Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal's viral baby photo comes full circle ahead of FIFA World Cup final

Argentina's 2-1 win over England, sealed by two assists from a 39-year-old Lionel Messi, sent them into Sunday's World Cup final against Spain, and within hours a nineteen-year-old photograph was back on every football account on the internet.

It shows a twenty-year-old Messi, mid-bath, holding a soapy, chubby baby in a plastic tub. The baby is Lamine Yamal, who will start Sunday's final on the opposite side of the pitch, having spent this tournament looking less like a teenager finding his feet and more like the heir Barcelona always hoped he'd become.

The photo has been circulating since 2024, when Yamal's father, Mounir Nasraoui, posted the old images to Instagram as his then-sixteen-year-old son made his European Championship debut, and it resurfaces every time the two of them end up in the news together, which lately has been often. Because of how neatly it appears to set up this exact final, a fair number of people have assumed it was fabricated or AI-generated, even when it isn't.

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A raffle, a charity calendar, and pure coincidence

The photograph was taken in December 2007, part of a charity calendar organised jointly by UNICEF and the FC Barcelona Foundation.

Families from the working-class Rocafonda neighbourhood in Mataró were entered into a raffle for the chance to have their photo taken with a first-team player at Camp Nou, and Yamal's parents won it. There was no scouting angle to it and no football pedigree in the family that made the pairing anything other than luck.

Messi, by the photographer Joan Monfort's account, was visibly unsure how to hold the baby at first, stepping straight from one locker room into another with a plastic tub of water and an infant waiting in it. Nobody involved in the shoot, including Messi himself, had any reason to think the photo would matter again.

It sat unremarked for seventeen years until Nasraoui shared it publicly in 2024, and Monfort has said he had no idea the baby in his own photographs had grown up to be Yamal until a colleague told him the images were going viral.

Two players and a final

Messi and Yamal share more than a bathtub photo. Both came up through Barcelona's La Masia academy, both wore the number 19 before inheriting the number 10, and both have spent this tournament playing like their respective peaks, one at the tail end of a career, one at the very start of it.

Messi arrives at the final with eight goals this campaign. Yamal has faced questions all tournament about being measured against him, and has been fairly blunt about what that comparison actually costs him. Asked about the constant Messi comparisons, he's said he doesn't think anyone minds being likened to the greatest player in history, but that the comparisons can hold a player back, since he'll never actually be Messi.

Whatever happens on Sunday at MetLife Stadium, the photograph will likely outlive the scoreline. It wasn't engineered, wasn't staged for symbolism, and wasn't even remembered by most of the people in it until a father's Instagram post accidentally turned a charity calendar shoot into the origin story of a World Cup final.