Lamine Yamal: The Prodigy of Barcelona's Season

Lamine Yamal began the season wearing a crown and ended it carrying a flag.

On the very first night of 2025-26, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager handed the shirt of Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi – took the last kick against Mallorca and buried it. His first goal as an adult. His own coronation. La Liga’s title race opened with a prodigy lifting his arms to the sky.

Nine months later, as the champions’ bus crawled through Barcelona, that same prodigy stood on the top deck and raised a Palestine flag above his head. Eighteen years old. Old enough, Hansi Flick said, to make his own decisions. Old enough to carry the weight of a club, a shirt, a cause. Old enough to admit, when the noise finally dipped, that he had spent part of the season staring into an “internal abyss”.

He came out of it with a third league title. Flick, the father figure who revealed that his own dad had died on the morning Barça clinched the championship and chose to share that grief with his “other family”, had his second. Someone asked him if he had ever felt so much love. “No, never,” he replied.

Barcelona run away, Madrid fall apart

Barcelona effectively finished the job with seven games to go, dismantling Espanyol and gliding towards the line. Lamine Yamal raced down the pitch that day, arms spread wide like Usain Bolt easing away from the pack. The league was as good as done.

The maths caught up in week 35, in a clásico that carried a weight it had not borne for 94 years. A title decided in the eternal duel. Three days after a dressing-room fight between Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni left Real Madrid’s vice‑captain in hospital with “craniofacial trauma” and stitches, Marcus Rashford landed the punch that really finished them. Barcelona, nomads with three different home grounds, had won in every single one. This clásico was their 11th consecutive victory, their 23rd in 25 league games since the previous meeting, 600km away.

The contrast with October was brutal. Back then, Barcelona looked brittle, their coach warning that “ego kills success” as Rayo Vallecano exposed “The Flick Line” and Sevilla sliced them apart. Madrid beat them 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabéu to go five points clear. Jude Bellingham dismissed Lamine Yamal’s words as “cheap talk”, posting Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation” for emphasis. Dani Carvajal waved the jibber-jabber gesture at the teenager. Madrid seemed to own the moment.

They had their own problems. Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left that night and Xabi Alonso insisted he wanted to focus on what mattered. It turned out that was exactly what mattered. With the coach increasingly isolated, the cracks widened. The authority he thought had arrived too early evaporated even faster.

Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico finally ended Alonso’s uneasy spell “in charge”. He trudged to the Club World Cup, then out of the job. Álvaro Arbeloa arrived and spoke the language of empathy, offering his grey sofa as a confessional and doughnuts as rewards. It sounded nice. It didn’t work. “I’m not Gandalf,” he said, and the magic never came. By the time Madrid faced Barcelona again in May, they were out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and close to being out of their minds. Divided, exhausted, desperate for it all to end, they left that clásico 12 points back with nine to play. Another season empty-handed.

Kylian Mbappé? He was simply gone, slipping off to Sicily while the ship listed. “Let’s go Madrid!” he posted, but only once they were already 2-0 down.

Two days later, Florentino Pérez stepped in front of the cameras for the first time in more than a decade and delivered a rambling, Trumpian performance that clarified nothing and somehow explained everything. At least, in his mind, he had found the source of Madrid’s problems: the newspaper ABC. He cancelled his subscription.

A title, but no European crown

Barcelona were champions, the trophy presented on the night they actually won it, paraded through the city with the Super Cup perched alongside. The European Cup, the one they wanted most, stayed out of reach. Madrid’s, too. Their best nights still came in that competition, but they fell short again.

Villarreal and Athletic Club never escaped the new league phase. The only place Paris Saint‑Germain failed to score all season? San Mamés, roaring as always. Atlético Madrid, who had knocked Barcelona out of both domestic cups and long since surrendered the league, went furthest in Europe. Even that ended in frustration. Arsenal eliminated them in their first Champions League semi-final in 10 years, then Real Sociedad broke their hearts in their first Copa del Rey final in 13, winning on penalties.

The final act in Seville was pure football theatre. Real Sociedad’s backup goalkeeper saved the decisive spot-kick and kissed a former ballboy on the cheek before the full-back ran up and converted the winner. Álvaro Odriozola, who did not play a minute, insisted he would not swap this for “anything in humanity”.

Next season, Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and Villarreal return to the Champions League, joined by Betis, who claimed Spain’s new fifth spot. Below them, cup winners Real Sociedad head back into Europe with Celta Vigo and Getafe.

