Lamine Yamal is approaching the Lionel Messi zone: The comparisons are impossible to ignore

Something is happening with Lamine Yamal.

The Lionel Messi comparisons have followed Yamal from the moment he burst onto the scene, and they’ve often been unhelpful. Why burden a teenager with the legacy of the greatest of all time? Yet with every passing year of Yamal’s fledgling career, Messi as a reference point becomes increasingly unavoidable.

Messi was (obviously) brilliant before Pep Guardiola’s arrival at Barcelona in the summer of 2008.

The Argentinian had already lifted the Champions League trophy, had won multiple league titles and finished runner-up on the Ballon d’Or podium that year – coming second to Cristiano Ronaldo would help set the stage for a rivalry that would define the next 15 or so years.

The talent was unmistakable. It was clear from the manner in which Chelsea’s Asier del Horno resorted to kicking Messi out of a Champions League game when he was still a teenager.

You only had to watch him in La Liga, or hear Ronaldinho talk about him, to realise this was something different. A freakish prodigy, spoken about in the same breath as Ronaldo Nazario and Diego Maradona.

Messi was getting better with every season, notching 13 goals and 16 assists for a flawed, third-place and trophyless Barcelona side in 2007-08.

Then came Guardiola. In 2008-09, Messi took the biggest leap of his career, transforming into an unstoppable force of nature and arguably the best footballer we’d ever seen. He was the undisputed star of a Barcelona side that swept to the treble.

“Messi is the best player in the world by a distance, he’s the No.1,” Xavi Hernandez said ahead of the 2009 Champions League final.

“There is nobody at all like him. I don’t want to compare him to anyone because it’ll just damage the other player if I do. For me Messi is easily the best.

“All due respect to Ronaldo and all the other great players on the world stage, but Messi is proving that he is better than ­everyone else.

“The world can see that he’s the boss. I’ve never seen anything like it. In a game, in the training sessions, never. I wouldn’t swap him for any player.”

Yamal is a few years ahead of where Messi was at the same age, but he looks to be approaching that same inflection point.

Not only is the La Masia wonderkid younger, but these early breakthrough years are arguably even more eye-catching than Messi’s were. He’s already won a European Championship and World Cup, and played a starring role in back-to-back La Liga title triumphs.

Rewatch his performance against Inter in the Champions League semi-finals, when he was only 17, and you’re struck with the same sense of otherworldly awe as Messi when he scored his first career hat-trick against Real Madrid. He’s already finished runner-up in the Ballon d’Or, and you’re once again left with a feeling of inevitability.

“He has the quality to win the Ballon d’Or. The question is when he will win it,” Feyenoord manager Giovanni Van Bronckhorst told reporters ahead of Yamal’s Champions League masterclass.

But there’s been a gap between what Yamal has achieved and the output you’d associate with the very best. He only scored one goal at the World Cup. His numbers have been good, outstanding for a player of his age, but they’re some way off prime Messi, or peak-age superstars like Harry Kane or Kylian Mbappe. He has not (yet) found himself registering goals or assists as a matter of course every single week.

Until now. Three braces in as many La Liga games suggest we might be witnessing a great leap forward unfold before our eyes.

It almost feels trite – taking away some of the joy – to invoke statistics when it comes to discussing such brilliance. To paraphrase Pep Guardiola: just watch him. That gives you a sense of the magic that an algorithm rating out of 10 never can.

Except this is football in 2026, and those scores are genuinely a pretty good benchmark for what you’re watching.

Consider Messi. He averaged above an 8.00 rating from WhoScored in every season between 2009-10 and 2020-21. Twelve years of unreal dominance, with the numbers simply reflecting what we were seeing with our eyes.

To put that in context, only one player in the whole of La Liga – Lamine Yamal, with 8.23 – managed that last season. And Yamal’s score was still lower than Messi’s worst of the lot: 8.34 in 2013-14.

Yamal’s scores this season? 7.87. 10. 9.89. 8.69. That averages out at 8.63 in La Liga. Not to mention another perfect 10 against Feyenoord. In other words, he’s in the Messi zone.

The usual caveats apply. It’s early days, and it’s a long season.

The context is a bit different, of course. There is no Guardiola coming in, no epoch-defining tactical revolution. But there is steady progress, growing chemistry with the likes of Raphinha and Fermin Lopez, and additions like Rodri that should make Barcelona stronger while giving Yamal the foundations to take centre stage.

We’ll see how the season unfolds. But watch Yamal shine as Barca routinely put four or five past the opposition, and it’s impossible to suppress that fizzing feeling you got way back when with Messi in Guardiola’s team: that we’re witnessing the start of something special. Something historic.

So watch it. Drink it in. You’re not going to want to miss what comes next.