Lamine Yamal: A Season of Triumph and Controversy
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 entrusted with the shirt of Kubala, Luis Suárez, Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Messi – took the last kick against Mallorca and buried it. His first goal as an adult. Arms spread, self-anointed, he conducted his own coronation. La Liga’s title race started with a statement from a boy everyone else insists on calling a miracle.
Nine months later, the bus crawled through Barcelona’s streets and the same boy, now 18, leaned over the rail of the top deck and raised a Palestine flag. It was a different kind of statement. “If he wants to it’s his decision,” Hansi Flick said. “He’s old enough: he’s 18.” Old enough, yes. Protected, no. Lamine Yamal would later talk about an “internal abyss” and the injuries that broke up his rhythm, but he finished with a third league title. Flick, who lost his father on the morning Barça clinched and chose to share that grief with his other “family”, had his second. Asked if he had ever felt so much love, the coach’s answer was short. “No, never.”
Barcelona pull away, Madrid fall apart
The title was done in everything but maths when Barcelona dismantled Espanyol with seven games left. Lamine Yamal charged towards the finish line like a sprinter, arms wide, Usain Bolt without the grin. The formal seal came in week 35 and with a twist: a clásico that decided the league for the first time in 94 years.
By then, Real Madrid were already wobbling. Three days after a dressing-room fight between Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni left the vice-captain in hospital with stitches and “craniofacial trauma”, it was Marcus Rashford who landed the decisive punch. Barcelona had played in three different homes and won every league game in all of them. This clásico was their 11th straight victory, their 23rd in 25 league matches since the previous meeting, 600km away.
It hadn’t always looked like this. Late October felt like a different universe. Flick, worried about complacency, warned that “ego kills success”. Rayo found what became known as The Flick Line and sliced Barcelona open. Sevilla did the same. Madrid then beat them 2-1 at the Bernabéu to go five points clear. Jude Bellingham mocked Lamine Yamal’s words as “cheap”, posting Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation” over the top. Dani Carvajal gave him the universal jibber-jabber sign. Madrid seemed to own the moment.
They had their own storm brewing. Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left that night. Xabi Alonso tried to steer the conversation back to tactics, to structure, to what he insisted really mattered. It turned out the mood, the fractures, the walk-offs were exactly what mattered. As the coach stood increasingly alone, the project began to fray. The cracks became canyons.
Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico closed the brief Alonso era that had started too early, taken him unhappily to the Club World Cup and ended too soon as well. Madrid turned to Álvaro Arbeloa, who spoke well, smiled often and missed the point entirely. He offered players his grey sofa if they needed to talk, brought doughnuts as rewards. The performances rarely justified the pastry. “I’m not Gandalf,” he protested. The magic never came.
By the time the rivals met again in May, Madrid were out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and almost out of their minds. A divided squad, a fanbase just wanting the ordeal over. Ninety minutes later they were out of the title race too, 12 points behind with nine left to play, empty-handed again like last season. Kylian Mbappé? Also out. Off to Sicily. “Let’s go Madrid!” he posted as they trailed 2-0.
Two days later, Florentino Pérez resurfaced for the first time in more than a decade to face the media and delivered a rambling, Trumpian press conference that answered nothing and somehow explained everything. He did, at least, identify one culprit and act decisively. The problem, he decided, was the newspaper ABC. He cancelled his subscription.
Champions without Europe, contenders without trophies
Barcelona’s league trophy was actually handed over on the night they won it, a rare logistical triumph, then paraded around the city. The Super Cup came along for the ride. The European Cup did not, and that still hurt. Madrid’s old love, the Champions League, offered them their better nights but not enough of them. Villarreal and Athletic never escaped the league phase, though champions PSG failed to score only once – at San Mamés, naturally.
Atlético Madrid went further than anyone in Europe from Spain. They knocked Barcelona out of both domestic cups, let the league drift and still ended with nothing. Arsenal ended their first Champions League semi-final in 10 years. In their first Copa del Rey final in 13, they were “Matarazzoed” by Real Sociedad on penalties.
That final produced one of the season’s purest football stories. A backup goalkeeper made the decisive save, then kissed a former ballboy on the cheek. The ballboy, now full-back Álvaro Odriozola, sprinted up and scored the winner. Odriozola never played a minute in the final but insisted he wouldn’t swap this for “anything in humanity”.
Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and third-placed Villarreal will all have another shot in next year’s Champions League, joined by Betis, who grabbed Spain’s new fifth spot. Below them, Copa del Rey winners Real Sociedad will return to Europe alongside Celta Vigo and Getafe. For Getafe, it felt almost absurd. Pepe Bordalás claimed their qualification “would go down in football history”. That was a stretch, but the scale of their climb was undeniable.
