The story of the impossible photo explained by the one 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 training with the FC Barcelona first team, photojournalist Joan Monfort and I were waiting for Leo Messi in a changing room at the old Camp Nou. We went to take a photograph of the God/God (with or without an accent, as you wish) with a baby that would illustrate the month of January for a solidarity calendar we invented at the newspaper Sport. The objective was to raise awareness of the invaluable work done by Unicef and the Casal d’Infants del Raval, and who better than Messi, Ronaldinho, Henry, Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta and company to do it.

First came Sheila Ebana – shy, prudent, extremely polite – with her son Lamine Yamal. The boy was sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms. A little angel. We were crossing our fingers that when Leo Messi arrived, everything would stay the same, but a wise man said that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. When the footballer stood in front of the spotlights and took the baby, it was clear that he had never held a creature in his arms in his life. I've never seen anyone so tense. To top it off, the baby, away from his mother's warmth, threw one of those deafening tantrums (yes, one of those, anyone with children knows what I'm talking about) and everything went wrong.

So, Messi was barely twenty years old and was more afraid of a baby than facing Sergio Ramos and Pepe with a free hand to nail their studs into his knee. Things were going badly, but it had to turn out well no matter what because, without knowing it yet, we had met to capture 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 kid put his crying aside and started to splash around in the water, but it was when we showed him a yellow rubber ducky that he broke into the smile that Joan Monfort, who is an artist, immortalized. The rest is history: the photo has gone viral and become a global football icon for all eternity.

Fate would have it that that October morning was the first time Lamine Yamal entered the Camp Nou, and he entered to be baptized by the one who would go on to be consecrated as the greatest of all time. Imagine Michael Jordan blessing a baby named LeBron James. Yes, it's that epic. I can swear that in my life I've believed in this thing called destiny, but when on July 5th we found out that the child accompanying Messi was Lamine Yamal, I thought that perhaps I should get myself checked.

[L'ARA recovers this text, published on May 17, 2025, due to the proximity of the World Cup final in which, for the first time on a football pitch, Leo Messi and Lamine Yamal will face each other]