Photos of Lionel Messi with 16-year-old soccer star Lamine Yamal as baby resurfaces

Pictures of Lionel Messi with 16-year-old baby football sensation Lamine Yamal have resurfaced and achieved international success on the pitch this week.

Tuesday night was Messi, who led Argentina to a world title in 2022, led his national team to the Copa America final after beating Canada 2-0 in a match in which he scored his first goal of this year’s tournament. Just hours earlier, Spain’s teenager Yamal became the youngest player ever to score at the European Championship when he netted in a 2-0 win over France. He turns 17 on Saturday — the day before the final.

The players have previously been linked with Yamal, who currently stars at FC Barcelona, ​​and Messi, who played for the organisation for almost two decades. But heartwarming photos of the two together from more than 16 years ago have resurfaced after Yamal’s father shared one of the images to his Instagram account last week, captioning it “the beginning of two greats.”

Joan Monfort, a freelance photographer for The Associated Press, shot the original photos. He told AP that the photo shoot took place in the visitors’ dressing room at Camp Nou in 2007, when Yamal was just a few months old.

Messi, then 20 and playing for Barcelona, ​​held Yamal in one of the photos. In another, Messi bathes the young Yamal in a plastic tub. There is also a photo of Yamal’s mother, Sheila Ebana, with Messi together as they bathe the child.

Barcelona players posed with children and their families for a calendar as part of an annual charity campaign by Spanish newspaper Diario Sport and UNICEF. Monfort was in charge of the photoshoots and Messi was paired with Yamal’s family.

“We made the calendar with the help of UNICEF,” Monfort said. “So UNICEF held a raffle in the Roca Fonda neighborhood of Mataró, where Lamine’s family lived. They signed up for the raffle to have their picture taken at Camp Nou with a Barça player. And they won the lottery.”

Monfort also said that the recordings were not easy because Messi did not know how to deal with Lamine.

“Messi is quite an introverted person, he is shy,” he said. “He came out of the dressing room and suddenly he was in another dressing room with a plastic container full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated. He didn’t even know how to hold him at first.”

The photographer had no idea Yamal was in the photos until a friend told him they had gone viral. The excitement over the photos is something he has never experienced before, he said, despite a long career as a sports photographer.

“It’s very exciting to be associated with something that has caused such a sensation,” he said. “To be honest, it’s a very nice feeling.”