Lamine Yamal: A Season of Triumph and Growth for Barcelona

Lamine Yamal began the season with a coronation and ended it carrying a cause.

On the opening night of 2025-26, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the boy handed the shirt of Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi – took the last kick against Mallorca and buried it. His first goal as an adult, his first as the heir. Arms spread, chest out, he conducted his own crowning. La Liga’s title race started with a teenager announcing that it now belonged to him.

Nine months later, as the champions’ bus rolled through Barcelona, that same teenager stood on the top deck holding a Palestine flag. Lamine Yamal was 18 now, old enough, Hansi Flick said, to make his own decisions. Old enough to know that growing up in public hurts. He later talked about an “internal abyss”, about injuries and doubt, but the numbers on the side of the bus told a different story: his third league title, Flick’s second.

“Have you ever felt so much love?” someone asked the coach whose own father had died on the morning they sealed the league and who chose to share that grief with what he called his other family.

“No, never,” he replied.

Barcelona pull away, Madrid fall apart

Barcelona had effectively ended the race long before the mathematics caught up. They ripped it from Espanyol’s grasp with seven games left, Lamine Yamal sprinting towards the line like Usain Bolt, arms out, already seeing the finish. Week 35 only confirmed it, and did so with a flourish: for the first time in 94 years, a clásico decided the championship.

Three days after Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni had fought in Real Madrid’s dressing room, Valverde leaving with stitches and “craniofacial trauma”, Marcus Rashford delivered the final punch. Barcelona won again. Another stadium, another victory. They had played in three different homes and hadn’t dropped a point in any of them. This clásico was their 11th straight win, their 23rd in 25 league games since the previous meeting, 600km away.

It felt a world away from late October.

Back then, Flick had warned that “ego kills success”. Rayo Vallecano had spotted the fault line in his team’s shape, Sevilla had sliced them open, and Madrid had beaten them 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabéu to go five clear. That night Jude Bellingham mocked Lamine Yamal’s words as “cheap”, soundtracked by Elvis’s A Little Less Conversation. Dani Carvajal wagged his fingers in that familiar jibber-jabber gesture. The kid talked too much, they said.

Yet Madrid’s real problem was closer to home. Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left that night. Xabi Alonso tried to insist he wanted to talk about “what really mattered”. It turned out that was what really mattered. The coach stood alone, and the cracks that had been papered over started to split. Then they widened.

Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico closed the brief Alonso era that had started too early and ended the same way. Real Madrid turned to Álvaro Arbeloa, who spoke in slogans, offered his grey sofa to players who wanted to “open up”, and brought doughnuts when they did well. They did not do well often. “I’m not Gandalf,” he said. He was right.

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. A squad divided, a club exhausted, they just wanted it over. Ninety minutes later it was. Twelve points behind with nine left to play, they were gone from the title race and headed for another empty season. As for Kylian Mbappé, he had gone too, slipping off to Sicily and posting “Let’s go Madrid!” when they were already 2-0 down.

Two days on, Florentino Pérez reappeared in front of the media for the first time in more than a decade and unravelled in public. The Real Madrid president went full Trump, rambling through an incoherent press conference that cleared up nothing and somehow explained everything. He did at least identify the club’s great enemy: the ABC newspaper. He cancelled his subscription.

Barcelona, meanwhile, lifted the trophy on the night they actually won it, parading it around the city with the Super Cup strapped alongside. The European Cup, the one they wanted most, stayed out of reach. Madrid’s too. Their best performances still came in that competition, but not often enough.

Villarreal and Athletic Club did not even get out of the new league phase, although San Mamés remained the only ground where champions PSG failed to score. Atlético Madrid, who had knocked Barcelona out of both domestic cups and had long since let go of the league, got closest of all the Spanish sides. Close, but still nothing.

Arsenal dumped them out of their first Champions League semi-final in 10 years. In their first Copa del Rey final for 13, they were “Matarazzoed”: Real Sociedad won on penalties. A backup goalkeeper made the decisive save and kissed a former ballboy on the cheek before that same ballboy, now Álvaro Odriozola, ran up and scored the winner. Odriozola, who did not play a minute in the final, later said he would not swap it “for anything in humanity”.

