Lamine Yamal: A Season of Triumph and Transformation

Lamine Yamal’s season began with a crown and ended with a flag.

On the opening night of 2025-26, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager given the most haunted shirt in football – stood over the final kick against Mallorca. Kubala’s number. Suárez’s, Maradona’s, Rivaldo’s, Ronaldinho’s, Messi’s. The number Spain coach Luis de la Fuente had said belonged to a boy “touched by God’s wand”.

He buried it. His first goal as an adult. Arms spread, he staged his own coronation. La Liga’s title race started with a proclamation.

Nine months later, as Barcelona’s bus crawled through a city drenched in blaugrana, that same teenager leaned over the rail of the top deck and raised a Palestine flag. Eighteen years old, champion again, and old enough, Hansi Flick said, to make his own decisions. Old enough, too, to admit the season had taken him into an “internal abyss” before he emerged with his third league title.

On the bus, the coach who had become a father figure stood not far away. Flick’s own father had died the morning Barcelona won the league. He chose to share that grief with what he called his other “family”. Asked if he had ever felt so loved, he didn’t hesitate. “No, never,” he replied.

Barcelona’s relentless march

The title was effectively decided with seven games left, across the city at Espanyol. Lamine Yamal sprinted towards the finish line like a sprinter easing clear of the pack, arms stretched like Usain Bolt, already seeing the tape.

They made it mathematical in week 35. A clásico, of all things, ended the championship for the first time in 94 years. The build-up had been toxic. Three days earlier, a fight in Real Madrid’s dressing room between Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni had sent the vice-captain to hospital with “craniofacial trauma” and stitches. When the whistle blew at this one, it was Marcus Rashford who landed the decisive punch.

Barcelona had played in three different homes and won every game in all of them. This clásico was their 11th straight victory, their 23rd win in 25 league matches since the previous meeting between the two giants, 600km away. A team once searching for itself had turned into a machine.

It had not always looked like that.

Back in late October, Barcelona’s coach had warned that “ego kills success”. Rayo Vallecano had found the weak seam in Flick’s structure, Sevilla had cut through them, and Madrid had won 2-1 at the Bernabéu to go five points clear. That night Jude Bellingham dismissed Lamine Yamal’s words as “cheap talk” and posted Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation” to twist the knife. Dani Carvajal mocked him with the classic jibber-jabber gesture.

Madrid, though, had their own noise to manage. Vinícius Júnior stormed off with 18 minutes left in that game, and Xabi Alonso tried to steer attention away from the drama, insisting he wanted to focus on what mattered. It turned out that this was what mattered. The dressing-room cracks widened, then split.

Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico closed the brief spell Alonso had spent “in charge”, a period he felt had started too early and finished too early as he trudged towards the Club World Cup. He did not last. Nor did the calm.

Álvaro Arbeloa arrived and tried to be the soothing presence. He said all the right things, but they were the wrong right things. He invited players to bare their souls on his grey sofa, rewarded them with doughnuts when they played well. They rarely did. “I’m not Gandalf,” he insisted. The magic never came.

By the time the rivals met again in May, Madrid were already out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and very nearly out of their minds. The squad was divided, exhausted, desperate for it all to end. Ninety minutes later, it did. They left the clásico 12 points behind, with only nine left to play, and empty-handed again, just as they had been the previous season. Kylian Mbappé was nowhere near it, already in Sicily, posting “Let’s go Madrid!” when they were 2-0 down.

Two days later, Florentino Pérez broke a decade-long silence with a press conference that lurched from grievance to grievance. He said little that made sense and yet somehow laid everything bare. Madrid’s problem? The president had found it. The ABC newspaper. He cancelled his subscription.

Barcelona, meanwhile, were champions. The trophy was handed over on the night they actually won it, then paraded around the city. The Super Cup joined them on board, though the European Cup, the one they wanted most, did not. Nor did it go to Madrid, whose best evenings still came in Europe but not often enough.

Villarreal and Athletic never made it out of the Champions League league phase. The only place champions PSG failed to score was San Mamés. Atlético Madrid, who had knocked Barcelona out of both domestic cups and dropped out of the league race long before the finish, went closest in Europe. They reached their first semi-final in a decade before Arsenal pushed them aside, then lost a Copa del Rey final for the first time in 13 years, Matarazzoed by Real Sociedad on penalties.

The final act was pure football theatre. A backup goalkeeper made the decisive save, then kissed the cheek of a former ballboy who stepped up and buried the winner. Full-back Álvaro Odriozola, who did not even play, declared he would not swap this for “anything in humanity”.

Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and third-placed Villarreal will all return to the Champions League next season, joined by Betis, who claimed the new fifth spot. Below them, Copa winners Real Sociedad head back to Europe with Celta Vigo and Getafe, whose coach Pepe Bordalás insisted their qualification would “go down in football history”.

That might be overstating it. But it was certainly a story.

Getafe started the season with only 13 first-team players, two of them goalkeepers. At halfway, they were in the relegation zone and so desperate they used full-back Allan Nyom as a centre-forward. Bordalás, a man who has inflicted plenty of suffering on others over the years, said: “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.” In January they signed four little-known loanees. By May they were seventh.

