Lamine Yamal went to Brazil last summer expecting a meeting with Neymar. He came away with something more lasting: advice on money, investing and the duty of a winger to serve the team first.
Yamal had chased Neymar long before that trip. As a child, he watched Neymar clips on YouTube while moving between his grandmother’s home and his mother’s home, then later said he could copy what the Brazilian did on the first try when he practiced in the park. The trip made that childhood admiration real, and it came with a message Neymar did not soften. “Cứ coi đây là nhà của em,” Neymar told him, while another person present said the former Barcelona forward spent a long time talking about money management and investing.
Neymar also put football in sharper terms. He told Yamal that many people said he had not won Quả bóng vàng or the World Cup, but that he always played to support his family and had done that. It was a reminder that the glamour of elite football sits on a hard, practical base. For Yamal, it landed at a moment when he is being discussed not only as a winger, but as a player who could grow into a number 10 later on.
That is where Neymar’s view matters most. He and Yamal also discussed the benefits and responsibilities of playing wide, a role Neymar once filled inside Barcelona’s treble-winning side in the 2014/15 season with Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez under Luis Enrique. Barcelona still remembered that Neymar worked back to help defend and closed the wing well, and his numbers that season showed the effort behind the flair: he and Lionel Messi shared the Champions League scoring lead with 10 goals, while Neymar averaged 10,26 km per match and Messi 8,25 km.
Yamal then carried that lesson into Spain’s win over Portugal, where he ran 9,6 km and made 10 direct pressing actions, more than Pedri and Dani Olmo, who each had six. Mikel Oyarzabal covered 10,2 km, but De la Fuente still singled out Yamal’s work as extraordinary and called the match one of the most important of his life. He went further, saying Yamal’s workload may have played a part in Nuno Mendes’s injury, a reminder that pressure at the top level is not just creative, but physical.
So the next question is not whether Yamal can dazzle. It is whether Spain keeps asking him to do the exhausting work Neymar described from the wing, or lets him move into the central role that many already see ahead. For now, his rise looks built on the same thing Neymar told him in Brazil: talent counts, but responsibility does too.
