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📸 Messi/Yamal pic goes viral
💀 Is football killing idealism?
🫀A study of penalties and pulse
🐔 French fan, chicken man
Picture Perfect: Yamal, Messi and photo that unites them
Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal are kindred spirits of sorts.
Messi climbed the ladder so easily at Barcelona that he was nailing an El Clasico hat-trick before most boys grow stubble. Yamal’s trajectory meant his exam results dropped through his letterbox while he and Spain were gearing up for Euro 2024’s last 16.
With comparable genius, they were destined to be mentioned in the same breath or to occupy the same space. But not in the way they did when they crossed paths for the first time in 2007, with Messi in his Kurt-Cobain haircut phase and Yamal just six months old.
The photo of that meeting, which has been doing the rounds on social media, is impossibly perfect: a young Messi bathing an infant Yamal for a charity calendar produced by Barca. Touched by God, washed by Messi; it’s divine intervention on tap and the sorcerer with his apprentice — not that either of them knew what Yamal was made of then.
“It was a difficult photo to take,” photographer Joan Monfort tells The Athletic’s Dermot Corrigan. “Messi is still shy now; he was much more shy when he was starting out and he finds himself there with a tiny baby in a plastic bath full of water.”
Yamal is the new sensation at Barca. It takes exams and braces on his teeth to remind those watching that while he runs riot like a top-level pro, he’s just out of school. The international stage is transitioning, too: Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Toni Kroos, Luka Modric, a trickle of long-established powerhouses slowing up. Yamal’s time is here. He’s not the only upstart on the scene either. Prodigies with his flair are blowing a fresh breeze through the game.
Messi and Yamal will be 6,500 kilometres apart tonight but on the same page: Messi in New Jersey with Argentina for the semi-finals of the Copa America, Yamal in Munich with Spain in the last four of the Euros. One is 37, the other is 16, and perhaps it was written that as Messi left his last fingerprints on football, Yamal would be grasping the sport by the neck; the pretender fuelled by the ultimate baptism of fire.
Catch a match
(Times in ET/UK) Euro 2024 semi-final: Spain vs France (3pm/8pm) — Fox, Fubo, BBC One. Live blog.
Copa America semi-final: Argentina vs Canada (8pm/1am) — Fox Sports 1, Fubo, Premier Sports 1. Live blog.
DealSheet 📝
Time for our regular Transfer DealSheet update. This is what is fresh off the grill:
NEWS: Former Liverpool striker Craig Bellamy has been named the new Wales head coach.
Is Idealism Dead?
Marcelo Bielsa’s press conferences are legendary. They can comfortably run for an hour or more. He’ll stay until every question is answered, whether he likes the questions or not. And if he has something on his mind, get ready to listen at length.
Over the weekend, Uruguay’s one-of-a-kind coach was heard lamenting the evolution of football; specifically, the degree to which the sport’s obsession with results was overriding entertainment. Too much process, not enough romance.
“I have no doubt football is on a downward curve,” Bielsa said. “The way we play now is not protecting the spectacle. Football is not a five-minute highlights package. It’s cultural expression.”
Don’t make the mistake of thinking Bielsa is fishing for likes. I heard him say exactly the same when he was Leeds United’s head coach in 2018. And who would argue? Success is king and Euro 2024 is demonstrating that. Most of the teams in the semi-finals are merely finding a way. They’re not thrilling the public. And they don’t especially care.
James Horncastle’s column today calls this the Apple-fication of football, where everything looks like everything else and individualism is lost. “Football has always been about moments,” James writes. “It used to produce movements, too.” For all but a few like Bielsa, is idealism dead?
Marsch Land 🇺🇸
Jesse Marsch is an idealist in the sense of having a style and sticking to it. For better or worse, he’s a chip off the Red Bull block, a coach devoted to the principles of counter-pressing.
It hasn’t worked everywhere, but it’s got Canada to the semi-finals of the Copa America. Tonight’s meeting with Argentina takes him to the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey — the same patch of land where he watched Italy and Bulgaria slog it out in the last four of the 1994 World Cup (worth the entrance fee for some vintage Roberto Baggio alone).
Marsch’s career has been a long and winding road out of Wisconsin. He’ll tell you he’s made it this far against the odds. And to look at his Canada squad, we’re not talking about a host of household names. Knocking out Argentina would be one of the bigger Copa upsets and this interview with midfielder Stephen Eustaquio highlighted one man who would deserve it.
Eustaquio lost both of his parents in the space of 12 months. He kept his head straight by throwing everything into his profession. Nobody on the pitch this evening can want it more.
France’s Right Wing Talk: ‘Relief’ equal to election worry
The French political scene is a powder keg. For a short time, polling and voting indicated that parties on the far right were about to take control of the country’s parliament. Then, on Monday, came a dramatic shift, with the final result favouring parties on the left.
France’s football squad are in Germany to win Euro 2024, but in between games, various members of it — Kylian Mbappe included — spoke out to challenge what they saw as the creep of fascism back home. Player after player pushed back against the right wing of politics. They did what footballers don’t often do by sticking their necks out and exerting diplomatic influence.
What impact they had on the final result, who can say? What mattered more was their conviction in taking up the fight. “The relief is equal to the worry in recent weeks,” said defender Jules Kounde. “It is immense.” Certain things will always be bigger than football.
Around The Athletic FC 🌎
❤️ We strapped a heart monitor to James McNicholas for England’s quarter-final win over Switzerland. Judging by the results (above), the penalty shootout nearly killed him.
🎟️ Some massive crowds, some empty seats. Has the Copa America’s approach to ticketing and engagement been a success?
⛔ Very few players say no to joining Real Madrid full time. Spain’s Joselu did. Pol Ballus has spoken to him.
🎙️ The Athletic FC podcast is discussing the impact of No 9s at the Euros. Poor Harry Kane’s not getting much love.
Ask Me (Almost) Anything 🗣️
Shira Luft sent TAFC an email asking something I’d been thinking about myself: have late goals been more prevalent at this European Championship than in previous incarnations?
It felt like they had, but when I enlisted the brain power of The Athletic’s Duncan Alexander, it turned out that Shira and I were imagining things. There’s been ample late drama in Germany, but over the years, late drama has been par for the course. Euro 2024 is bang on trend.
And Finally… a cockerel 🐓
Meet Clement Tomaszewski. He’s French, he follows the national team everywhere and for the best part of 30 years, he’s been smuggling a cockerel — 35 of them across that time, in fact, all named Balthazar — into games as a lucky charm.
The good news? One of the birds won France the World Cup in 1998. The bad news? Logistics forced him to leave the mighty Balthazar at home for tonight’s semi-final. So I’d be lumping on Spain.
Got a question/feedback? Email us: [email protected]
(Top photo: Diario Sport/Joan Monfort)