They did it their way: second fewest goals scored, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. Brutal, basic, and brutally effective.

Chaos at the bottom

Somewhere amid Getafe’s pitch invasion on the final day, red shirts were scattered through the blue. Osasuna’s players, fighting to avoid relegation, stayed out on the grass, waiting for other results to finish, glued to iPads, phones and radios. Their captain called those minutes “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”.

When safety finally came, they exploded. They bounced with Getafe’s fans and with Nyom, who insisted he would not head for the dressing room until he knew Osasuna were safe. “It’s been … weird,” said coach Alesio Lisci. It had. A month earlier, they had celebrated survival after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla. They never imagined they would need to escape again. In the end, others saved them.

It was that kind of season. The top was stable, the same five or six teams circling the summit all year. The bottom was wild. Sudden plunges, improbable resurrections, salvation snatched and lost in a weekend.

Only Real Oviedo went quietly. Back in the first division after 24 years, with Santi Cazorla finally making his Primera debut for the club he had joined at eight and rejoined at 38 on the minimum wage, they had no room for romance. They scored nine home goals all season, changed managers three times and won fewer away games than that. They went down early, without a twist.

Everywhere else, the fight was vicious. In a league where good teams turned bad overnight and bad ones became brilliant for a month, the line between Europe and oblivion was barely there. Nine clubs entered the penultimate round still trying to avoid the last two relegation spots. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia escaped then. Five remained on the final day, their fates tangled.

Elche and Girona met at Montilivi in a straight shootout. All or nothing. A late shot from Thomas Lemar cannoned off the bar, the margin between Girona staying up or falling. They took only four points from their last eight matches. Two years ago they had challenged for the title. Last season they played Champions League football. This time they dropped with 41 points, a total that would have kept them up in any other season this decade.

Mallorca went with them, undone by a three-way mini-league tiebreaker with Osasuna and Levante after all three finished on 42 points. They had a striker who scored 23 league goals, a mark unmatched in 26 years. It still was not enough.

“This hurts,” said coach Martín Demichelis. “Football has been cruel,” admitted Girona’s Míchel Sánchez. Elche’s Eder Sarabia shook his head and called it “really crazy”. But he had survived. That was the only truth that mattered.

Rayo’s almost-perfect ending

There was still one story left, saved for last. Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, the neighbourhood side that never quite fits and never wants to, reached their first European final, in the Conference League. They could not bring the trophy back from Germany.

Which, in a way, felt wrong. And yet, because it was Rayo, felt absolutely right.

In Leipzig, at the end, a banner stretched across their end said what a piece of silverware never could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat.” It was all there: defiance, belonging, the sense that the journey meant more than the medal.

Unless, of course, you actually win one of these.

The season’s best and worst

Most charming president

• Rayo’s Raúl Martín Presa, who chose to describe his own fans as “drunk, brainless and idle”. A relationship defined in one line.

Most optimistic owner

• “Don’t talk to me about just avoiding relegation; talk to me about European places,” Oviedo owner Jesús Martínez said in week eight, two days after sacking the coach who had taken them up and kept them safe so far. Forty-eight hours later, Oviedo were in the bottom three. They never climbed out.

Best atmosphere

• San Mamés, of course. The surprise was that Athletic weren’t playing. Euskadi and Palestine were.

Best tifo-type thing

• Those pandemic toilet-roll hoards finally found a purpose. Atlético fans turned the Metropolitano into the Monumental with a bog-roll shower, Sevilla’s supporters copying them days later. The response from Uefa and La Liga was predictable. Fines all round.

Best post-match singalong

• Rayo again, roaring through “A Pirate’s Life” with the CD Yuncos players they had just beaten, a lower-league crossover no one knew they needed.

Best party – and worst hangover

• Imagine winning the Copa del Rey for only the fourth time in your history. Kick-off at 10pm, extra-time, penalties, you leave the stadium at 2am. The hotel disco starts at 2.39am, taxis to a club at 4.45am, then the bus to the airport at 10.15am, still without sleep, duty-free cracked open on the plane. One of the liveliest shouts: “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time.” So they do. That day, the next, the one after that, circling the city on an open-top bus, drinking in the sun and the adoration. Then they stumble into training the following afternoon, still in a state, to prepare for a game they just want to get through. And someone tells them: lads, it’s Getafe.

Most nostalgic fan

• Lionel Messi, slipping silently into the Camp Nou one cold Sunday night in November, alone in the stands where he once owned every blade of grass.

Most brilliantly unexpected fan

• Wait, what?!

(Unanswered questions are sometimes the best ones.)

Unluckiest fan

• At the end of Betis’s 3-0 win over Real Mallorca, a supporter desperate for Cédric Bakambu’s shirt hurdled down the stand, flipped over the barrier and landed at the forward’s feet. Perfect entry. No reward. Bakambu simply stared, bemused, and walked away. Somewhere, Sergio Herrera smiled – the Osasuna goalkeeper had once gathered his entire team’s kit and hand-delivered it to the stands in Palma, no pratfalls, no broken bones.