Getafe began the season with 13 first-team players, two of them goalkeepers. At halfway, they were in the relegation zone and so desperate they shoved full-back Allan Nyom up front. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Bordalás said – and he has inflicted some pretty grim evenings on plenty of opponents. Yet after four little-known January loanees arrived, they finished seventh. They did it in pure Getafe style: second fewest goals, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. Ugly, efficient, theirs.
Chaos at the bottom, cruelty at the end
Somewhere in the middle of Getafe’s final-day pitch invasion, a cluster of red shirts stood still. Osasuna’s players weren’t celebrating. They were waiting. Phones, radios, iPads, all tuned to other grounds, every second stretched. “Agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had,” their captain called those minutes. When survival finally arrived, delivered by results elsewhere, they exploded with the Getafe fans and Nyom, who said he stayed out there to be sure Osasuna were safe before disappearing inside. “It’s been … weird,” admitted coach Alesio Lisci. Weird, and not entirely of their own making. A month earlier, they had already celebrated survival after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla. They never imagined they would have to clamber clear again.
The top of the table lacked drama; the same five or six sides circled each other all year. The bottom was a madhouse. Sudden plunges, late revivals, biblical comebacks. Only Real Oviedo went down early. Back in the first division after 24 years, with Santi Cazorla finally making his Primera debut for the club he had joined aged eight and rejoined on the minimum wage at 38, they were supposed to be the romance. There was no room for it. Oviedo scored nine home goals all season and finished with more managers (three) than away wins (two).
The fight to avoid the other two relegation places became a brawl. In a league where good teams turned bad overnight and bad ones briefly became brilliant, the line between Europe and oblivion almost vanished. Nine clubs entered the penultimate round still in danger. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia pulled clear, but five teams remained trapped in the final-day equation, their fates tangled together.
Elche and Girona met at Montilivi in a straight shootout. One would fall, one would breathe. A late Thomas Lemar shot crashed off the bar, the difference between Girona standing and falling. They had taken four points from their last eight games. Two years ago they had chased the title; last season they were in the Champions League. Now they slipped into the second division on 41 points – a total that would have kept them up in any other campaign this decade.
Mallorca went with them, victims of a three-way tie-breaker mini-league with Osasuna and Levante, all three locked on 42 points. They had a striker who scored 23 league goals, a mark no one had hit for 26 seasons. It still wasn’t enough. “This hurts,” said coach Martín Demichelis. “Football has been cruel,” lamented Girona’s Míchel Sánchez. Elche’s Eder Sarabia summed up the mood of the division in five words: “This league was really crazy.” His team survived. Others didn’t.
Rayo’s almost-perfect ending
There was one last story, saved for the very end. Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, the neighbourhood team that never quite fit the corporate sheen of modern football and never wanted to, reached their first ever European final in the Conference League. They could not bring the trophy home from Germany.
It felt wrong. It also felt exactly like Rayo. At the end, in Leipzig, a banner stretched across their end captured it all better than silverware ever could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat,” it read.
You could argue only winning one of these things tops that.
The season’s characters and curios
The year produced a gallery of characters, some glorious, some absurd.
Rayo president Raúl Martín Presa took the prize for most charming president by calling his own fans “drunk, brainless and idle”. Oviedo owner Jesús Martínez won most optimistic owner when, in week eight, he ordered everyone to stop talking about survival and start talking about Europe. Two days after he sacked the coach who had kept them safe, Oviedo dropped into the bottom three. They never escaped.
San Mamés, inevitably, delivered the best atmosphere, though Athletic weren’t even playing. Euskadi faced Palestine and the noise never dipped. The best tifo? Atlético fans raided their pandemic hoards and turned the Metropolitano into a paper blizzard, a bog-roll shower that echoed River Plate’s Monumental. Sevilla copied them days later. Uefa and La Liga responded the only way they know how. Fines all round.
Rayo again supplied the soundtrack, belting out “A Pirate’s Life” with the CD Yuncos players they had just knocked out. The best party – and worst hangover – belonged to Copa del Rey winners Real Sociedad. Kick-off at 10pm, extra time, penalties, leaving the stadium at 2am. Hotel disco at 2.39am, taxis to a club at 4.45am, onto a bus for the airport at 10.15am, duty free opened mid-flight. “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time,” shouted the liveliest of the lot. They did. That day, the next, and the next, looping the city on an open-top bus, drinking in the sun and the adoration. Then, still half-cut, they stumbled into preparation for the next league game. The opponent? Getafe, of course.
There was nostalgia too. One cold Sunday night in November, Lionel Messi slipped silently into the Camp Nou alone, the most nostalgic fan in the building.
Others made their mark in stranger ways. A Betis supporter, desperate for Cédric Bakambu’s shirt after a 3-0 win over Mallorca, hurdled the stand, misjudged it and crashed at the striker’s feet. Perfect way to get a player’s attention. Useless way to get his shirt. Bakambu just stared, bemused. Sergio Herrera at Osasuna, by contrast, scooped up his entire team’s kit after a win in Palma and hand-delivered it to the stands. No pratfalls, no broken bones.
