It all started with the photograph.
Not the one that will be taken on Sunday. Not the handshake in the tunnel, the embrace after full-time or the image of one walking past the other with the World Cup.
It started with the photograph nobody knew mattered.
It is 2007. Lionel Messi is 20 years old, long-haired, slightly awkward and still several years away from becoming the gravitational centre of football. In front of him is a baby sitting inside a small plastic bathtub.
The baby is Lamine Yamal.
Messi does not know that, of course. Not really. Yamal certainly does not know who Messi is.
Photographer Joan Monfort is working on a charity calendar project involving Barcelona, UNICEF and the Spanish newspaper SPORT.
Yamal’s family, from Rocafonda in Mataro, had won a raffle that gave them the opportunity to participate in a photoshoot with a Barcelona player. By chance, the footballer paired with their infant son was Messi.
Monfort would later remember Messi being unsure of what exactly to do with a baby in a bathtub. There was no ceremony in the moment. No footballing prophecy. No dramatic music playing somewhere in the background.
Just a young footballer, a child and a camera.
Nearly two decades later, they will meet again.
This time there will be no bathtub between them.
There will be a World Cup. And only one of them can leave with it against their name.
If this were a movie, you would reject the script
There are stories that feel cinematic because we reshape them afterwards.
This one hardly requires any help.
Just imagine an ambitious filmmaker submitting this script.
The greatest footballer of one generation is randomly paired with a baby for a charity photoshoot.
The baby grows up to join the same academy. He becomes a left-footed phenomenon at the same club. He inherits the shirt the legend left behind at the club.
The older player leaves Barcelona just before the younger one arrives, their careers missing each other by inches.
Then, almost 20 years after the photograph, when the older man is 39 and the younger one 19, they finally meet on a football pitch.
Not in a friendly. Not in a Major League Soccer game. Not even in the Champions League.
In the World Cup final.
A producer would send it back. Too perfect. Too neat. Too unrealistic.
Yet football does not care for subtlety.
Argentina and Spain will meet in New Jersey with the greatest prize in the sport between them.
Messi is trying to lead Argentina to consecutive World Cups, something no country has achieved since Brazil in 1962.
Yamal is trying to help Spain complete an extraordinary tournament and add a second star to the one won in 2010.
Somewhere behind all this sits that one photograph. A picture taken long before either of their stories had truly begun.
Before Messi was Messi
Perhaps the strangest detail is that the baby was not the only unfinished person in the photograph.
Messi was not yet Messi. Not the Messi we understand now.
The young man leaning over that bathtub had never won the Ballon d’Or.
Pep Guardiola had not yet built Barcelona’s greatest side around him. He had not scored 91 goals in a calendar year, collected Champions Leagues or turned football’s record books into an absolute joke.
The heartbreak with Argentina had not happened either. No lost World Cup final in 2014. No repeated Copa America defeats. No temporary international retirement. No Maracana redemption. No Lusail.
When Messi held Yamal, the footballer who would eventually complete the sport had not even started.
That gives the photograph its real charm. It is easy to look at it now and see one legend blessing another. To imagine some mystical transfer of footballing genius from one left foot to the next.
That was not the truth.
The king leaves, the prodigal son enters
Messi and Lamine’s paths have remained interconnected ever since that photograph without ever properly crossing.
Messi spent the next 14 years becoming inseparable from Barcelona. Then came the brutal summer of 2021, when he was pushed out of the place he called home and continues to do so.
Two years later, another left-footed boy emerged.
Yamal did not arrive from Rosario. He came from Rocafonda, the multicultural working-class neighbourhood he continues to carry with him through the 304 postcode celebrated with his hands after goals.
He did not inherit Messi’s story. However, he walked into the boots that the great man had left behind.
The timing remains remarkable. Messi departed Barcelona just before Yamal’s senior career began. They belong to the same club mythology but never shared its present. One era closed its door moments before the next walked through it.
So, the first time football truly places them opposite one another will come with national colours on their backs.
The prodigal son against the king.
The beginning of one player’s World Cup story against what may be the other’s final World Cup chapter.
Yamal is not the new Messi
There is an obvious temptation here, and it is very important to resist it.
Yamal is not the new Messi. Football is always a sucker for nostalgia, and every gifted left-footed attacker from Argentina or Barcelona has been dragged towards the comparison.
However, the Spanish teenager does not need to become Messi to become extraordinary.
His football has a different personality. There is more visible swagger, more appetite for confrontation.
His influences belong to a different generation. He has spoken openly about his admiration for Neymar, another footballer who played with the swagger of someone who knew his incredible talent.
Messi’s genius often felt private. Yamal’s feels public.
