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 around it until his appearance at Fanatics Fest.
When Brady raised the subject on stage, framing the situation as remarkably fitting given the pair were about to meet in a World Cup final, Messi did not shy away from how strange the whole thing still feels to him. “That photo is incredible,” Messi said. “The fact that we’re both playing in the World Cup now is crazy.”
He went further, speaking about Yamal not as a footnote to his own career but as a player he genuinely admires and has followed closely, in part because of his own lasting connection to Barcelona.
“He’s one of the best in the world right now, no doubt about it,” Messi said. “And I wish him a lot of luck, because what’s good for him will also be good for Barcelona.”
At a separate pre-final press conference, Messi expanded on that sentiment further, noting that Yamal, at just 19 years old, has his whole career still ahead of him and a genuine chance to accomplish something historic, one Messi made clear he intends to try to stop from happening in the final itself.
Yamal’s Spain teammate Mikel Merino offered his own reaction to the photo when asked about it the same week, and it mirrored the disbelief so many fans expressed when the image first resurfaced.
“The first time I saw it, I thought it was AI and that it wasn’t even real,” Merino said. He added that the moment carries weight beyond its novelty, calling it fitting that two players of that caliber would share a photo like this one.
“It’s unbelievable that two of the best players to have played the game, and hopefully Lamine, in the future, will be one of those, share a picture like that,” Merino said. “Hopefully we’re going to see a very bright final with those two protagonists at their best, playing and giving all the fans a great spectacle.”
From a Bathtub in Barcelona to a Final at MetLife Stadium
The football context surrounding the reunion only adds to how unlikely the whole story feels. Argentina, the defending champions, reached the final by grinding through a knockout stage full of late drama, including extra-time wins over Cape Verde and Switzerland and a come-from-behind victory against England powered by a late Messi-orchestrated turnaround.
Spain, by contrast, cruised through its bracket with tighter, more controlled performances, capped by a commanding 2-0 win over France in the semifinal that kept Kylian Mbappé and company largely contained.
The two nations had met exactly once before at a World Cup, a 1966 group-stage match won by Argentina, making Sunday’s final only their second meeting in the tournament’s history and their first with the trophy on the line.
Messi, now 39 and playing in his third World Cup final after appearances in 2014 and 2022, is chasing a chance to help Argentina become just the third nation ever to defend a World Cup title.
Yamal, at 19, is chasing something no player his age has ever managed: a chance to add a World Cup title to the European Championship he already won with Spain in 2024.
Whatever happens on the scoreboard, the story of how the two players first crossed paths has already given the final an emotional layer that a simple pre-tournament preview never could have manufactured on its own.
For Messi, the photo seems to represent something closer to full-circle wonder than nostalgia. He is not framing it as a passing of the torch, and he has been clear that he plans to compete against Yamal as hard as he would against anyone else standing in Argentina’s way.
But the fact that football’s greatest modern star once held its next great hope in his arms, years before either of them knew what the other would become, gives Sunday’s final a storyline that neither team’s roster sheet could ever fully capture on its own.
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