Europe, survival and a league that refused logic

Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and Villarreal, who finished third, will all return to the Champions League next season, joined by Betis, who claimed Spain’s new fifth spot. Below them, Copa del Rey winners Real Sociedad head back into Europe alongside Celta Vigo and Getafe.

Getafe’s manager, Pepe Bordalás, insisted their qualification would go down in football history. That was a stretch, but the context gave him a case. They started the season with 13 first-team players, two of them goalkeepers. At halfway, they were in the relegation zone and so desperate they played full-back Allan Nyom as a centre-forward. Bordalás, a man who has inflicted plenty of misery on others, admitted: “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

They signed four little-known loanees in January and somehow finished seventh. They did it in pure Getafe style: second fewest goals scored, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. Ugly, effective, unashamed.

On the final day, as Getafe’s pitch filled with celebrating fans, a dozen red shirts lingered in the chaos. Osasuna’s players were still out there, waiting for other results to decide their fate. The captain called those minutes with iPads, phones and radios “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”. When salvation finally came, they leapt around with the Getafe fans and Nyom, who refused to leave the field until he knew they were safe.

“It’s been … weird,” their coach, Alesio Lisci, said. It had. Osasuna had already celebrated survival a month earlier after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla. They never thought they would have to clamber clear again. In the end, others saved them.

That was the season in miniature. The top barely shifted – the same five or six teams all year – but the bottom was chaos, full of sudden collapses and resurrections. Only Real Oviedo sank without late drama. Back in Primera after 24 years, they brought Santi Cazorla home at 38 on the minimum wage, finally giving him a top-flight debut for the club he joined at eight. Romance had no room. Oviedo scored nine home goals all year and finished with more managers (three) than away wins (two).

Everywhere else, the fight was brutal. In a league where good teams suddenly turned bad and bad teams briefly became brilliant, the gap between Europe and the abyss stayed paper-thin. Nine clubs went into the penultimate round trying to avoid the last two relegation spots. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia scrambled clear, leaving five to sweat on the final day, all bound together by head-to-heads and goal difference.

At Montilivi, Elche and Girona met in a straight shootout. All or nothing. A late Thomas Lemar shot crashed off the bar, the sound echoing like a verdict. Had it dropped in, Girona might have survived. Instead, four points from their last eight games dragged them down. The team that had chased the title two years earlier and played in the Champions League last season went down with 41 points – a total that would have saved them in any other campaign this decade.

Mallorca joined them, sunk by the cruellest of calculations. They finished level on 42 points with Osasuna and Levante, then lost a three-way tie-breaking mini-league. They were relegated despite having a striker who scored 23 league goals, a mark not reached in 26 seasons.

“This hurts,” their coach, Martín Demichelis, said. “Football has been cruel,” added Girona’s Míchel Sánchez. “This league was really crazy,” Elche’s Eder Sarabia said. His team had survived. Just.

Rayo’s banner, Messi’s ghost and a season of small stories

There was still one last chapter, and it belonged to Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano. They reached their first ever European final, the Conference League showpiece in Germany, and could not quite bring the trophy home. It felt wrong and right at the same time.

At the end in Leipzig, their fans unfurled a banner that captured everything about them, and about this season, better than any medal could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat,” it read.

Except perhaps winning one of these …

Rayo’s president, Raúl Martín Presa, spent the year charming no one by calling his own supporters “drunk, brainless and idle”. At the other end of the ownership spectrum, Oviedo’s Jesús Martínez sacked the coach who had taken them up and kept them safe by week eight, then demanded talk of Europe, not survival. Two days later, Oviedo dropped into the bottom three. They never climbed out.

San Mamés once again claimed the best atmosphere in Spain. The twist: Athletic Club were not even playing. Euskadi and Palestine were.

Atlético’s fans finally found a use for the pandemic hoarding, welcoming their team to the Metropolitano under a blizzard of toilet roll that turned the place into the Monumental. Sevilla’s supporters copied them days later. Uefa and La Liga responded with fines, naturally.

Rayo, of course, provided the best post-match singalong, roaring through A Pirate’s Life with the CD Yuncos players they had just knocked out of the cup.