The naughtiest fan? An Oviedo supporter who was supposed to be at his grandmother’s house when their match at Mestalla was postponed by 24 hours because of torrential rain. The club kindly flew stranded fans home on the team charter. A photo went online. One mother in Asturias recognised her son. “Hey, Real Oviedo,” she wrote, “please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home.”
Celta’s support took the award for best groomed. When Borja Iglesias suffered homophobic abuse for painting his nails, fans and teammates responded by painting theirs too, stands and dressing room suddenly full of colour.
El Periódico de Aragón delivered the bluntest headline: “Zaragoza are going to shit.” Sadly, the paper wasn’t wrong.
Managers, mischief and the man of the year
There were little vignettes everywhere. Tiny Inter de Valdemoro, from Spain’s ninth tier, faced Getafe in the Copa del Rey, trailed 8-0 with half an hour left and watched Borja Mayoral come on to torment his older brother Kity in midfield. Mayoral scored twice more in an 11-0 demolition. Their goalkeeper, Busy – yes, Busy – had the best name and the worst night.
Granada’s Jorge Pascual produced the best red card, sent off for calling the assistant “fucking moustache-face” and, as the referee’s report carefully noted, “pointing to his upper lip to simulate said moustache”. Just in case the insult hadn’t landed.
Dani Cárdenas won handiest goalkeeper, stopping a Kike García penalty and then saving the Vallecas nets themselves. Sevilla, under Matías Almeyda, took best-dressed team, the coach describing their look as hand-me-down chic: grandad’s trousers, cousin’s T-shirt, anything that fit. Betis launched a scratch-and-sniff shirt made of oranges that smelt like oranges, at least until kick-off.
There were apologies and misunderstandings. Vedat Muriqi, put alongside Robert Lewandowski in a Barça promo for Mallorca’s visit, responded: “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.” Betis striker Cucho Hernández scored against Levante and apologised to his “former club”. Only problem: he never played for Levante, just for Huesca, who happen to wear the same colours.
The managers’ race for coach of the year was brutal. Luis Castro slipped over on his debut at Levante, literally falling on his backside as he tried to return the ball, then never slipped again, overseeing a miracle escape. Real Sociedad president Jokin Aperribay asked ChatGPT whether Rino Matarazzo was a good coach for the club and got a “no”. Four months later, Matarazzo had delivered a historic Copa del Rey.
Bordalás at Getafe warned that his team were like a pencil you keep sharpening until there’s nothing left. Somehow, with only a stub and the rubbery bit remaining, he still carved out Europe. At Sevilla, the sporting director grumbled “it’s like a funeral in here” when Luis García was presented. Six weeks later, the new coach had resurrected them. Eder Sarabia at Elche spoke of bazookas and tanks, of his side turning up with a catapult, and still staying up playing decent football. Claudio Giráldez, Manuel Pellegrini, Hansi Flick – all had claims.
The award went to Iñigo Pérez, bound for Villarreal but forever tied to Rayo’s season. No training ground, no proper pitch, no hot water. Endless problems, no excuses. He took Rayo to their highest-ever league finish and their first final with a quiet dignity and a simple line: “It’s easier to reach success through love.” For once, football proved him right.
As for the players, there were many cases to make. Carlos Espí scored 10 goals in Levante’s last 14 games – the only ones he started all season – and might genuinely have been the single most significant footballer of the campaign. Levante fans called for him to win the Ballon d’Or. Vedat Muriqi twirled a finger at his temple in response and called them crazy. One more point and Muriqi might have had this award and survival.
Joan García produced the save of the season for Barcelona against Espanyol, a stop Lamine Yamal described as “science fiction” before adding: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!” The official team of the year put García in goal, with Marcos Llorente, Florian Lejeune, David Affengruber and Carlos Romero across the back; Fermín López, Luis Milla and Pablo Fornals in midfield; Lamine Yamal and Alberto Moleiro either side of Vedat Muriqi in attack.
The bench read like a who’s who of the season: Aaron Escandell, Eric García, Pedri, Ratiu, Chavarría, Isi, Jon Martín, Mikel Oyarzabal, Aleix Febas, Abde, Budimir, Espí, Mbappé, Arda Güler, Tchouaméni, Muñoz, Pubill, Koke, Griezmann, Martínez, Gueye, Exposito, Iglesias.
Yet the player of the year, the one who defined the campaign, was the teenager who started it all on that first night against Mallorca. Lamine Yamal finished with 24 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, leading Barcelona’s surge to the line in a spell that felt like destiny condensed into a few months.
“I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” he said. That sentence revealed the weight on his shoulders. His football did the rest. The shirt on his back has belonged to legends. The question now is how far he intends to take it.
