Lamine Yamal: Barcelona's New No 10 and Champion at 18
Lamine Yamal began the season with a coronation and ended it with a flag.
On the opening night of 2025‑26, with the last kick against Mallorca, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager handed the shirt of Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi – scored his first goal as an adult. He spread his arms, conducted his own ceremony and announced himself as the face of a title race that, in truth, barely became a race at all.
Nine months later, as Barcelona’s bus crawled through the streets on the victory parade, he stood on the top deck and held a Palestine flag aloft. Eighteen years old. Champion for the third time. “If he wants to it’s his decision,” Hansi Flick said. “He’s old enough: he’s 18.”
Coming of age in public is brutal. Lamine Yamal spoke of injuries and an “internal abyss”. Flick, the father figure whose own dad died on the morning they clinched the league, chose to share that grief with his other “family”. Asked if he had ever felt so much love, he didn’t hesitate. “No, never.”
Barcelona’s long sprint to the line
Barcelona had effectively finished the job weeks earlier. Espanyol were the ones left staring at the back of their heads.
Seven games from the end, a derby win all but sealed it, Lamine Yamal surging towards the line, arms outstretched like Usain Bolt glancing at Richard Thompson and Walter Dix. The maths caught up in week 35, the title officially delivered by a clásico for the first time in 94 years.
Three days after a dressing-room fight between Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni had sent Real Madrid’s vice‑captain to hospital with “craniofacial trauma” and stitches, it was Marcus Rashford who landed the decisive punch. This was Barcelona’s 11th straight league win, their 23rd victory in 25 games since the previous clásico, played 600km west. They had used three different stadiums and won in all of them.
The contrast with autumn was stark. Back in late October, when Flick warned that “ego kills success”, Barcelona looked fragile. Rayo had exposed what was quickly dubbed “The Flick Line”, Sevilla had sliced them open, and Madrid’s 2-1 win at the Bernabéu sent Xabi Alonso’s side five points clear.
That night Jude Bellingham mocked Lamine Yamal’s talk as “cheap”, posting Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation” as the soundtrack. Dani Carvajal added the jibber-jabber gesture from the touchline. Madrid, though, had their own noise to deal with. Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left, Alonso insisted he wanted to focus on what really mattered, and discovered that this – the tantrums, the fractures – was exactly what really mattered. With the coach increasingly isolated, the fault-lines widened and the season began to come apart.
Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico snapped Madrid’s sense of control. Alonso, who felt he had been pushed into the job too early and then pushed out too quickly, trudged off to the Club World Cup and then away altogether. His replacement, Álvaro Arbeloa, talked about connection and empathy, invited players to unburden themselves on his grey sofa, turned up with doughnuts as rewards. The words sounded right. The football didn’t.
“I’m not Gandalf,” he said. No magic followed. By the time the great rivals met again in May, Madrid were out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and almost out of their minds. They were divided, exhausted and desperate for it all to end. Ninety minutes later they were out of the title race too, 12 points back with only nine left on the table, empty-handed again just as they had been the previous season. Kylian Mbappé? He was out as well, slipping away to Sicily. “Let’s go Madrid!” he posted as they trailed 2-0.
Two days on, Florentino Pérez reappeared in public for the first time in more than a decade. The Real Madrid president delivered an incoherent, Trumpian press conference that answered nothing and somehow explained everything. He did, at least, identify a culprit: the ABC newspaper. Subscription cancelled. Problem solved.
Champions, but not kings of Europe
Barcelona lifted the league trophy on the very night they won it, a rare piece of administrative common sense. They paraded the Super Cup alongside it, but the European Cup stayed out of reach. The one they wanted most eluded them again. Madrid’s nights under the lights were better, but not good enough either.
Spain’s other representatives fared no better in Europe’s expanded landscape. Villarreal and Athletic failed to escape the league phase, though San Mamés remained the only ground where champions PSG failed to score. Atlético Madrid went deepest, knocking Barcelona out of both domestic cups and then loosening their grip on the league long before the run-in. They reached a first Champions League semi-final in a decade and a first Copa del Rey final in 13 years. Arsenal ended the European dream; Real Sociedad shattered the domestic one.
The Copa final turned into a story of role players and ghosts from the past. Real Sociedad won on penalties. A backup goalkeeper made the decisive save and kissed the cheek of a former ballboy, who then stepped up and buried the winner. Álvaro Odriozola, who did not play a minute, said he would not swap this for “anything in humanity”.
Next season, Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and Villarreal will be back in the Champions League, joined by Betis, who claimed Spain’s new fifth spot. Below them, Copa winners Real Sociedad head into Europe alongside Celta Vigo and Getafe. For Pepe Bordalás, that last part bordered on the mythical. He claimed qualification would go down in football history. That was a stretch, but the journey had been absurd.
Getafe started the season with 13 senior players, two of them goalkeepers. By the halfway point they were in the relegation zone, so stripped of options that full‑back Allan Nyom ended up playing up front. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Bordalás said – a line loaded with irony given the punishment his teams usually dish out. Four little-known loanees arrived in January. Somehow, by the end, Getafe were seventh.