Messi spent his early career almost shrinking away from attention until the ball arrived. Yamal appears to enjoy telling defenders what is about to happen before attempting it anyway.
Labelling Yamal as the next Messi would be lazy and unfair on both players for very different reasons.
The legend who is refusing to leave the story
This final should belong to Yamal’s generation. That is how time is supposed to work.
Messi won his World Cup in Qatar. The final missing piece arrived. He climbed onto the podium, lifted the trophy and produced the image that seemed to complete the greatest individual story football had ever written.
Everything after that was supposed to be an epilogue. Instead, Messi has just refused to leave the scene.
At 39, he is back in a World Cup final.
Argentina have won all seven of their matches at this tournament despite repeatedly being forced into uncomfortable situations, and now stand one victory from becoming the first team in 64 years to successfully defend the trophy.
Messi has spent his entire career making the extraordinary eventually feel routine. This, however, feels different. There is something almost defiant about his continued presence.
Football has changed around him. Generations have arrived. Players who grew up watching him have become veterans themselves.
The baby from the photograph 20 years ago is now old enough to challenge him for the World Cup, a trophy he had to wait for until he was 35.
Despite all the odds stacked against him, Messi has continued to mesmerise at this tournament and is the frontrunner to add another Golden Ball to his cabinet.
No place for sentiment on Sunday
For all the poetic storylines that can be written from Sunday’s final, there will be absolutely no place for sentiment.
Yamal is not arriving on Sunday to participate in Messi’s farewell. He is aiming to play spoilsport.
Spain have reached the final after an extraordinary run, unbeaten in 37 matches and carrying the controlled authority of a team that seems to know exactly what they are doing.
They beat France 2-0 in arguably one of the most dominant semi-final performances the sport has seen.
The photograph may invite tenderness. The match most certainly will not.
For 90 minutes, or perhaps 120 minutes, the child from the bathtub becomes the obstacle to the man who once held him.
And Messi becomes an obstacle to Yamal completing international football at just 19.
For all the talk about that one photograph, imagine this.
Nineteen-year-old Lamine Yamal, world champion, having beaten Lionel Messi in Messi’s final World Cup match.
Now imagine the alternative.
Messi, at 39, lifting consecutive World Cups after defeating the teenager increasingly positioned as one of football’s next defining players.
Either one would feel scripted, but one of them is going to materialise in reality in New Jersey on Sunday.
Barcelona will be everywhere
Officially, this is Argentina vs Spain in the final.
Spiritually, though, it feels like Barcelona vs Mr Barcelona.
Messi remains the greatest symbol La Masia has ever produced. Yamal is its latest miracle. Pau Cubarsi represents another branch of the same academy.
The tactical language is familiar too. The ball as control. Technique as identity. The courage to receive under pressure. The belief that possession comes first and foremost.
In the space between Messi and Yamal, the presence of Barcelona cannot not be felt.
One represents what La Masia once gave the world. The other represents that the production line never stops.
The club itself could not arrange the meeting. The World Cup did.
The meeting that football made us wait for
For a while, everyone thought they knew where this meeting would happen.
The Finalissima.
Argentina, champions of South America. Spain, champions of Europe. Messi against Yamal.
The meeting never came, and at the time it felt like a missed opportunity. One of football’s most irresistible storylines had been placed within touching distance and then taken away.
In hindsight, perhaps football was saving the photograph for a bigger frame.
Their first meeting comes with everything at stake. A World Cup final.
The Finalissima would have given us Messi versus Yamal because we wanted to see it. The World Cup final gives us Messi versus Yamal because they have earned their way to each other.
That distinction makes the story infinitely more powerful.
They have travelled through opposite sides of the tournament, survived different battles and fought their way until the bracket has finally brought them back into the same frame.
It was a cruel wait, but definitely worth it.
The photograph on Sunday
It all started with a photograph, and it would only be right if it all circled back to a photograph on Sunday.
Almost 20 years ago, a camera clicked and nobody understood. On Sunday, thousands of cameras will point at Messi and Yamal, and this time everyone will understand.
One way or another, there will be another photograph.
Perhaps it will show Messi walking past Yamal with the World Cup in his hands. Perhaps it will show Yamal holding the trophy instead.
Maybe they will embrace. Maybe they will exchange shirts. Maybe, for a few seconds after everything is decided, they will stand in the same frame again.
There is no version of Sunday that does not feel written. And yet, nobody wrote it.
Since 2007, this script has quietly been lurking in the archive, allowing two lives to travel in parallel without ever reaching an intersection.
And now, with the entire world watching on Sunday, there is only one scene left to shoot, and it will definitely be worth the wait.
