The most enduring images of this World Cup may very well be baby photos—three, in fact. You may have seen them: In one, a dimple-faced Lionel Messi cracks a grin as he holds a swaddled, six-month old Lamine Yamal. In another, he is kneeling next to Sheila Ebana, Yamal’s mother, as they both lean over the bathtub to play with her soaped-up son. And, in my personal favorite, Yamal stares off into the distance while Messi—twenty years old, with dark brown hair cascading down his shoulders—tries to wash him using a posture any parent would identify as doomed from the start. Taken by the photographer Joan Montfort during the fall of 2007, these images were part of a series featuring Barcelona soccer players and kids meant to grace a calendar put together by the Catalan paper Sport and UNICEF. As he explained to the Associated Press, “UNICEF did a raffle in the neighborhood of Roca Fonda in Mataró, where Yamal’s family lived. They signed up for the raffle to have their picture taken at the Camp Nou with a Barça player. And they won the raffle.” Today, nearly nineteen years later, they will play their first ever match against each other, in the World Cup final.

When these photos surfaced a couple of years ago, the story behind them seemed too good to be true. Yamal’s father, Mounir Nasraoui, had posted one of the photos to Instagram in the middle of the Euro 2024 tournament with the caption: “The beginning of two legends.” Yamal, only sixteen years old, was playing his first major tournament for the Spanish national team. He was an amazing talent, but his inclusion on the team seemed to have more to do with securing his long-term commitment to playing for Spain over Morocco (the birthplace of his father) or Equatorial Guinea (the birthplace of his mother) than with his inclusion in the starting lineup. Spain, after all, has not been known for playing with wingers. 

Within several weeks, his promising future materialized into the country’s contemporary glory. The day after Nasraoui’s viral post, the Spanish national team began an improbable run, beating Germany in the quarterfinals, France in the semis, and England in the final to secure the country’s third European championship. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, Spain had won with wingers, their vertigo-inducing attack led by wunderkinds Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams. Messi had taken many photographs with prodigious children over the years, including several on the current Spanish national team: Dani Olmo, Gavi, and third-string goalkeeper Joan Garcia. But he had apparently only ever taken one with a baby. And that one was with Yamal. Messi had, unknowingly, anointed his successor.

This is where my patience with religious hagiography ends. If there’s one statistic that tells you everything you need to know about why Spain has made it to the World Cup final, it is this: Pedro Porro has scored more goals in this tournament so far than Lamine Yamal. Porro, mind you, is a right back. His job mostly consists of sprinting up and down the right sideline, making overlapping runs on offense and containing speedy wingers on defense. When the ball reaches his feet, he’s expected to whip in a cross or pass the ball off to one of his more goal-minded and centrally located teammates. But, in knockout games against Austria and France, Porro became the open man on offense, cutting into the box while the rest of his teammates were covered. He tilted the balance when everyone least expected it.

Porro wasn’t even Spain’s starting right back coming into the tournament. That distinction went to Marcos Llorente, the blonde, bronzed Atlético de Madrid star who has made a name for himself outside of football as a spokesperson for the anti-sunscreen movement. (So strong is his obsession that, midway through the tournament, as Porro was taking his spot in the starting lineup, Llorente persuaded fellow Spanish team players Marc Pubill and Ferrán Torres to join him on the sidelines for a tanning session while the team was practicing in Los Angeles.) That Porro has scored two goals — one more than Yamal himself — tells us a story about Spain that starkly contrasts the narrative of the other three semifinalists. Rather than rely on superstars — Kylian Mbappé and Messi have each scored eight goals, while Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane have each netted seven and six, respectively — Spain has deployed a strictly collective style throughout the entire tournament. If we are witnessing a miracle in this World Cup, it is just how evenly distributed the team’s statistics are across goal scoring, assists, and defensive numbers. Six different players have scored for Spain; seven different players have assisted. Against France, the majority of the team’s defensive interventions were distributed across not merely its defenders, but more than half the team. And its top goal scorer, Mikel Oyarzabal with 5, continues to fly criminally under the radar, just as he has his entire career.

Spain has been the best team at the World Cup without a single one of the tournament’s stand-out players. France had Mbappé, Ousmane Dembélé and Michael Olise. England had Kane, Bellingham and Bukayo Saka. Argentina still has the best player in the world. Many imagined that this would be the tournament in which Yamal would add his name to that list. After winning the 2024 Euros and growing into stardom at Barcelona, the recently turned nineteen-year-old was expected to put the final nail in the coffin of Spain’s quintessential tiki-taka style, in which inordinate amounts of ball control and lengthy sequences of short, hypnotic passes are meant to yield victories. Yamal and Williams were supposed to return the Spanish national team to the fun, goal fest days of Raúl and Emilio Butragueño. That, of course, times ten. 

Instead, head coach Luis de la Fuente doubled down on tiki-taka, adding a new emphasis on ball recovery. Like Pomeranians to a plushie, the current Spanish team aggressively prioritizes the recovery of what was once theirs. Another anti-hagiographic statistic: throughout this World Cup, Spain has, on average, recovered the ball less than twelve seconds after losing it. And another: Spain has allowed opponents an average of 0.31 expected goals per match. The lone outlier is the Portugal match, in which they allowed Portugal a whopping 0.63 expected goals. Yet any Spanish fan who watched that match knew their team was never in any real danger, statistics be damned. Unlike the World Cup-winning side in 2010, this Spanish squad isn’t quite good enough to pass and possess their opponents into oblivion. So, being much better than their forebears at defense, they’ve decided instead to press and possess them to death.

Which brings us back to Yamal. Though it might sound counterintuitive, all this pressing and possessing and winning works because of him, because his presence offer a constant threat. While Messi has continued to manufacture miracles, bringing his team back from near deaths in each of their knockout stage victories, Yamal has begun to learn the monkish lessons of building team trust and collective physical commitment. During this World Cup, he has constantly had to deal with two or three players marking him, and rarely has he ever had room to run. Yet he has persisted in his attempts to threaten the opposing backline, even when the chances of doing so seem next to none. This seemingly individual trait—baiting opposition defenses into one-on-ones on the wing—is in fact the most collective move of all, because, without it, Pedro Porro would never have the chance to sneak in when everyone least expects it. Playing individually to benefit the collective may seem like a contradiction, but it’s one that helps explain why Spain has managed to play like a properly drilled club team in a tournament where every other elite side has been dependent on a handful of all-star individuals.

Before the semifinal, Mariano Rajoy, the former Prime Minister of Spain, wrote in his weekly soccer column for an online Catholic newspaper—bizarre, yes—that France had a great team despite the fact that none of their players were actually French. That fact was, of course, wrong: all of the French players are French, and 23 of them were born in France. (Such is the state of reasoned debate in Spanish society that these kinds of claims can be made with a straight face.) When asked about it at the pregame press conference, Yamal responded, unfazed. “Soccer,” he said, “if it is useful for anything, it is to integrate society.” Yamal’s way of batting away Rajoy’s comments was appropriate. But it was also banal. When a good portion of the Spanish media wanted fire and brimstone, he gave them a shrug. Why would he care what Rajoy thought about the French national team? Why would anyone, frankly? Yamal, after all, was probably thinking about Messi, and how great it would be to play against—and defeat—that shy, introverted prodigy he’d unknowingly met as a baby all those years ago.