Lamine Yamal, a warning and a hope

It was the 74th minute of the match. Lamine Yamal scored the seventh goal against Georgia on his debut for the Spanish national team, making history twice over. The youngest to debut, the youngest to score. He was only 16 years and 57 days old.

"What national team is this?" The question was posed on social media by a pseudo-journalist who acts as a mouthpiece for the far right. It wasn't a praise of precocity. It wasn't joy at the victory. It was outrage at the goal celebration: Lamine Yamal hugging Nico Williams. A Black man and a Muslim as the present and future of the red one.

"Fucking Moor," "piece of shit." These are insults from the Santiago Bernabéu stands a year after that match. An isolated case. Football has traditionally been fertile ground for racism, but this "them" and "us," beyond the insults, can be portrayed in many ways. Sports commentators and journalists sometimes comment. They use it as a crutch, in the same way they might say "Barça's number X." There are attitudes from good intentions that separate a line between them and us. An idea of what it means to be Catalan. Another good example is the interview that Gerard Romero did with Lamine Yamal's father, Mounir Nasraoui. going to school since P3. What do you want me to talk about? outside. The reality is that Catalonia is also black and Muslim.

The year Lamine Yamal was born, in 2007, 1 in 5 newborns were born to foreign parents, either a father or a mother. In 2021, the latest year with available data, the figure rose to 37%.

That's why it makes perfect statistical sense that Catalans named Nasraoui, Balde, or Fati play for Barça. Perhaps the question, rather, is why their presence in Parliament and in culture is residual. mainstream, on television or in media newsrooms. Also, why not say it, in this one who reads it?

This can have different interpretations. An obvious one is that there is a correlation between immigration and poverty, and between poverty and education. Immigrants are at greater risk of poverty, and the poorest people have less education. Sport leaps through these screens, escapes all this because it has nothing to do with studies, status, or connections. A paradigmatic case is France, which experienced waves of migration 50 years before Catalonia.

The French Mirror

"It's artificial to recruit foreign players and call them 'the French national team.' Most of them don't sing the anthem with fervor or don't know the words." These are the words of Le Pen Sr., founder of the xenophobic National Front, lamenting that most of the national team's players were children of immigrants. Shortly after, on July 12, 1998, the blue won the World Cup for the first time. It was at the Stade Saint-Denis, with Zinedine Zidane, son of Algerian parents, as the star. Le Pen's party ended with him congratulating the player, whom he defined as "the son of French Algeria" and the then president Jacques Chirac celebrated the triumph of "a multicultural and victorious France".

Seven years later, the streets of France, the same ones that had been filled with celebrations of the victory, were burning with the famous riots of the suburbs 2005. Young people from neighborhoods like Zidane's in Marseille, young people who considered the French footballer a god, set fire to vehicles and buildings in a confrontation against the state and the police that spread throughout the suburbs of the entire country.

Las Rocafondas

Lamine Yamal claims 304, the postal code of his neighborhood. "It's always the first identification with the country that migrants and the children of migrants have," says demographer Andreu Domingo. "First you take over the space you have, the neighborhood, and then the others." Researcher Blanca Garcés also celebrates his connection with Rocafonda because it provides role models for the neighborhood's youth, but asks for vigilance with the narrative of success. "What's happening with Lamine's cousin in the neighborhood? With people who aren't successful soccer players? You don't have to be a great soccer player to deserve to be part of the... us".

Being part of us, says Garcés, and it is precisely one of the dangers Domingo points out: not recognizing the Laminas Yamals of Rocafonda, and of all the Rocafondas of Catalonia, as Catalans. "We have a Catalan far right that redefines identity based on blood lineage. The great advantage here is that identity was porous, it only required accepting the language for its children." That is why it is important, he says, that beyond the neighborhood, other spaces can be made their own. "And this second part depends on us. These kids must have expectations, but then it is important to live up to them so they can meet them." The phrase recalls the sociologist Pierre Bordieu when he said: "If you don't give young people the spaces they deserve, they will take them for themselves." The Laminas Yamals are present and future, and their figure functions as both hope and warning.