Naughtiest fan

• Oviedo’s game at Mestalla was postponed 24 hours by torrential rain, leaving travelling supporters stranded in Valencia. The club stepped in, flying them home on the team charter. A lovely gesture. Until a mum in Asturias saw the photo online and recognised one of the passengers. “Hey, Real Oviedo,” she wrote, “please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home.” He was supposed to be at his gran’s.

Best groomed fans

• When Celta striker Borja Iglesias received homophobic abuse for painting his nails, teammates and fans joined him, turning their nails into tiny canvases of solidarity.

Bluntest headline

• “Zaragoza are going to shit,” declared El Periódico de Aragón. Sadly, it was accurate.

Best starting XI

• This one. The arguments will rage anyway.

Best revenge

• In the Copa del Rey, tiny Inter de Valdemoro from Spain’s ninth tier trailed Getafe 8-0 with half an hour left. On came Borja Mayoral, finally given the chance to settle a score with his big brother Kity, playing in the opposition midfield. Mayoral scored twice more in an 11-0 demolition. Sibling rivalry, settled in double figures.

Best name

• Valdemoro’s goalkeeper that night? Busy. Very, very busy.

Toughest opponent

• Robert Navarro, stopped only by tinfoil. Literally tackled by it.

Best red card

• Granada’s Jorge Pascual, dismissed for calling the assistant “fucking moustache-face” and, as the referee’s report helpfully clarified, for “pointing to his upper lip to simulate said moustache”. Just in case the insult had been too subtle.

Best timing

• Well done, sunshine. Sometimes a moment says more than a whole season.

Best-dressed team

• Sevilla, embracing hand-me-down chic. “You haven’t got any trainers, you lack the clothes you need, and someone from your family says: ‘Would you like your grandad’s trousers?’” coach Matías Almeyda explained. “‘Yes please, I could use them.’ ‘Would you like your cousin’s T-shirt?’ ‘Sure, give it to me’.” A wardrobe built on generosity and improvisation.

Most sought-after shirt

• Madonna’s got it. Enough said.

Smelliest shirt

• Real Betis’s scratch-and-sniff jersey, made of oranges and smelling of oranges too. At least before kick-off.

Handiest goalkeeper

• Dani Cárdenas, who saved a Kike García penalty and then saved the Vallecas nets themselves. Quite literally.

Best teammate

• All Action Hero Hugo Hard, accepting his place on the bench without complaint. “If I’m not a starter any more,” he said, “it’s because [Umar] Sadiq is playing like Pelé.”

Most modest player

• When Barcelona trailed Mallorca’s visit as Robert Lewandowski versus Vedat Muriqi, the Kosovan laughed it off. “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.”

Best apology

• Betis striker Cucho Hernández scored against Levante and immediately apologised to his “former club”. Touching, except he had never played for Levante. He had played for Huesca, who just happen to wear the same colours.

The men on the touchline

Manager of the year? Take your pick.

Luis Castro literally fell on his backside on his debut, slipping as he tried to return the ball, but never again. He led a miracle at Levante. Real Sociedad president Jokin Aperribay asked ChatGPT whether Rino Matarazzo would be a good coach for his club. The answer came back “no”. Four months later, La Real had a historic Copa del Rey in their hands.

Bordalás, the man with the stub of a pencil, warned that his approach could only be sharpened so far before nothing was left. He still dragged Getafe into Europe with that stub and the rubber at the end. At Sevilla, sporting director Víctor Orta grumbled that presenting Luis García felt “like a funeral”. Six weeks later, the coach had resurrected them.

Eder Sarabia, at Elche, compared his team to soldiers with a catapult facing opponents armed with “bazookas and tanks”. They stayed up anyway, and did it playing decent football. Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini impressed again. Hansi Flick, of course, won the league once more.

But the award goes to Iñigo Pérez, now Villarreal-bound. Through all of Rayo’s problems – no pitch to play on, no proper place to train, no hot water to wash in – he guided them to their highest-ever league finish and a first European final. He did it with a rare dignity. “It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. This season proved him right.

The player who owned the year

Player of the year might just have been Carlos Espí. Levante’s striker scored 10 goals in his last 14 games – the only league matches he started all season – and dragged his team towards safety almost on his own. His impact was enormous, his case for the award oddly diminished by the fact that he had played so little.

When Levante fans demanded the Ballon d’Or for him, Vedat Muriqi twirled a finger at his temple and called them crazy. Yet one more point and Muriqi might have taken this prize himself, along with survival. Joan García, Barcelona’s goalkeeper, produced a “science fiction” save against Espanyol that Lamine Yamal greeted with: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!”

But the season belonged to Lamine Yamal. It almost had to.

“I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” he said, a sentence that revealed the weight on his shoulders. With 24 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, he still outshone everyone, especially in the decisive stretch when Barcelona sprinted for the line and never looked back.

His name sits on the No 10 now. The crown is his. The flag, too. The question, for the rest of Spain, is simple: how on earth do you take it off him next year?