Young prince Lamine Yamal embracing the pressure of joining Barcelona’s kings | La Liga

Heavy is the head that wears the crown but Lamine Yamal is willing to wear it. Willing? He wants to, so there he was on Saturday night conducting his own coronation. With the last touch of Barcelona’s first game of 2025-26, their new No 10 – the player handed a six-year contract and the shirt Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi wore, the kid Spain coach Luis del la Fuente claimed was “touched by the wand of God”, the baby Messi bathed – scored against Real Mallorca.

It was his first goal as an adult; it was also exactly as you imagine it, Lamine Yamal scoring the Lamine Yamal goal that was Messi’s once. He had come in from the right and then, when the ball settled in the corner, went back out again. Where, stopping before the Son Moix stands, he lowered an invisible crown to his head, a statement of intent for this season and beyond.

An opening weekend that is not over yet – Elche play Betis on Monday night, Real Madrid face Osasuna on Tuesday – brought controversy despite the introduction of such vital changes to the refereeing structure as calling the officials by their first name and one surname not two, which meant José Luis Munuera got blamed in Mallorca instead of Munuera Montero. It brought victory for Rayo Vallecano, courtesy of comical errors from the Girona goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga, and for Getafe in Vigo where Christantus Uche went all original Ronaldo. It brought the capital’s other team to their knees, the new Atlético Madrid ending up like the old one, beaten 2-1 at Espanyol, whose coach Manolo González was once literally employed to park the bus and has never lost to Diego Simeone. And it brought old faces back, then defeated them both, promoted Real Oviedo losing at Villarreal and Levante at Alaves.

Above all, though, it brought three moments, three men. Because if there was a coronation in Son Moix on Saturday, a coming of age a month on from Lamine Yamal’s 18th birthday, the night after there was redemption at “the Cathedral” where Athletic Club’s Nico Williams was reconciled with the congregation. And the night before at the Estadio de la Ceramica there was, well, what would you call this? Some kind of perfection, perhaps? On Friday, aged 40, after 12 operations and 10 centimetres taken from his achilles, Santi Cazorla made his first appearance in primera for Oviedo, the club he always wanted to play for, the one he first joined at eight and rejoined at 38 on the minimum wage, finally taking them back to the first division 24 years later. And he did so against the team that made it all possible in the first place.

Some time in 2015 when he was in the midst of the injury that should have ended everything, skin repeatedly splitting open and infection seeping out, the operations endless and the days when he was ready to ditch it all countless, a part of his arm grafted on to his heel, a new tendon made with rolled-up hamstring, Cazorla was told to settle for being able to walk around his garden – and now he was. Thirty-thousand people were there to see it, all of them standing and applauding, some crying, most singing, as he went on to face Villarreal, where he played his first ever professional game, 22 years ago. Where he had played 333 more of them and where, he said, they had treated him “like their son”.

He had needed them to. Cazorla arrived at Villarreal as an 18-year-old in 2003, forced to leave home when Oviedo collapsed, relegated, dropping two tiers in one go, in debt, abandoned and on the verge of disappearing for ever. Just as the chance to make his debut might have come, a decade after he had arrived, it was taken away again. Villarreal came for him then, a shy, timid boy at the time. When Arsenal released him in 2018, assuming it was all over, they were there for him again, giving him place to train, to try to recover. Which, a stubborn so-and-so behind the smile, he did. He played 86 games and got another Spain call at 34.

There was just one thing left to do; the one thing he had always wanted to. So, having accepted the pain, ignored the advice to leave it, he returned to Oviedo on a mission: get them back to primera for the first time since 2001. It took two years, it took him scoring in the playoff semi-final and final too, but they made it. Where they returned gave it something extra: back among friends, at Cazorla’s other home, something healing about watching him heading on with 10 minutes left of a game that was already lost but for his club against one he helped make great. “This was very special,” Cazorla said.

