"I do now," Joan Monfort says. "I didn't before but now I believe in destiny." Fate, or whatever this was, revealed itself just before midnight one Thursday in July.
A photograph, taken by Monfort in December 2007 and not seen since, the page turned as January became February 2008 and never turned back again, an image lost somewhere in time without anyone realising it was lost at all, reappeared out of nowhere 16 years later. In it, Lionel Messi bathes a tiny baby, aged six months. A plastic tub, bubbles, a rubber duck and a cherubic smile.
The child, the chosen one, is Lamine Yamal . Wait, that kid is ..
. this kid? The now-17-year-old who, five days after the photo emerged had led Spain to victory over France , taking them into the final of Euro 2024 with an outrageous goal? The prodigiously gifted footballer, the youngest in the history of the seleccion , called upon to lead the post-Messi generation at Barcelona -- no pressure, kid -- is that tiny little boy in the tub? The cherubic face of January 2008 in a charity calendar. Of all the children in all of Catalonia, entirely by chance.
Put there, as if baptised, anointed, by Messi. During the Euros, Spain's coach Luis de la Fuente described Lamine as "touched by God's wand," and then, as if by divine intervention, this picture was discovered, like something from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the creation of Adam, some religious artefact. "Without realising, it was there hidden in an ark, and then it appeared," Monfort.