Getafe’s story came out of the trenches. They started the season with just 13 first‑team players, two of them goalkeepers. At halfway they sat in the relegation zone, so short of options they used full-back Allan Nyom up front. José Bordalás, a man who has inflicted some of the league’s ugliest evenings on others, admitted: “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.” Four low-profile loan signings in January turned the squad, not the style. Getafe finished seventh with the second-fewest goals, the lowest possession, the fewest shots and the most fouls in the division. Bordalás called it sharpening a pencil until there was almost nothing left. Somehow, there was just enough.

A relegation fight that never ended

On the final day, as Getafe’s players and staff spilled across the pitch in celebration, a cluster of red shirts lingered in the chaos. Osasuna’s players stayed out there, phones, iPads and radios in hand, waiting for the other scores that would decide their future. Their captain called it “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”. When safety finally arrived, they jumped around with Getafe fans and Nyom, who refused to disappear into the dressing room until he knew they were safe. “It’s been … weird,” coach Alesio Lisci said. It had. Osasuna had already celebrated survival a month earlier after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla. They never imagined they would have to escape again. In the end, others saved them.

It was that kind of season. The top remained relatively fixed, the same five or six teams circling each other. The bottom was chaos. Sudden collapses. Wild revivals. Biblical resurrections. Only Real Oviedo, back in the top flight for the first time in 24 years, sank early. No room for romance, even with Santi Cazorla finally making his Primera debut for the club he joined at eight and rejoined at 38 on the minimum wage. Oviedo scored just nine home goals, burned through three managers and went down with more coaches than away wins.

Everywhere else, the drop felt inches away. In a league where good sides turned bad overnight and strugglers suddenly looked brilliant, the gap between Europe and oblivion stayed tiny. Nine clubs went into the penultimate round trying to avoid the last two relegation spots. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia dragged themselves clear, but five teams reached the final day still entangled.

At Montilivi, Elche and Girona played for their lives. All or nothing. A late shot from Thomas Lemar crashed off the bar, the thin line between Girona’s salvation and the fall. Four points from their last eight games condemned them. Two years after pushing for the title and one season on from the Champions League, Girona went down with 41 points – a total that would have kept them up in any other season this decade.

Mallorca joined them, sunk by a three-team head-to-head mini-league with Osasuna and Levante, all tied on 42. They dropped despite having a striker who scored 23 league goals, a mark not reached in 26 years.

“This hurts,” said coach Martín Demichelis. “Football has been cruel,” added Girona’s Míchel Sánchez. Elche’s Eder Sarabia looked around at the wreckage and simply said: “This league was really crazy.” His team, at least, had survived.

Rayo’s heartbreak and a season of little stories

There was one last act, saved for the end. Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, reached their first European final, in the Conference League, and took their travelling rebellion to Germany. They could not bring the trophy home. In a way, that felt wrong. In another, it felt exactly like them.

At the end in Leipzig, a banner hung in the stand, cutting through the disappointment. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat,” it read. For Rayo, that meant more than silver.

Elsewhere, the season pulsed with side-stories that coloured the campaign.

Rayo’s president, Raúl Martín Presa, managed to call his own fans “drunk, brainless and idle”. Jesús Martínez, owner of doomed Oviedo, declared in week eight: “Don’t talk to me about just avoiding relegation; talk to me about European places,” two days after sacking the coach who had kept them safe. By the end of that week, Oviedo were in the bottom three. They never escaped.

San Mamés delivered the best atmosphere of the year and Athletic weren’t even playing. Euskadi and Palestine were. Atlético fans, still hoarding pandemic toilet rolls, hurled them into the air to create a spectacular paper storm at the Metropolitano, Sevilla supporters copying them days later. UEFA and La Liga responded as they know best: fines.

Rayo’s players belted out “A Pirate’s Life” with the CD Yuncos squad they had just beaten. Real Sociedad’s Copa del Rey party blurred into a hangover from another planet: a final that ended after 2am, a hotel disco starting at 2.39am, taxis to a club at 4.45am, a bus to the airport at 10.15am with no sleep and duty-free cracked open on board. The next afternoon, still reeling, they had to prepare for a league game. The opponent? Getafe, of course.

