PHOTOGRAPHY Tan Jun

It is 18 months since I first interviewed Lamine Yamal for Champions Journal, and when writing about the experience I pinched a line from the Ed Norton/Brad Pitt film Fight Club to discourage anyone from comparing the then 16-year-old with arguably the greatest footballer of all time. “The first rule of Lamine Yamal club,” I joked, “is that you do not talk about Leo Messi.” In the ensuing year and a half, it’s as if the wunderkind winger took it as a personal mission to make me eat my words. So, eat them I will.

Between that first interview and this one at Barcelona’s training ground (where, back then, he was a charming, relaxed, inexperienced newbie, and now he’s master of all he surveys) perhaps the most remarkable explosion of talent, chutzpah, magic and ingenuity ever seen in a teenage footballer has occurred.

Stats don’t – and can’t – fully capture the sublime, jaw-dropping stuff Lamine has produced over that period. But let them do the job of validating the adjectives I feel duty-bound to use, because we are witnessing a phenomenon.