The story of the impossible photo explained by whoever organized it

BarcelonaI took seventeen years to know that October 31, 2007, would be one of the most incredible days of my life. That Wednesday, after the first team training of FC Barcelona, photojournalist Joan Monfort and I were waiting for Leo Messi in a locker room at the old Camp Nou. We went there to take a photograph of God/God (with or without an accent, as you wish) with a baby that would illustrate the month of January for a charity calendar we invented at the newspaper Sport. The objective was to give visibility to the invaluable work done by Unicef and the Casal d’Infants del Raval, and who better than Messi, Ronaldinho, Henry, Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, and company to do it.

First came Sheila Ebana – shy, prudent, extremely polite – with her son Lamine Yamal. The boy was sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms. An angel. We crossed our fingers that when Leo Messi arrived everything would stay the same, but a wise person said that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. When the footballer stood in front of the cameras and took the baby, it was clear he had never held a creature in his arms in his life. I've never seen anyone so tense. To make matters worse, the baby, away from his mother's warmth, threw one of those deafening tantrums (yes, one of those, anyone with children knows what I'm talking about) and everything went wrong.

Back then, Messi was just twenty years old and was more afraid of a baby than facing Sergio Ramos and Pepe with a free hand to stomp on his knee. Things were going badly, but it had to turn out well one way or another because, without knowing it yet, we had arranged to capture a piece of history. Little by little, baby Lamine Yamal began to feel comfortable. Between Sheila and Messi, they put him in a basin, the kid put his tears aside and started splashing in the water, but it was when we showed him a yellow rubber duck that he drew the smile that Joan Monfort, who is an artist, immortalized. The rest is history: the photo has gone viral and become a global football icon forever.

Destiny wanted that October morning to be the first time Lamine Yamal entered the Camp Nou, and he entered to be blessed by the one who would end up being consecrated as the best of all time. Imagine Michael Jordan blessing a baby named LeBron James. Yes, it's that big. I can swear that in my life I have never believed in destiny, but when on July 5th we learned that the child accompanying Messi was Lamine Yamal, I thought that perhaps I should get it checked out.

[L'ARA is recovering this text, published on May 17, 2025, due to the proximity of the World Cup final in which, for the first time on a football pitch, Leo Messi and Lamine Yamal will face each other]