The World Cup kicked off on Thursday, and for the next month, soccer will be an inescapable cultural and economic force, dominating screens and conversations around the world. This is a sporting event of unprecedented scale: Forty-eight countries, 104 matches, 16 cities across Mexico, the U.S., and Canada, and almost $9 billion in predicted revenue for the sport’s governing body, FIFA, as Vivienne Walt wrote this month.
One of the most-anticipated players on the pitch is an 18-year-old phenom from Barcelona: Lamine Yamal, who “inherited Lionel Messi’s famed No. 10 shirt when he was barely out of braces”—as Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg recently observed—is Spain’s biggest star heading into the tournament (assuming a hamstring injury doesn’t prevent him playing). He stands to earn up to $46 million this year.
Back in 2018, Walt recalls, she had a chance encounter with Yamal on a visit to a nighttime youth training session at FC Barcelona’s storied club for a Fortune feature. Watching the young trainees, Walt asked a coach whether one of them could be the next Messi.
“He pointed to a skinny 10-year-old boy darting across the pitch, the son of modest-income African immigrants,” she recalled in her recent feature. “‘Of course, you can’t tell,’ he told me. ‘He could be injured, or puberty could change things.’ I wrote his name in my notebook, on the slim chance he one day turned pro. Years later, I checked his name in my notes: Lamine Yamal.”
Walt’s 2018 portrait found a club—and a sport—at an inflection point. Barça was consumed by the tension between its almost romantic identity (Més que un club, or “more than a club,” is the motto) and the brutal financial realities of modern football. And on La Masia’s training fields, Walt watched a hand-picked cohort of talented boys, some not yet teens, training and hoping against the very long odds—only about 5% ever make the first team—that they would succeed.
One of them did. And the way that Yamal has used his fame and platform offers, in Lichtenberg’s assessment, “one of the cleanest snapshots of how celebrity, politics, and generational identity are converging in 2026”: Over one weekend in May, Yamal posed pitchside with pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo, then courted controversy and praise by waving a Palestinian flag from the top of the Barcelona championship bus.
Walt’s find in her notebook offers a glimpse of a multimillion-dollar talent in the making. And it’s a timely reminder of something older and harder to quantify: the stubborn human conviction that talent, hard work, and ambition can still rewrite a life—and occasionally, influence the world.