They did it in pure Bordalás style: second fewest goals scored, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. Ugly, efficient, utterly theirs.
Chaos at the bottom
When Getafe’s players and fans flooded the pitch on the final day, a small cluster of red shirts lingered among them. Osasuna’s squad stayed out, waiting for the other results that would decide their fate, phones, radios and tablets clutched like life rafts. The captain called those minutes “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”. When salvation finally came, they celebrated with the Getafe fans and with Nyom, who insisted he wanted to be sure they were safe before disappearing into the dressing room.
“It’s been … weird,” their coach Alesio Lisci said. That was generous. Osasuna had already celebrated survival a month earlier after a 99th‑minute winner against Sevilla. They never imagined they would have to climb out of the pit again. In the end, others dragged them clear.
This was the pattern. The top of the table felt almost static – the same five or six teams rotating positions – but the bottom was wild, a season of sudden collapses and near-biblical resurrections. Only Real Oviedo went down early, and even their story was soaked in sentiment.
Back in the top flight after 24 years, Oviedo finally gave Santi Cazorla his primera debut for the club he had joined at eight and returned to at 38 on the minimum wage. Romance didn’t score goals. They finished with nine at home all year, and more managers (three) than away wins (two).
The fight to avoid the other two relegation places was savage and crowded. In a league where good teams suddenly looked awful and bad teams turned brilliant overnight, the gap between Europe and oblivion stayed tiny. Nine clubs entered the penultimate round still trying to dodge the last two spots. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia escaped that weekend. Five remained in danger on the final day, their fates tied together.
At Montilivi, Elche and Girona faced each other in a straight shootout. All or nothing. A late shot from Thomas Lemar crashed off the bar, the thickness of the woodwork separating Girona from salvation. Four points from their last eight games condemned the side that had challenged for the title two years ago and played Champions League football last season. They went down on 41 points, a total that would have been enough to survive in any other campaign this decade.
Mallorca followed them, undone by the cruel geometry of a three-team mini-league with Osasuna and Levante. All three finished on 42 points; Mallorca finished bottom of the tie-break. They did so despite having a striker who scored 23 league goals – a mark no one had reached in 26 seasons.
“This hurts,” said their coach Martín Demichelis. “Football has been cruel,” Girona’s Míchel Sánchez added. “This league was really crazy,” said Elche’s Eder Sarabia, whose team stayed up. All three were right.
Rayo’s almost-perfect ending
There was one last act, the most romantic of all, and it ended in defeat.
Rayo Vallecano, the little club from the working‑class barrio that had gone from “little Rayo” to “Rayo effing Vallecano”, reached their first ever European final, the Conference League showpiece in Germany. They could not bring the trophy back from Leipzig. It felt wrong and yet perfectly Rayo: the team that never quite fits the script, even when it is writing its own.
At the end, a banner stretched across their end summed it up better than any cup could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat,” it read.
The season’s characters and curiosities
Spain’s year came loaded with the kind of details that make a season live long in the memory.
Rayo’s president Raúl Martín Presa earned the title of most charming leader by labelling his own fans “drunk, brainless and idle”. Oviedo’s owner Jesús Martínez took optimism to new heights. “Don’t talk to me about just avoiding relegation; talk to me about European places,” he declared in week eight, days after sacking the coach who had brought them up and kept them safe. Within 48 hours Oviedo were in the bottom three. They never climbed out.
San Mamés delivered the best atmosphere, not for Athletic but for a meeting between Euskadi and Palestine. Atlético’s supporters finally found a use for all that pandemic hoarding, greeting their team with a spectacular bog-roll shower that turned the Metropolitano into the Monumental. Sevilla fans copied them. Uefa and La Liga responded in the only way they know: with fines.
Rayo provided the soundtrack of the year, belting out “A Pirate’s Life” with the CD Yuncos players they had just eliminated from the cup. The best party – and worst hangover – belonged to Real Sociedad. They won the Copa del Rey for only the fourth time, in a final that started at 10pm, went to extra time and penalties, and did not release them from the stadium until 2am. The hotel disco kicked off at 2.39am, taxis to a club left at 4.45am, and the sleepless squad climbed on to the bus to the airport at 10.15am, cracking open duty-free on the plane home. “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time,” one of the liveliest shouted. They did. That day, the next, and the one after that, circling the city on an open-top bus, drinking in the sun and the adoration. Then came the comedown. Back to work, still half-cut, to prepare for a league game no one wanted to play. The opponents? Getafe, of course.
Lionel Messi slipped quietly into the Camp Nou one cold Sunday night in November, the most nostalgic fan in the house. Another fan, a Betis supporter, tried to vault a barrier to get Cédric Bakambu’s shirt after a 3-0 win over Mallorca, fell at the forward’s feet and still went home empty-handed. In Palma, Osasuna’s goalkeeper Sergio Herrera showed how it should be done, gathering up the entire team’s kit and hand-delivering it to the stands.
