Lamine Yamal: A Season of Triumph and Challenges for Barcelona

Lamine Yamal’s season began with a coronation and ended with a flag.

On the opening night of 2025-26, with the last swing of his left foot, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager inheriting a shirt worn by Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi – bent the ball past Mallorca and into a different kind of future. His first goal as an adult, his first as the face of a club desperate for a new era. He spread his arms, conducted his own ceremony, and La Liga’s title race opened under his rule.

Nine months later, the race was run. Barcelona’s bus crawled through the city, a familiar trophy rattling on the top deck. Lamine Yamal, now 18, leaned over the rail and held a Palestine flag above the crowds. A kid touched by “God’s wand”, as Spain coach Luis de la Fuente once said, now old enough, in Hansi Flick’s words, to make his own decisions. Old enough to carry a cause, a club and a number that weighs like history.

The season had not spared him. Injuries, pressure, and what he would later call an “internal abyss”. But he had a third league title. Flick, the father figure whose own dad died on the morning Barcelona sealed the championship – news he chose to share with his “other family” in the dressing room – had his second. Asked if he had ever felt so much love, the coach didn’t bother with a speech.

No, never.

Barcelona’s sprint to the line

Barcelona had effectively ended the argument weeks earlier. The decisive blow came in Cornellà, against Espanyol, seven games from the finish. Lamine Yamal tore away towards the corner, arms wide like Usain Bolt watching Richard Thompson and Walter Dix in the rear-view mirror. The gap was not just points; it was mood, conviction, inevitability.

They made it mathematical in week 35, and did it with a clásico that carried a century of weight. For the first time in 94 years, a league title was clinched in that fixture. The context was pure Madrid chaos: three days after a dressing-room fight between Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni that ended with the vice-captain in hospital, stitched up and diagnosed with “craniofacial trauma”, it was Marcus Rashford who landed the sporting knockout. Barcelona’s 11th straight win, their 23rd in 25 league games since the previous clásico 600km away, confirmed what everyone already knew.

They had played in three different homes and won every league game in all of them. They had a star who finished with 24 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, and who still insisted: “I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be.” He came close.

The contrast with late October was brutal. Back then, Flick had warned that “ego kills success”. Rayo Vallecano had exposed “The Flick Line”, Sevilla had sliced Barcelona apart, and Real Madrid had beaten them 2-1 at the Santiago Bernabéu to go five points clear. That night Jude Bellingham dismissed Lamine Yamal’s talk as “cheap”, dropping Elvis’s A Little Less Conversation over the top, while Dani Carvajal threw in the jibber-jabber gesture for good measure.

Madrid had their own noise to deal with. Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left, Xabi Alonso insisted he wanted to focus on what really mattered, and then discovered that this was what really mattered. From that point, the thread snapped. The coach looked abandoned, fault lines widened, and the season began to fray.

Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico finally ended the illusion of Madrid control Alonso said had started too soon. He trudged to the Club World Cup, then out of the job. Álvaro Arbeloa arrived and tried to play therapist, offering his grey sofa for confessions, handing out doughnuts as rewards. It sounded warm. It wasn’t working.

“I’m not Gandalf,” he said. The results agreed.

By the time the rivals met again in May, Madrid were out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and, mentally, almost out of the building. Divided, drained, desperate for it to be over, they left the pitch 12 points behind with nine to play. Empty-handed, again, like last season.

Kylian Mbappé was nowhere near it. He slipped off to Sicily, posting “Let’s go Madrid!” when they were already 2-0 down. The timing fit the whole campaign.

Two days later, Florentino Pérez stepped in front of the cameras for the first time in more than a decade and delivered a press conference that spiralled between grievance and confusion. He answered nothing and somehow laid everything bare. At least he identified the real enemy: the ABC newspaper. Subscription cancelled. Crisis solved.

Champions without Europe, contenders without closure

Barcelona’s title was wrapped in a rare piece of common sense: the trophy actually appeared on the night they won it, then rolled around the city on the open-top bus. The Super Cup climbed aboard as well. The one they wanted most, the European Cup, stayed away.

Madrid’s didn’t arrive either. Their best performances still seemed reserved for Europe, but this time they weren’t good enough there, either. Villarreal and Athletic never made it out of the league phase. Only San Mamés, thunderous as ever, kept champions PSG from scoring.

Atlético Madrid, who had knocked Barcelona out of both domestic cups and abandoned the league long before the end, went the furthest. They reached a first Champions League semi-final in a decade and a first Copa del Rey final in 13 years. Arsenal ended the European run. Real Sociedad ended the domestic dream on penalties.

The Copa final was pure storybook. A backup goalkeeper made the last save, then kissed the cheek of a former ballboy who stepped up and buried the winner. Álvaro Odriozola, who didn’t play a minute, stood there afterwards and declared he wouldn’t swap this for “anything in humanity”.

Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and third-placed Villarreal will all get another shot in the Champions League next season, joined by Betis, who grabbed Spain’s new fifth spot. Below them, cup winners Real Sociedad head back into Europe alongside Celta Vigo and Getafe, whose coach Pepe Bordalás claimed qualification would “go down in football history”.

That was a stretch. But the route he took demanded respect.

Getafe started the season with 13 first-teamers, two of them goalkeepers. At the halfway point, they were in the relegation zone and so short of options that Allan Nyom played up front. Bordalás, a man who has inflicted more suffering than most, admitted: “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.” In January they signed four largely unknown loanees. By May they were seventh.

They did it their way: second fewest goals scored, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. An anti-football manifesto that somehow ended in Europe.

Survival, cruelty and a league on a knife-edge

On the final day, Getafe’s pitch turned into a party. Among the blue shirts and flares, a dozen red jerseys lingered nervously. Osasuna’s players, still threatened by relegation, stayed out on the grass waiting for the other results to come in. iPads, phones, radios, faces drained. Their captain called those minutes “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”.

When the news finally broke that they were safe, they exploded with the Getafe fans and Nyom, who said he wanted to be sure Osasuna were staying up before disappearing into the dressing room. Their coach, Alesio Lisci, summed it up in one word: “weird”.

A month earlier, after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla, they had already celebrated survival. They never thought they would have to claw their way out again. This time, others saved them.

It was that kind of season. The top stayed mostly fixed – the same five or six in the same orbit – but the bottom was chaos. Sudden collapses, improbable resurrections, a table that never sat still. Only Real Oviedo went early.

Back in the first division after 24 years, with Santi Cazorla finally making his Primera debut for the club he joined at eight and rejoined at 38 on the minimum wage, Oviedo never got the romance they wanted. They scored nine home goals all year and finished with more managers (three) than away wins (two). The drop felt inevitable, and still hurt.

Everywhere else, the trapdoor stayed open until the very end. In a league where good teams turned bad overnight and bad teams briefly became brilliant, the line between Europe and oblivion almost vanished. Nine clubs went into the penultimate round trying to dodge the last two relegation spots. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia scrambled clear then. Five remained in danger on the final day, tangled together.

Elche and Girona met at Montilivi in an all-or-nothing shootout. A late Thomas Lemar shot smashed off the bar, the difference between Girona staying up or going down. They took four points from their last eight matches, and the team that had challenged for the title two years ago and played in the Champions League last season slipped into the second division with 41 points. Any other year this decade, that would have been enough.

Not this one.

Mallorca joined them, sunk by a three-way head-to-head mini-league with Osasuna and Levante, all three locked on 42 points. They went despite having a striker who scored 23 goals, a mark no one had hit in 26 seasons.

“This hurts,” coach Martín Demichelis said. Girona’s Míchel Sánchez called football “cruel”. Elche’s Eder Sarabia looked up at the table, at his safe team, and simply said: “This league was really crazy.” He was right. It was over now, but it had left scars.

Rayo, romance and the game that got away

There was one more story, saved for last. Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, the team that never quite fits and never quite wants to, reached their first European final. They took their Conference League dream to Germany and came back without the trophy.

It felt wrong. With Rayo, it also felt exactly right.

In Leipzig, a banner unfurled in their end told the truth better than any medal could. “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat,” it read. For them, that was the point.

Still, you suspect they would like to win one of these one day.

The season’s cast of characters

La Liga’s year came loaded with side stories, punchlines and oddities that said as much about the league as the table did.

Rayo’s president Raúl Martín Presa set the tone early, branding his own supporters “drunk, brainless and idle”. At Oviedo, owner Jesús Martínez refused to talk about survival and demanded European ambitions in week eight, two days before his club slipped into the bottom three and never came out.

San Mamés delivered the best atmosphere of the season without Athletic even playing, as Euskadi faced Palestine. Atlético fans finally found a use for pandemic toilet-roll stockpiles, turning the Metropolitano into a paper blizzard that Sevilla’s supporters soon copied. Uefa and La Liga responded with fines.

Rayo’s post-match soundtrack of choice became A Pirate’s Life, belted out alongside the CD Yuncos players they had just knocked out of the Copa del Rey. Real Sociedad’s Copa del Rey celebrations were so wild that by the time they stumbled into a league game they just wanted to get through, the fixture list offered them the cruelest of comedowns: Getafe.

Lionel Messi quietly slipped into the Camp Nou one cold Sunday in November, alone, a ghost in the house he built. Elsewhere, one Betis fan trying to get Cédric Bakambu’s shirt managed to fall over the barrier and land at the striker’s feet, only to walk away empty-handed. In Palma, Osasuna goalkeeper Sergio Herrera went the other way, carefully collecting every teammate’s shirt and delivering them to the stands by hand.

