September 2007. In the Camp Nou changing rooms, a 20-year-old Messi awkwardly held a baby barely six months old over an improvised bathtub. He was shy, he didn’t know how to hold the child. A rubber duck broke the ice.
The baby was not chosen for being special: his family won a charity raffle organized by UNICEF in Rocafonda, the neighborhood of Mataró where they lived. The session was for the charity calendar of the newspaper Sport and the Barça Foundation. Photographer Joan Monfort, from the AP agency, came up with the bath idea because he himself had bathed his daughter the day before. No one in that room—not Messi, not the parents, not even the photographer himself—knew for 17 years that that baby was Lamine Yamal.
In July 2024, with Yamal shining at the Euros, his father Mounir Nasraoui posted the image on Instagram with four words: “The beginning of two legends”. The world stood still for a moment. Monfort admitted that he himself had not recognized the boy until the photo started going viral. There are stories that fate writes long before anyone reads them.