Why Lamine Yamal is already better than Messi in some ways, but still has room to improve.

Is Lamine Yamal the Next Messi? A Deep Dive into the Teenage Sensation’s Meteoric Rise

Just a couple of days before the 2022 World Cup final, I found myself in the eye of a storm. I had written an article that stirred up quite a bit of controversy. The piece argued that for the past 15 years, we had been asking the wrong question. The debate wasn’t about whether Lionel Messi was the greatest soccer player of the modern era. Spend a few seconds pondering or a couple of minutes analyzing the data, and it becomes evident that Messi is indeed the greatest soccer player of the game’s fully globalized era.

Instead, I suggested we should be asking ourselves whether Messi was the greatest male athlete of all time. The gap between Messi and the second-best player of the modern era, Cristiano Ronaldo, is as significant as it is in any other major sport.

Soccer, unlike major U.S. sports, is played by a far larger number of people worldwide, making it much harder to stand out. American football and basketball, while popular, are not as globally accessible due to body-size requirements. If you consider this perspective and stop wondering if Messi could play free safety for the New York Jets, the debate narrows down to Messi and Usain Bolt, as almost everyone can run 200 or 100 meters.

Writing about Messi often leads to pushing logic to its extremes. In the emotional and zero-sum world of sports, hyperbole is easy to fall into. However, with Messi, it was challenging to reach hyperbole. I never thought I’d feel that way again, but now, every few weeks, I find myself in a similar state. The player causing this sensation is playing for Messi’s former club, in the same position. While it’s unlikely we’ll see another player as good as Messi, watching 17-year-old Lamine Yamal at Barcelona makes it hard not to wonder if history might be repeating itself.

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Is Lamine Yamal the Best Teenager in Soccer History?

Comparing Yamal and Messi at the same age is futile because Yamal has already surpassed Messi multiple times. By the end of his age-17 season, Messi had scored one LaLiga goal with zero assists. Yamal, who turns 18 in mid-July, already boasts 11 goals and 17 assists, with four games left in the season.

Yamal also has five goals and five assists in the Champions League. Messi didn’t reach five goals in Champions League play until his age-20 season and five assists until his age-21 season, when Barcelona won it all and he claimed the first of his eight Ballon d’Or awards.

Currently, Yamal is 37 goals and assists ahead of Messi. For context, only one player in Europe, Mohamed Salah of title-winning Liverpool, has at least that many goals and assists this season.

But how does Yamal compare to other players at the same age?

• Pele scored six goals at age 17 as Brazil won their first World Cup in 1958. However, this was a different era, and the sport wasn’t fully professionalized.
• FBref’s stats database, dating back to the early 1990s, shows the best age-17 season for an attacker was Michael Owen’s legendary campaign for Liverpool in 1997-98, with 18 goals and 10 assists.
• Next best: Kylian Mbappe‘s 15 goals and seven assists for Ligue 1-winning Monaco in 2016-17.
• Yamal’s six goals and 12 assists (and counting) for Barcelona this season.

In conclusion, Owen, Mbappe, and Yamal are the best teenagers in modern soccer history. Yamal’s current season surpasses those of Owen and Mbappe for several reasons.

Liverpool with Owen finished third in 1997-98, during a weak period for the Premier League. According to Club Elo ratings, the average rating of Premier League clubs was the lowest of the Big Five leagues. Despite finishing third in England, Liverpool ranked 29th in Europe in early May 1998. Serie A was the dominant league, with five of the top six teams in the rankings from Italy.

Monaco with Mbappe was a better team than Liverpool, ranking 10th in the Elo ratings in early May 2017. However, Ligue 1 was still the weakest of the Big Five leagues, with only two other teams inside the top 50 besides Monaco and PSG.

This season’s Barcelona with Yamal is much better than either Liverpool or Monaco. They currently rank fifth in the Elo ratings, behind only Arsenal, Liverpool, Inter Milan, and Manchester City. LaLiga is neck-and-neck with Serie A as the second-best league after the Premier League.

One might argue that Mbappe and Owen were more impressive because they scored and assisted despite playing with less talent. However, Yamal is not just benefiting from his teammates; Barcelona is benefiting from having him on the field. This is where the Messi comparisons gain weight: Yamal is scoring and assisting, but he’s also doing all the other stuff.

Why Yamal Isn’t the Best Player in the World … Yet

After the 3-3 draw with Inter Milan in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal, many wondered if Yamal was already the best player in the world. He certainly looked like it in spurts during that match.

However, it’s essential to remember that Mohamed Salah has 22 more goals and six more assists than Yamal this season. They play the same position, and Salah plays in a tougher league.

Yamal is not the best player in the world yet, but he’s not far off. According to Michael Imburgio’s DAVIES model, which sums up the value of everything a player does on the ball, both in and out of possession, there are eight players in Europe’s Big Five leagues who have added at least 10 goals of value to their teams this season:

1. Mohamed Salah, Liverpool: 13.04
2. Kylian Mbappe, Real Madrid: 12.42
3. Cole Palmer, Chelsea: 11.28
4. Raphinha, Barcelona: 10.76
5. Hugo Ekitike, Eintracht Frankfurt: 10.64
6. Ousmane Dembélé, Paris Saint-Germain: 10.64
7. Robert Lewandowski, Barcelona: 10.45
8. Lamine Yamal, Barcelona: 10.36

The significant difference between Yamal and others on the list is that he’s five years younger than Palmer and Ekitike, the second-youngest players on the list. However, all these other players have significantly more goals and assists than Yamal.

This means Yamal is already doing all the secondary things that help his team win games. What made Messi the best ever was that he scored and assisted goals more often than everyone and did all the other stuff better than anyone.