Which was more than Nico Williams could say two nights later when he came off the San Mamés pitch in the 82nd minute of an extraordinary game, an ovation accompanying him to the bench. “I don’t even know how to describe this feeling,” Athletic’s winger said. He had gone off, the cramp clawing at his calves, having given everything. Athletic were on course to defeat Sevilla 3-2 and Williams had provided two assists, both brilliant, won the penalty from which he scored the other and hit a post. After a summer in which he had appeared on the verge of leaving for Barcelona only to stay, signing a 10-year contract, and in which the mural featuring him and his brother had been vandalised, he had needed this.

There was something healing here too, especially in the moment he scored the penalty, his brother Iñaki, who is something like his father too, standing there on the penalty spot with the ball under his arm and his hands on his hips, wearing the look of a parent waiting for their son to get home. All around San Mamés they chanted Nico’s name, demanding that he take it, so Nico smoothed down his hair and headed across. Iñaki handed him the ball and kissed him. Nico scored, and all was well with the world. All that was missing was a break in the cloud, a biblical ray of sunshine and heavenly music, El Correo wrote. “There’s a reason I stayed,” Nico said.

There had been a reason to go, too. Lots of them in fact, but one stood out: to play with his international teammate and newfound best mate, his other “brother” – a younger one this time. The third man to mark the opening weekend, the kid who reached a European Championship final at 16, the youngest Clásico goalscorer in history, a leader before his time and set to mark a generation, already the best in the world at 17.

Which is a stupid thing to say. Not just stupid; irresponsible. Another young player loaded with pressure, not allowed to just enjoy it. Just leave him alone. Have you forgotten Ansu Fati? But, well, it is Lamine Yamal who says it, Lamine Yamal who embraces it. It is there in the things he says: in him publicly leaving Adrien Rabiot in checkmate. Saying the Ballon d’Or will come, promising to be back for the Champions League, turning to the camera and declaring himself unstoppable. In the cheek, the glint in his eye; yes, the cockiness. The Instagram and a controversial birthday party too, and the bling and things which people throw at him, but he doesn’t care, willing to bring the attention on himself, not hide. “For as long I win, they can’t say anything,” he said, and mostly he does because if it’s there in what he says, it’s there in what he does too.

And it is genuinely hard to think of anyone who has done this, anyone who does do this. By the time he got the goal on Saturday night, the game was already done. Mallorca had been two goals and two men down since the first half, two men sent off. Then Lamine Yamal evaded two players, three, four, and bent the ball into the net. El Mundo Deportivo called it his own personal show. It was, Eric García said, the same goal he scores in training every game; it was the same seen in so many games already: the goal that won last year’s title and a candidate for this season’s best already. You know what’s coming but you still can’t stop it.

He doesn’t always take the same route, not least because his ability with the outside of his boot allows him to turn outwards too to drop the ball on a teammates’ head. Here, he had completed more dribbles than anyone, taken more shots and made more chances. He took the free-kicks, too – that’s new. He took two minutes to find a way through everyone and just five more to provide a perfect assist for Raphinha to score, done with an ease that made it look as if he was messing about. It was even his shot that led to the second goal soon after, Antonio Raíllo crumpling to the floor when he blocked it with his head and still down when Lamine Yamal found Ferran Torres who thumped it into the net. It was also an outrageous run from the halfway line to the edge of the area that ended with Mateu Morey bringing him down and getting the first of two red cards.

Lamine Yamal had wanted a goal of his own. When it finally came he had just been confronted by Jan Salas. “As soon as that happened, I knew he would score,” García said, laughing at the inevitability of it all. Angering him isn’t a good idea, which is what Pep Guardiola used to say about that guy, yet another echo found. “I didn’t like comparing Messi to Maradona, but Messi didn’t make it easy; I don’t like comparing Lamine to Messi but Lamine doesn’t make it easy either,” Jorge Valdano said. On the opening day of the season, an adult now and ready to reign, Lamine Yamal did it his way again, putting the ball in the net and the crown on his head.