tub like somebody just handed him a live grenade. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:
It’s funny. Normally that’s where a story like this ends.
Except that baby is Lamine Yamal. And Sunday, he’s lining up against the guy who bathed him. For the actual World Cup.
Here’s how that photo came to be.
People keep treating this like it was written in the stars somewhere, and honestly, the real version is funnier. It was a raffle.
Barcelona and UNICEF put together a charity calendar back in 2007, working with the local paper Diario Sport. Families around Mataró, a working-class city outside Barcelona, could enter for a shot at getting photographed with a Barca player. A family from the Rocafonda neighborhood won. Whoever was running the thing paired them with a young winger who’d just started cracking the first team.
You already know his name. The baby they brought, five months old, did not have a name anybody knew yet.
Messi genuinely had no idea what to do with him. Joan Monfort, the photographer who shot it, remembers it about how you’d picture it. “At the start, there was not much interaction,” he said. Messi walks out of the locker room expecting a normal photo op, and instead there’s a plastic tub full of water waiting for him with a baby in it. He just kind of rolled with it, and somewhere in there somebody got the shot everyone’s seen: Messi cradling Yamal in a towel, Yamal’s mom Sheila Ebana standing close by just in case things went sideways.
Then nobody thought about it again for seventeen years.
Fast forward to the 2024 Euros. There’s a 16-year-old winger out of Barcelona’s academy absolutely torching the tournament, becomes the youngest player and youngest scorer in Euros history, Spain wins the whole thing. That’s Yamal.
His dad posted the old photo during the run. Captioned it “the beginning of two legends.” That was basically it.
Even Monfort didn’t clock who the baby was until a former colleague told him it was blowing up online. “Nobody could imagine that this baby would be who he is now,” he said, and yeah, fair. Yamal’s still repping Rocafonda too, still throws up the 304 hand sign every time he scores, a nod to his old postal code. His dad’s from Morocco, his mom’s from Equatorial Guinea.
Trevor Noah brought it up on his World Cup watch party and put it about as well as anyone. “It’s crazy that it’s real. Imagine this moment.” Two guys who once shared bathwater, now sharing a World Cup.
Yamal turned 19 on Monday. The next day, he won the penalty, which his teammate Oyarzabal converted, sending Spain past France and into Sunday’s final. One day after that, in Atlanta, 39-year-old Messi did his usual thing: Argentina down 1-0 to England with the clock dying, and he set up both goals in the final seven minutes to drag his team through too.
When somebody showed Yamal the photo again after Spain clinched their spot, he just smiled. What else are you supposed to do?
I don’t want to oversell this into some grand old-king-new-king thing, because it’s not quite that clean. Messi isn’t handing anything over just by sharing a field with Yamal. And Yamal doesn’t need Messi’s blessing for anything; he’s already the youngest Ballon d’Or nominee ever. This final isn’t proving his case because his case is already made.
That photo is nineteen years old. "The beginning of two legends," his dad called it when he finally posted it. Sunday, we find out who actually gets to finish that sentence.
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