The Messi comparisons don’t really go anywhere at this stage. But they have two obvious things in common. First, the relationship with the ball, the ability to make it come alive and do weirdly personalised things. I was there in Munich last July when he decided to just stop in the middle of the most packed and pressed tournament game, skip away from Adrien Rabiot like a child teasing a friendly dog, then shoot in a strange parabola, the ball hanging, dipping and arcing into a spot that hadn’t seemed to exist as a serious option.
And second, there’s the same relationship with time and space, a kind of fly-vision, the ability to see it all in slow motion. Lamine Yamal’s goal on Wednesday night involved skating through an invisible channel of air, then doing something impossible with his foot mid-stride, casually shifting the point of contact to make scoring from a closed, front-on angle seem not just possible but entirely logical.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/football/2025/may/03/lamine-yamal-barcelona-dopamine-hit-footballer
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