By “other stuff,” I’m mainly talking about moving the ball closer to the goal, building the capacity for goals to be scored. As 17-year-olds, Owen and Mbappe relied on others to move the ball into dangerous areas so they could capitalize. Yamal’s teammates, though, are relying on him to do that.

Across Europe’s Big Five leagues this season, there are two players who have carried and passed the ball into the penalty area at least 80 times: Salah and Yamal. But he’s in even rarer company than that. Since 2017, there have been only three other seasons in which a player reached 80 in both types of penalty-box entries: Salah again in 2022-23, Eden Hazard in 2018-19, and Messi in 2017-18. That’s a 32-year-old, two 30-year-olds, a 27-year-old, and a 17-year-old.

And again: Yamal still has four league games left to play.

So, What’s Next for Yamal?

How does Yamal actually become the best player in the world? And how does he go beyond even that?

It’s pretty simple: goals.

An easy way to explain why he’s not the best player in the world yet: He has six goals in league play. Six! As of this writing, 175 players across the Big Five leagues have scored more goals than Yamal this season. But get this: only two players have attempted more shots. Among the 84 players who have attempted at least 60 shots, he’s last in goals per shot: 0.05.

There are three potential explanations: He’s getting unlucky, he’s shooting terribly, or he’s taking terrible shots. Well, in fact, it has been a combination of all three.

Per Stats Perform’s post-shot expected goals model, which looks at where the shot ended up on the goal frame to determine the likelihood that it would be scored, Yamal would usually score 7.9 goals from those 119 shots. So, opposing goalkeepers have conceded about two goals fewer than average while facing his shots. He has no control over this.

At the same time, all of Yamal’s shots have an xG value, a conversion probability based on factors at the time of the shot, of 8.75. That’s higher than his post-shot number, which means he’s producing worse attempts than we’d expect from the shots he’s getting.

But that’s all secondary compared to the main reason why Yamal shoots so much and rarely scores: He takes horrible shots. Among the players who have taken at least 60 shots this season, only two players have a lower xG-per-shot average than Yamal’s 0.07. The average throughout Europe is around 0.10.

He shoots a lot from outside of the box, and he’s rarely getting into the center of the penalty area:

This is maybe the one area where he’s “normal,” though. Most young players take a high volume of bad shots and then they eventually shave off some attempts in favor of higher quality shots as they get older. I’d bank on him figuring this out and being dialed in at some point. To what degree he figures it out, I’m not sure. But I think that’ll be what determines how good he actually becomes.

To level-set: Messi managed to put up 150 or more shots every season, on roughly average shot quality, and he finished around eight goals above his xG every season. That’s how you score 50 goals in a single LaLiga season.

For Yamal to achieve a more human level of stardom, we can look at Salah. At Liverpool, he has finished, on average, about only a goal above xG every season. He attempts roughly the same number of shots as Yamal currently does, but the quality of those shots is more than twice as good: 0.15, compared to Yamal’s 0.17.

The big difference between Salah and Yamal is that Salah became an elite passer in his late 20s to early 30s. Yamal is already there. We’ve seen plenty of dribblers as good as Yamal at his age, but passing is typically an older-player skill — it develops a bit later into your career and then it hangs around for way longer — and he’s already one of the best creative passers in the world at any age and pretty easily the best teenage passer we’ve ever seen.

The passing all but guarantees a world-class floor for Yamal — the development of his shot profile, though, will determine the height of his ceiling.

Unfortunately, the biggest risk to Yamal’s career is the same as it is for everyone: injury. It’s tempting — and horrifying — to look at Owen’s career and worry about the same thing happening to Yamal. Owen’s best season, as measured by goals and assists, ended up being his age-17 season. He continued to be great for Liverpool for six more years before moving to Real Madrid for a season and then moving back to the Premier League with Newcastle United and fading out of the spotlight.

Owen blames his decline on a hamstring tear when he was 19. And he has said he hated playing soccer by the time he reached his peak years. Owen played over 1,000 minutes only one more time after his age-27 season. Over that final stretch, he scored 14 Premier League goals — four fewer than he did during the single season when he was 17.

Barcelona, too, don’t have a great recent track record of managing young talent. Ansu Fati, Pedri, and Gavi have all played at incredibly high levels for the club as teenagers, and they’ve all sat out significant amounts of time because of injury before their prime years have even begun.

If he keeps up his current pace, Yamal will have played the most minutes of any 18-and-under outfield player in FBref’s database by the end of the next season. He’ll be around 8,000 minutes, while no one else is above 6,300. But of the four players who would be right below him — Eduardo Camavinga, Wayne Rooney, Iker Muniain, and César Azpilicueta — three went on to have long, mostly injury-free careers, while Camavinga, who was recently ruled out by Real Madrid for the rest of the season because of an adductor injury, hasn’t really been any more injury-prone than the average player.

We tend to remember the lost promise of someone such as Owen or even Luke Shaw — who played nearly 3,000 minutes for Southampton at age 18 and hasn’t played as many minutes since. But players who play a lot at a young age in a Big Five league don’t appear to be any more at risk of injury.

So, maybe when Real Madrid and Barcelona play this weekend, perhaps we should all try to just enjoy the absurdity of what’s happening right now.

Mbappe and Vinícius Júnior will be buzzing around up top for Madrid, with Jude Bellingham crashing the box and doing pretty much everything else from the midfield. For Barcelona, Raphinha will press his face off and try to cap off a potentially Ballon d’Or-winning season. Robert Lewandowski will try to lengthen the lead between himself and every other goal scorer not named Lionel or Cristiano. And Pedri will find space and pick out passes that no one else in the world is even capable of seeing.

But despite all of that, there’s a pretty good chance that the best player on the field will be someone who still isn’t even old enough to vote.