A couple of days before the 2022 World Cup final, I made a lot of people really angry.
I wrote a piece in which I claimed that we’d been having the wrong argument for the past 15 years. The question wasn’t whether Lionel Messi was the greatest soccer player of the modern era. No, if you spend more than 15 seconds thinking about it or a couple of minutes looking at data, then it’s quite clear that Messi is the greatest soccer player of the game’s fully globalized era.
Instead, I said, we should be asking ourselves whether Messi was the greatest male athlete of all time. If you’re already mad, you can read the whole thing here. But in short, the separation between Messi and the second-best player of the modern era (Cristiano Ronaldo) is as big as it is in any other major sport.
But the major difference between soccer and all of the major U.S. sports is this: way more people play soccer, so it’s a lot harder to be that much better than your peers than it is in the NFL or the NBA. American football and basketball are sports still not played by large swaths of the globe, and they are sports not accessible to large portions of the population because of simple body-size requirements. If you look at it that way — and free yourself from wondering if Messi could play free safety for the New York Jets — then it becomes an argument between Messi and Usain Bolt because almost everyone can run 200 or 100 meters.
When you write and think about Messi, this is always where you end up: pushing logic to its absolute extremes. Given how emotional and how zero-sum sports seem, it’s really easy to fall into hyperbole when writing about sports. Messi is the only athlete I’ve covered where it worked the other way: It was really hard to ever reach hyperbole.
I never thought I’d feel that way again, but I’m starting to feel it every few weeks. And the guy who’s making me feel that way is playing for Messi’s former club at the exact same position. It’s still incredibly unlikely that we ever see another soccer player as good as Messi was, but if you watch 17-year-old Lamine Yamal play with Barcelona enough times, it’s really hard not to wonder if it might be happening again.
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Is Lamine Yamal the best teenager in soccer history?
It’s useless to compare Yamal and Messi at the same age — and that’s because Yamal has already lapped Messi, multiple times.
By the end of his age-17 season (the age he was when the season started), Messi had scored one LaLiga goal. And he had zero assists. Yamal, who doesn’t turn 18 until mid-July, already has 11 goals and 17 assists. That’s with four games left in the current season.
Yamal also has another five goals and five assists in the Champions League. Messi didn’t get to five goals in Champions League play until his age-20 season and he didn’t get to five assists until his age-21 season, when Barcelona won it all and he took home the first of his eight Ballons d’Or.
So, as of now, Yamal is already 37 goals and assists ahead of Messi. For reference, only one player in Europe — Mohamed Salah of title-winning Liverpool — has at least that many goals and assists this season.
OK, but what about everyone else at the same age?
Before we continue: yes, Pele. He scored six goals at age 17 as Brazil won their first World Cup in 1958. This was back when the World Cup was still the pinnacle of competitiveness in a not-yet-globalized game. But this was a very different era — the sport wasn’t fully professionalized and the best players in the world played all across the world — so it’s not really worth comparing to the present time.
Instead, FBref’s stats database goes back to at least the early 1990s for all of Europe’s Big Five top leagues. The best age-17 season for an attacker was Michael Owen’s legendary-but-somehow-still-not-appreciated-as-much-as-it-should-be campaign for Liverpool in 1997-98. He scored 18 goals with 10 assists. Those 28 goal contributions are the most in the FBref database for a 17-and-under player.
Next best: Kylian Mbappe‘s 15 goals and seven assists for the Ligue 1-winning Monaco team in 2016-17. And after that, it’s Yamal’s six goals and 12 assists (and counting) for Barcelona this season.
Broadly, this is the conclusion: Owen, Mbappe and Yamal are the best teenagers in modern soccer history. We’re already there with Yamal. And there are a few reasons why Yamal’s current season surpasses those of Owen and Mbappe.
This is maybe the one area where he’s “normal,” though. Most young players take more-but-worse shots and then they eventually shave off some attempts in favor of higher quality shots as they get older. I’d bank on him figuring this out and being dialed in at some point. To what degree he figures it out, I’m not sure. But I think that’ll be what determines how good he actually becomes.
To level-set: Messi managed to put up 150 or more shots every season, on roughly average shot quality, and he finished around eight goals above his xG every season. That’s how you score 50 goals in a single LaLiga season.
For Yamal to achieve a more human level of stardom, we can look at Salah. At Liverpool, he has finished, on average, about only a goal above xG every season. He attempts roughly the same number of shots as Yamal currently does, but the quality of those shots is more than twice as good: 0.15, compared to Yamal’s 0.17.
The big difference between Salah and Yamal is that Salah became an elite passer in his late 20s to early 30s. Yamal is already there. We’ve seen plenty of dribblers as good as Yamal at his age, but passing is typically an older-player skill — it develops a bit later into your career and then it hangs around for way longer — and he’s already one of the best creative passers in the world at any age and pretty easily the best teenage passer we’ve ever seen.
The passing all but guarantees a world-class floor for Yamal — the development of his shot profile, though, will determine the height of his ceiling.
Unfortunately, the biggest risk to Yamal’s career is the same as it is for everyone: injury. It’s tempting — and horrifying — to look at Owen’s career and worry about the same thing happening to Yamal. Owen’s best season, as measured by goals and assists, ended up being his age-17 season. He continued to be great for Liverpool for six more years before moving to Real Madrid for a season and then moving back to the Premier League with Newcastle United and fading out of the spotlight.
Owen blames his decline on a hamstring tear when he was 19. And he has said he hated playing soccer by the time he reached his peak years. Owen played over 1,000 minutes only one more time after his age-27 season. Over that final stretch, he scored 14 Premier League goals — four fewer than he did during the single season when he was 17.
Barcelona, too, don’t have a great recent track record of managing young talent. Ansu Fati, Pedri and Gavi have all played at incredibly high levels for the club as teenagers, and they’ve all sat out significant amounts of time because of injury before their prime years have even begun.
If he keeps up his current pace, Yamal will have played the most minutes of any 18-and-under outfield player in FBref’s database by the end of the next season. He’ll be around 8,000 minutes, while no one else is above 6,300. But of the four players who would be right below him — Eduardo Camavinga, Wayne Rooney, Iker Muniain, and César Azpilicueta — three went on to have long, mostly injury-free careers, while Camavinga, who was recently ruled out by Real Madrid for the rest of the season because of an adductor injury, hasn’t really been any more injury-prone than the average player.
We tend to remember the lost promise of someone such as Owen or even Luke Shaw — who played nearly 3,000 minutes for Southampton at age 18 and hasn’t played as many minutes since. But players who play a lot at a young age in a Big Five league don’t appear to be any more at risk of injury.
So, maybe when Real Madrid and Barcelona play this weekend, perhaps we should all try to just enjoy the absurdity of what’s happening right now.
Mbappe and Vinícius Júnior will be buzzing around up top for Madrid, with Jude Bellingham crashing the box and doing pretty much everything else from the midfield. For Barcelona, Raphinha will press his face off and try to cap off a potentially Ballon d’Or-winning season. Lewandowski will try to add to lengthen the lead between himself and every other goal scorer not named Lionel or Cristiano. And Pedri will find space and pick out passes that no one else in the world is even capable of seeing.
But despite all of that, there’s a pretty good chance that the best player on the field will be someone who still isn’t even old enough to vote.