Oviedo supporters stranded in Valencia by a waterlogged Mestalla ended up on the team’s charter flight home, prompting one mother in Asturias to recognise her supposedly well-behaved son in the photos and promise a conversation when he landed. In Vigo, when Borja Iglesias suffered homophobic abuse for painting his nails, Celta fans and teammates answered by painting theirs too.

Real Zaragoza’s crisis needed no dressing up. “Zaragoza are going to shit,” read the headline in El Periódico de Aragón. No one argued.

The Copa del Rey threw up a ninth-tier opponent for Getafe, Inter de Valdemoro. Eight goals down with half an hour left, Getafe sent on Borja Mayoral, who took the chance to stick two more past his older brother Kity in midfield. Valdemoro’s goalkeeper, busy all night, left with the best name and the worst shift.

Granada’s Jorge Pascual collected the season’s most memorable red card for calling the assistant “fucking moustache-face” and, as the referee’s report carefully noted, “pointing to his upper lip to simulate said moustache”. Dani Cárdenas became Vallecas’s handiest goalkeeper, saving a Kike García penalty and the nets themselves. Sevilla, under Matías Almeyda, embraced “hand-me-down chic”, the coach describing his squad as a kid gratefully accepting grandad’s trousers and a cousin’s T‑shirt.

Real Betis released a scratch-and-sniff shirt made from oranges that smelled of oranges. At least before kick-off. Another Betis forward, Cucho Hernández, scored against Levante and apologised to them on camera, apparently forgetting he had never actually played for them. He had played for Huesca. Same colours. Different club.

Vedat Muriqi, put up as Robert Lewandowski’s equal in a Barcelona preview, brushed the idea away: “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.” Later, when Levante fans jokingly demanded the Ballon d’Or for their own late-season saviour Carlos Espí, Muriqi twirled a finger at his temple and called them crazy. One more point and he might have taken the award here, along with safety.

In Osasuna, Hugo Hard accepted the bench with a shrug and a line: “If I’m not a starter any more, it’s because [Umar] Sadiq is playing like Pelé.” At Betis, Joan García produced a “science fiction” save against Espanyol that had Lamine Yamal gasping: “Mother of God almighty, what a goalkeeper!”

The managers who bent the season

The dugouts produced their own theatre. Luis Castro literally fell on his backside on his Levante debut, slipping as he tried to return the ball, then spent the rest of the season walking on air, leading a rescue act that bordered on miraculous.

At Real Sociedad, president Jokin Aperribay turned to ChatGPT to ask if Rino Matarazzo was a good coach for his club and got a “no”. Four months later, Matarazzo had delivered a historic Copa del Rey. At Sevilla, sporting director Víctor Orta grumbled that presenting new coach Luis García felt “like a funeral”. Six weeks later, García had resurrected them.

Eder Sarabia, steering promoted Elche, described his team as a catapult facing rivals with “bazookas and tanks”. They survived, and did it playing football worth watching. Claudio Giráldez and Manuel Pellegrini enhanced their reputations again. Hansi Flick, of course, finished as champion once more.

But the manager of the year? That honour belonged to Villarreal-bound Iñigo Pérez, who dragged Rayo Vallecano to their highest-ever league finish and a first major final while dealing with a club that sometimes lacked a pitch to play on, a place to train, or even hot water to wash with. Through it all, he refused to abandon his principles.

“It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. His team proved him right.

The season’s XI – and the boy with the No 10

By the end, the team of the season wrote itself, even if the league never did.

Joan García, Barcelona’s revelation in goal. Marcos Llorente, reimagined as a right-back at Atlético. Florian Lejeune anchoring Rayo, David Affengruber shining for Elche, Carlos Romero standing out at Espanyol. In midfield, Fermín López’s energy at Barcelona, Luis Milla’s control at Getafe, Pablo Fornals’s craft at Betis. Up front, Lamine Yamal on the right, Vedat Muriqi through the middle, Alberto Moleiro lighting up Villarreal’s left.

The bench told its own story: Aaron Escandell, Eric García, Pedri, Ratiu, Chavarria, Isi, Jon Martín, Mikel Oyarzabal, Aleix Febas, Abde, Budimir, Espí, Mbappé, Arda Güler, Tchouaméni, Muñoz, Pubill, Koke, Griezmann, Martínez, Gueye, Exposito, Iglesias. A cast stretched across crisis and glory.

Player of the year could have gone in several directions. Carlos Espí scored 10 in Levante’s last 14 games – the only ones he started – and changed their season. Muriqi came within a point of saving Mallorca almost on his own. Joan García made the save of the season. But the answer sat in that No 10 shirt.

Lamine Yamal, with his 24 goals, 11 assists and a campaign that swung when he caught fire, stood above the rest. He carried Barcelona’s escape towards the line, shouldered the weight of expectation and history, and still found room to be an 18-year-old on a bus, flag in hand, looking out over a city that now belongs to him.

He began with a coronation and ended with a cause. The question now is not whether he can handle the crown.

It’s how far he intends to run with it.