In Valencia, torrential rain pushed Oviedo’s game at Mestalla back 24 hours, stranding away fans in the city. The club flew them home on the team’s charter the next day. A heartwarming gesture, until a mother in Asturias spotted a familiar face in the photo. “Hey, Real Oviedo,” she wrote, “please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home.” He was supposed to be at his gran’s house.
Celta’s Borja Iglesias responded to homophobic abuse over his painted nails by doubling down. So did their fans and teammates, turning the stands into a gallery of colours and designs. El Periódico de Aragón produced the bluntest headline of the year: “Zaragoza are going to shit.” Sadly, they were.
Down in the Copa del Rey, tiny Inter de Valdemoro, from the ninth tier, found themselves 8-0 down to Getafe with half an hour to play. On came Borja Mayoral, finally given the chance to stick it to his big brother Kity in the opposition midfield. Mayoral scored twice more in an 11-0 rout. Their goalkeeper that night? Just “Busy”.
Granada’s Jorge Pascual collected the season’s best red card for calling the assistant “fucking moustache-face” and, as the referee’s report helpfully added, “pointing to his upper lip to simulate said moustache”. Dani Cárdenas earned the title of handiest goalkeeper by saving a Kike García penalty and then rescuing the Vallecas nets.
Sevilla, under Matías Almeyda, embraced the “hand‑me‑down chic” look. “You haven’t got any trainers, you lack the clothes you need, and someone from your family says: ‘Would you like your grandad’s trousers?’” the coach said. “‘Yes please, I could use them.’ ‘Would you like your cousin’s T-shirt?’ ‘Sure, give it to me’.” Betis went the other way, producing a scratch-and-sniff shirt made of oranges that smelled like oranges too – at least before kick-off.
On the pitch, Hugo Hard accepted a place on the bench with grace. “If I’m not a starter any more,” he said, “it’s because [Umar] Sadiq is playing like Pelé.” Mallorca’s Vedat Muriqi reacted to a promo billing him alongside Robert Lewandowski by shrugging. “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.” Betis striker Cucho Hernández apologised to Levante after scoring against them, only to realise he had never actually played for them – it was Huesca, who just happen to wear the same colours.
The minds behind the madness
On the touchline, Luis Castro literally slipped into the season, falling over as he tried to return the ball on his debut. He didn’t slip again. Instead he led a minor miracle at Levante. Real Sociedad president Jokin Aperribay consulted ChatGPT about Rino Matarazzo before appointing him. The answer was “no”. Four months later, Matarazzo had delivered a historic Copa del Rey.
Bordalás, sharpening his Getafe pencil down to a stub, warned: “They say I get results from not much, always find a way to get points, but this is like a pencil: you sharpen it and sharpen it, and keep sharpening it, and in the end there’s no pencil left.” Somehow, there was just enough graphite left to write a European story.
At Sevilla, sporting director Víctor Orta moaned that “it’s like a funeral in here” when he presented Luis García. Six weeks on, the coach had resurrected them. Eder Sarabia, whose Elche survived with style, put it another way: “Some teams have bazookas and tanks, and we’re there fighting with a catapult.” Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini impressed again. Hansi Flick, calm amid the storm, collected another league title.
Yet the manager of the year was Iñigo Pérez, bound now for Villarreal. Through endless problems – no proper pitch to play on, no reliable place to train, no hot water to wash with – he led Rayo Vallecano to their highest-ever finish and a first major final, without ever losing his composure. “It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. In Vallecas, it felt true.
The boy who wore No 10
As for the players, the season had many stars, but one shone brighter.
Carlos Espí, the Levante striker, scored 10 goals in the last 14 games – the only league matches he started all year. His impact was so outrageous that fans half-jokingly demanded the Ballon d’Or for him. Vedat Muriqi twirled a finger at his temple in response, calling them crazy, but knew that one more point and he might have taken both salvation and this award.
Joan García produced the save of the season against Espanyol, a stop Lamine Yamal described as “science fiction”, adding: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!” Yet the numbers, the moments and the narrative all point back to Barcelona’s No 10.
Lamine Yamal finished with 24 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, the driving force behind Barcelona’s surge away from trouble and towards the tape. “I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” he said. That line revealed the weight he carries. His football showed he can handle it, at least for now.
The team of the season reflected the chaos and the surprises: Joan García in goal for Barcelona; Marcos Llorente at right-back for Atlético; Florian Lejeune of Rayo and Elche’s David Affengruber at centre-back; Carlos Romero of Espanyol at left-back. In midfield, Barcelona’s Fermín López, Getafe’s Luis Milla and Betis’s Pablo Fornals. Up front, Lamine Yamal on the right, Muriqi through the middle for Mallorca, Villarreal’s Alberto Moleiro on the left. A bench full of stories: Aaron Escandell, Eric García, Pedri, Isi, Mikel Oyarzabal, Abde, Mbappé, Griezmann, and many more.
A season that began with a teenager slipping into Messi’s shirt ended with him standing on a bus, a flag in his hand and a league medal around his neck. Spain has its new No 10. The question now is not whether he belongs among the names on that list. It is how far he can drag Barcelona – and La Liga – with him.
