It was the year of Spain in football. The year they were crowned the European Champions; the year the most influential midfielder in the world, Rodri, was deservedly adjudged the best footballer on the planet; and it was also the year the country’s 17-year-old sensation Lamine Yamal introduced his ridiculous talents to the world. Sadly, an injury ended his year on a sombre note, but not before he had offered to the global audience a peek into his staggering gifts as well as the future of the game.
The curlers and benders from his gliding, gilded left foot in the Euros would form the montages of greatest goals scored in the championship. Those were slithering snakes in the skin of silk. He cut in, he spat away, he ripped the ball inside, he fizzed the ball outside. He feigned and floated like a frictionless gnome. As though bored of routine deception, he has been flaunting his latest toy, the trivela, one of the most outrageous tricks in the game. It’s a lobbed, out-swinging cross (often a long-ranger) from outside of the boot that swerves and spins (tremendous backspin is imparted) when allowed to land.
The word is Portuguese—its best exponent has been the Portuguese forward Ricardo Quaresma—originating from the expression Tres Dedos, or three fingers because the ball is sliced with the three outer toes of the foot. At first sight—the deception always begins with the eyes—it looks like he has scuffed the shot. It seems weak, with not much pace or venom, the bend floaty, as though its lone intention is to tease. Then it evades the men and their lunging legs and heads and falls to the right man in the right space.
Three of nine assists for Barcelona have been the trivela. The most delightful one was against Villareal. He received the ball in his own half, a few yards away from the half-line. He zips upfront, the defenders rather than closing in, are blocking the route of his classical in-swinger. They were anticipating him to cut into the box, so kept dragging him away to the touchline, to his weaker right foot, ready to fling their bodies to the left, unsuspicious of Yamal’s deceit.
Then Yamal pauses, ponders, shifts the angle of his body with a dinky little half-step and just floats the ball into the path of Raphinhia, spearing into the box. The ball wriggled and giggled and blushed as it hung in the air, past four defenders, each shoving their limbs to thwart the ball but futilely. It lands precisely into Raphinhia’s feet, who nails the target.
Yamal nearly scored one against Sevilla too. This time he was on the edge of the box, on the left side. The markers again obscured the path of his inward bending curler, but he stunned them with a pearler that snapped away and snaked back. It required a full-stretch save from the goalkeeper Orjan Nyland to deny a goal. A trivela assist against Mallorca had a television anchor ask him in jest: “Is there any way to do those passes you do in video games?” He replied with a chuckle: “Yes, you can, to be fair. You need to press the L2 button and then pass, go and try it! I think it is a pass that I can do very well, I am confident with it, so I will not stop trying.”
Spain’s Lamine Yamal reacts during a semifinal match between Spain and France at the Euro 2024 soccer tournament in Munich, Germany, Tuesday, July 9, 2024. Left Spain’s Rodri. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
It’s hard to perfect the craft—which Quaresma used to say required a bit of god’s gift and devil’s luck. The Portuguese was discouraged to perform the trivela, as the peak of his career unfolded at a time when managers fetishised systems, where trivela-like frippery was discouraged, when individual flair was construed as antithetical to the idea of the collective. The demand was for two-footed, 360-degree passing metronomes. Tricksters and romantics were largely outliers or castaways.
Yamal strikes the perfect blend between system and individual, liberating the game from the clutches of excessive structuralism and breathing a fresh air of improvised brilliance the game had long yearned for. In this sense, he is not a classical La Masia player, but rather bridges the school and streets. He is as much as La Masia as Mataro, the town he grew up in and honed his tricks in. His game has the exuberant notes of Samba as well as the dexterous chords of the Spanish passing game. He could liberate the game from the suppressing tactical cages, without disturbing its order.
It’s symbolic that his rise runs parallel to Pep Guardiola’s crumbling Manchester City empire. Pep symbolised the ideals of the modern game; maybe it is getting outdated. A point comes when every philosophy requires rethink, revision and perhaps scrapping. The future could be Yamal and his types, when humans make the system work, and not the other way around, when rigid structures don’t stifle individual creativity.
His rise has wider social and cultural dimensions too. He embodies the winds of multiculturalism that is sweeping Spain in general and Spanish football. He is of Moroccan-Equatorial Guinea descent, who grew up in a town largely populated by migrants from North Africa. From such multi-ethnic backgrounds are his national team colleague Nico Williams and others like Robert Sánchez, Alejandro Balde and Ansu Fati.
Hence, it could be that Rodri was crowned the best footballer on the planet. But the eye-stopper was Yamal, the footballer from the future. Or the football future itself.
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