The story of the impossible photo told by the person who organized it

BarcelonaIt took me seventeen years to know that October 31, 2007, would be one of the most incredible days of my life. That Wednesday, after FC Barcelona's first team training session, photojournalist Joan Monfort and I were waiting for Leo Messi in a locker room at the old Camp Nou. We went to take a photograph of God/God (with or without an accent, as you wish) with a baby that would illustrate the January issue of a charity calendar we invented at the newspaper. SportThe goal was to raise awareness of the invaluable work done by Unicef ​​​​and the Casal de Infants del Raval, and who better to do it than Messi, Ronaldinho, Henry, Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta and company.

First came Sheila Ebana—shy, cautious, extremely polite—with her son, Lamine Yamal. The boy lay peacefully in his mother's arms. A little angel. We crossed our fingers that everything would be the same when Leo Messi arrived, but a wise man said that if something can go wrong, it does. When the footballer stepped into the spotlight and picked up the baby, it was clear he had never held a child in his life. I've never seen anyone so tense. As if that weren't enough, the baby, out of his mother's warmth, threw one of those deafening tantrums (yes, one of those, anyone who has children knows what I'm talking about), and everything went wrong.

At the time, Messi was barely twenty years old, and he was more afraid of a baby than facing Sergio Ramos and Pepe with carte blanche to dig his knees into his. The data was wrong, but things had to go right at all costs because, without even knowing it, we had arranged to photograph a piece of history. Little by little, baby Lamine Yamal began to feel comfortable. Between Sheila and Messi, they placed him in a basin; the boy stopped crying and began to splash around in the water, but it was when we showed him a yellow rubber duck that he drew the smile that Joan Monfort, an artist, immortalized. The rest is history: the photo has gone viral and forever become an icon of world football.

As fate would have it, that October morning was the first time Lamine Yamal entered the Camp Nou, and he entered to be baptized by what would end up being consecrated as the greatest of all time. Imagine Michael Jordan blessing a baby named LeBron James. Yes, it's that brutal. I swear I've never believed in destiny in my life, but when we learned on July 5th that the child accompanying Messi was Lamine Yamal, I thought maybe I should get it checked out.