This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Some photos age well simply because the people in them got older. This one aged into a full-blown football legend.
Nearly two decades after a 20-year-old Lionel Messi was handed a six-month-old baby to hold and bathe for a charity calendar shoot, that same baby grew up to become Lamine Yamal, one of the brightest stars in the world game, and the two are now set to face each other for the first time on football’s biggest stage, in the 2026 World Cup final.
Messi finally addressed the photo directly at Fanatics Fest in New York City on Friday, July 17, just days before Argentina and Spain were scheduled to meet at MetLife Stadium.
Speaking with former NFL quarterback Tom Brady, who brought up the image during a live conversation, Messi did not hide his own disbelief at how the story has unfolded.
He also used the moment to heap praise on the player who will be standing across from him at kickoff, a rare bit of warmth between two rivals about to compete for the sport’s ultimate prize.
A Photo Nobody Was Supposed to Find Again
The image traces back to autumn 2007, when Messi was still a 20-year-old rising talent at Barcelona rather than the global icon he would soon become.
Freelance photographer Joan Monfort organized a charity calendar shoot inside Camp Nou on behalf of the Catalan newspaper Diario Sport and UNICEF, an annual event in which Barcelona players were photographed alongside children.
Yamal’s family had entered a raffle for a chance to take part, and they won, landing their infant son a spot in the shoot alongside Messi.
For the portion involving Messi, Monfort brought along a plastic bathtub and a rubber duck borrowed from his own daughter, and the resulting images showed Messi cradling and bathing the baby while Yamal’s mother, Sheila Ebana, looked on.
At the time, nobody involved had any reason to think the photos meant much beyond a nice charity gesture. Yamal’s father, Mounir Nasraoui, kept copies of the images but did not share them publicly for years, and he has since explained that the decision was intentional rather than an oversight.
Yamal himself later confirmed as much, telling the outlet Jijantes that the photos were deliberately kept out of view during his early rise because comparisons to Messi would not have helped him as a young player trying to build his own identity.
“My dad had the photos saved and they never came out, basically because we didn’t want the comparisons with Messi,” Yamal said.
That changed in 2024, when Nasraoui posted one of the images to Instagram with the caption “The beginning of two legends.”
The post spread quickly as fans reacted with disbelief that the sport’s most decorated modern player had once held, in his arms, the teenager many were already calling his heir.
Nasraoui has continued to speak about the photos since, at one point playfully pushing back on the idea that the image showed Messi passing something down to Yamal. “Maybe Lamine was giving it to Leo, I don’t know,” he said. “For me, my son is the best. In everything.”
Messi Breaks His Silence, With Tom Brady Doing the Asking
Even after the photo went viral in 2024, Messi had largely stayed out of the conversation ar