A crowd near Rocafonda, the neighborhood where Lamine Yamal grew up, watches the player on a giant screen during Spain’s semifinal with France last week.
“Shortly before Spain’s soccer team won a place in the World Cup final, the grandmother of the team’s 19-year-old star player, Lamine Yamal, sat on a playground bench watching children of North and West African descent kick around balls. This was the place, she said, where her grandson, the child of a Moroccan father and an Equatorial Guinean mother, first honed his skills. It is also where his portrait, spray-painted onto a wall behind the goal, now looms over a neighborhood that lionizes him. Yet as hundreds of Spaniards, many wearing his name on their backs, made their way to a nearby park to watch him play on a big screen, his grandmother, Fatima Romani, remembered a time when Spaniards showed less love for him. …”
NY Times