The history of the impossible photo explained by who organized it

BarcelonaIt took me seventeen years to realize that October 31, 2007, would be one of the most incredible days of my life. That Wednesday, after the FC Barcelona first team training, photojournalist Joan Monfort and I were waiting for Leo Messi in a changing room at the old Camp Nou. We went there to take a photograph of the 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 came up with 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 Sheila Ebana arrived – shy, prudent, extremely polite – with her son Lamine Yamal. The kid was sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms. A little angel. We crossed our fingers that when Leo Messi arrived, everything would stay the same, but a wise person once 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 kids 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 met 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.

Fate wanted that October morning to be the first time Lamine Yamal entered the Camp Nou, and he entered to be baptized 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 fate, but when on July 5th we found out that the child accompanying Messi was Lamine Yamal, I thought I might need to get it checked.

[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 field, Leo Messi and Lamine Yamal will face each other]