Lionel Messi slipped silently into the Camp Nou one cold Sunday night in November, just another fan in the dark. Somewhere else, a Betis supporter desperate for Cédric Bakambu’s shirt tumbled over a barrier and landed at the striker’s feet. Bakambu looked baffled and walked away. No shirt. No glory. In Palma, Osasuna goalkeeper Sergio Herrera did the opposite, gathering his teammates’ entire kit and hand-delivering it into the stands.

In Valencia, torrential rain pushed Oviedo’s game at Mestalla back 24 hours, stranding fans. The club flew them home on the team charter. A lovely gesture, until a mother in Asturias saw the photo and recognised her son. “Please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home,” she wrote. He was supposed to be at his grandmother’s.

Celta fans and players painted their nails in solidarity with Borja Iglesias after he received homophobic abuse. El Periódico de Aragón ran the bluntest headline of the year: “Zaragoza are going to shit.” They were.

Tiny Inter de Valdemoro, from Spain’s ninth tier, found themselves eight goals down to Getafe in the Copa del Rey when Borja Mayoral came on and scored twice more, finally enjoying his moment to hammer big brother Kity in midfield. Their goalkeeper, Busy – the name said it all that night – picked the ball out of his net 11 times.

Granada’s Jorge Pascual collected the season’s most memorable red card for calling the linesman “fucking moustache-face” and, as the referee’s report carefully recorded, pointing to his own upper lip “to simulate said moustache”. Some offences need visual aids.

Sevilla’s Matías Almeyda described his team’s improvised wardrobe as if they were dressing from relatives’ wardrobes: grandad’s trousers, cousin’s T-shirt, whatever they could find. Real Betis unveiled a scratch-and-sniff shirt made of oranges and smelling of oranges too. At least before kick-off.

Cucho Hernández apologised after scoring against Levante, a respectful gesture to his “former club”. Only he had never played for Levante. He had played for Huesca. Same colours, wrong team.

The men on the touchline

On the benches, a cast of coaches turned chaos into something close to art.

Luis Castro literally fell on his backside on his Levante debut, slipping as he tried to return the ball, then spent the rest of the season leading a survival miracle. At Real Sociedad, president Jokin Aperribay typed Rino Matarazzo’s name into ChatGPT to see if he was a good fit. The answer came back: no. Four months later, La Real had a historic Copa del Rey.

Bordalás, with his half-squad and half-pencil, dragged Getafe into Europe. Luis García walked into a funereal Sevilla presentation and raised them in six weeks. Eder Sarabia, at Elche, said: “Some teams have bazookas and tanks, and we’re there fighting with a catapult.” His catapult stayed up and played. Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini quietly did what they always do: improve teams.

And then there was Iñigo Pérez. Villarreal-bound now, he took Rayo Vallecano through a season without a stable pitch, without a proper training ground, sometimes without hot water. He still led them to their highest-ever finish and a first major final. “It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. For Rayo, it was.

Hansi Flick, champion again, stood among them with the biggest prize of all.

The year of Lamine Yamal

On the pitch, the individual honours belonged to the teenager who started the story. Carlos Espí, with 10 goals in his 14 starts for Levante, might have been the most decisive player in the relegation battle. Fans jokingly demanded the Ballon d’Or for him. Vedat Muriqi, who might have saved Mallorca with one more point, twirled his finger at his temple and called them crazy.

Joan García, Barcelona’s goalkeeper, produced the save of the season against Espanyol, a stop Lamine Yamal described as “science fiction” before adding: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!”

Yet the player of the year had to be Lamine Yamal himself. Twenty-four goals and 11 assists in all competitions. A teenager shouldering the No 10 shirt of Messi and making it look light. “I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” he said. The sentence revealed the weight on his shoulders. The numbers showed how often he carried it.

The team of the season reflected that balance of stars and survivors: Joan García in goal for Barcelona; Marcos Llorente, Florian Lejeune, David Affengruber and Carlos Romero across the back; Fermín López, Luis Milla and Pablo Fornals in midfield; Lamine Yamal, Vedat Muriqi and Alberto Moleiro in attack. A bench stacked with names from Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético, Real Sociedad, Elche, Betis, Osasuna, Villarreal, Espanyol, Celta and Levante, and even Mbappé, watching a Spanish season that moved on without him.

La Liga closed with Barcelona on top again, Madrid searching for answers, Rayo dreaming in defeat, and a teenager with a crown and a flag standing at the centre of it all.

The question now is not whether Lamine Yamal is ready for this league. It is whether this league is ready for what comes next.