Lamine Yamal Is Soccer’s Brightest New Star

Whenever Lamine Yamal scores, which is often, he doesn’t so much bask in adoration as channel it elsewhere. The 17-year-old soccer phenom celebrates his goals for Barcelona and Spain’s national team by flashing 3-0-4 with his hands: the final postal-code digits for the rough Rocafonda neighborhood of the Catalan city of Mataró where he grew up, a place described by national newspaper El País as “forgotten, isolated, and stigmatized.”

The gesture transports Yamal, whom soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo recently christened “the best player of this new generation,” and his legion of fans from the manicured emerald of packed stadiums to the graffiti-­strewn asphalt where he learned his trade. “It’s true that Barcelona has influenced me,” the gangly forward known for dancing past opponents with impudent tricks and flicks tells TIME over a video call from his home. “You can’t play in the top league the way you played in the park. But 60% to 70% of my game comes from the slyness of playing with other kids [in Rocafonda]. I feel proud of helping the neighborhood to be known.”

Last April, just 15 years and 9 months old, Yamal became the youngest player ever to represent Barcelona’s first team and soon after became the youngest to score in La Liga. When the call came to join the Spain squad for the 2024 European Championship over the summer, Yamal became the youngest player ever to compete there too. And he played a key role in Spain’s victory, registering one goal and four assists and being named the tournament’s best young player. “It was a happy summer for everyone in Spain,” says Yamal. “Even the ones that don’t like football.”

Yamal’s rise has certainly transcended sport. Son of a father from Morocco and a mother from Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, he represents a new, multi­cultural society, as a declining birth rate and rising immigration spur a demographic and political shift. “Yamal is really the pioneer of a new generation of Spaniards,” says Simon Chadwick, a scholar specializing in sport and geopolitical economy. “But there is still a level of discomfort about some of the changes that are taking place.”

Indeed, nativism has swept Europe in recent years, including Spain, where the far-right Vox party openly demonizes predominantly immigrant neighborhoods like Rocafonda. Yamal’s pride in his African heritage is a stark rebuttal. “All my ­personality—­cheerful, social—comes from my parents,” he says. “In Africa, people are more or less like this: loving, close, nice.”

Yamal speaks Arabic at home, looks after his little brother between matches, and craves his grandmother’s Moroccan cooking, especially her rfissa, a dish of chicken and lentils spiced with fenugreek. “I try to go there after eating, because if I go there during lunchtime I end up grabbing something,” he says, braces glinting as he smiles.

Yamal’s story also embodies the sacrifice and toil of the immigrant experience so often missing from right-wing propaganda. His mother worked from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day just to put food on the table, while neighbors would often help his father pay the train fare to take him to training. “My father and my mother had to go to work, they couldn’t pay anyone to take care of me,” Yamal says.

It’s a familiar story across Spain, where marginalized communities occupy a patchwork of neighborhoods on the periphery of major cities. “Not only for Black people, but also for white working-class people, Yamal is a role model and somebody to look up to,” says Moha Gerehou, a renowned Spanish journalist and anti-racism advocate.

Since his April debut, Yamal has become a mainstay on a resurgent Barcelona team. Asked how he handles the intensity and expectations, Yamal offers the carefree shrug of a teen doing what he loves. “You only feel pressure when you think about it,” he says. “If you enjoy what you do and have fun, you don’t have pressure. That’s what I always try.”

Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com.