The best party? Real Sociedad’s Copa del Rey binge. Kick-off at 10pm, extra time, penalties, leaving the stadium at 2am. Hotel disco from 2.39am, taxis to a club at 4.45am, the airport bus at 10.15am without a minute’s sleep, duty-free bottles cracked open on the flight home. One player yelled: “This is the best day of my life and we’re going to have a fucking great time.” They did. That day, the next, and the next, looping around the city on an open-top bus, drinking in the sun and the adoration. Then they staggered into training, still half-cut, to prepare for the next league game.

The opponent? Getafe. Of course.

Lionel Messi made his own quiet appearance in the story. One cold Sunday in November, he slipped into the Camp Nou alone, unannounced, and sat there in the dark. The most nostalgic fan of the season.

Others left with bruises. A Betis supporter, desperate for Cédric Bakambu’s shirt after a 3-0 win over Mallorca, tumbled over a barrier and landed at the striker’s feet. Bakambu stared, confused, and walked away without giving him the shirt. Somewhere in Pamplona, Sergio Herrera, the Osasuna goalkeeper who once carried his entire team’s kit into the stands to hand-deliver it, must have winced.

Some fans made more creative headlines. Real Oviedo’s trip to Mestalla was postponed 24 hours because of torrential rain, leaving supporters stranded in Valencia. The club kindly flew them home on the team’s charter the next day. When the photo went up online, a mother in Asturias spotted a familiar face. “Hey, Real Oviedo,” she wrote, “please tell my son I’ll be having a word with him when he gets home.” He was meant to be at his grandmother’s.

In Vigo, Celta fans responded to homophobic abuse aimed at Borja Iglesias for painting his nails by painting their own, a terrace in bright colours and sharp designs. In Zaragoza, the local paper went for blunt honesty with a headline that read: “Zaragoza are going to shit.” They were not wrong.

Coaches who bent a broken league

On the touchlines, the season belonged to the managers who found ways to win with less.

Luis Castro literally fell over on his debut, slipping as he tried to return the ball, then stood back up and led a miracle at Levante. At Real Sociedad, president Jokin Aperribay asked ChatGPT if Rino Matarazzo was a good coach for his club. The answer came back: no. Four months later, they had a historic Copa del Rey in their hands.

Bordalás, sharpening Getafe down to the last splinter, 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 in the end there’s no pencil left.” Somehow, with just a stub and the rubbery bit, he took them back into Europe.

At Sevilla, the sporting director grumbled that presenting Luis Garcia felt “like a funeral”. Six weeks later, the new coach had resurrected them. In Elche, Eder Sarabia talked about going into battle with a catapult while others rolled out bazookas and tanks. His promoted side stayed up playing good football anyway.

Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini quietly impressed again. Hansi Flick, the father figure in Barcelona, took another title and something deeper from a squad that had to move home three times.

Yet the manager of the year was Iñigo Pérez, now Villarreal-bound, who guided Rayo Vallecano through a season of constant obstacles – no pitch, no proper training ground, no hot water – to their highest-ever finish and that first European final. He did it, as he put it, with love.

“It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. It was.

Lamine’s league

On the pitch, the season belonged to the kid with the No 10 on his back.

Carlos Espí might just have been the single most decisive player of the campaign, scoring 10 goals in Levante’s last 14 games – the only matches he started all year. His impact made his case and undermined it at the same time. Levante fans joked about giving him the Ballon d’Or. Vedat Muriqi spun a finger next to his head and called them crazy. One more point and Muriqi might have taken this award himself, along with survival.

Joan García produced the save of the season for Barcelona against Espanyol, a stop Lamine Yamal described as “science fiction” before adding: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!” Others shone in bursts. Many burned out.

Yet it had to be Lamine Yamal. Twenty-four goals, 11 assists in all competitions. Numbers that would be absurd for most players, never mind one who turned 18 with the whole world watching. More than that, he led Barcelona through their escape run-in, dragging them towards the line with a maturity that made the No 10 shirt look light.

“I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be,” he said. That line said enough about the weight he carries.

By season’s end, he had worn the crown, flown the flag, and stood at the front of a bus full of champions. The league was his. The question now is how long he intends to keep it.