Lamine Yamal's Stellar Season with Barcelona: A Journey from Coronation to Championship
Lamine Yamal began the season with a coronation and ended it with a flag.
On the opening night of 2025-26, Barcelona’s new No 10 – the teenager handed the most loaded shirt in football, the one once worn by Ladislao Kubala, Luis Suárez, Diego Maradona, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi – walked into the light. With the last kick against Mallorca he scored his first goal as an adult, then celebrated like a man announcing a new era. Arms spread, chest out. La Liga’s title race started with a statement.
Nine months later, the bus crawled through Barcelona’s streets and the same kid, now 18, stood on the top deck holding a Palestine flag. Lamine Yamal had his third league title and the weight of a generation on his shoulders. Hansi Flick, the coach who had become a kind of father figure and whose own dad died the morning they clinched the league, watched his prodigy grow up in real time.
“I spoke to him and if he wants to it’s his decision,” Flick said. “He’s old enough: he’s 18.”
He was also champion again. Flick was asked if he had ever felt so much love. “No, never,” he replied.
Barcelona run away, Madrid fall apart
The league was effectively over with seven games to spare, Barcelona ripping it from Espanyol in a derby that turned into a coronation march. Lamine Yamal sprinted towards the line that night, arms out like Usain Bolt easing away from Richard Thompson and Walter Dix. The swagger fit the season.
They made it mathematical in week 35, and did it in the most delicious way possible: in a clásico. For the first time in 94 years, a league title was sealed in that fixture. Three days earlier, Real Madrid’s dressing room had exploded, Fede Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni fighting so fiercely that the vice-captain ended up in hospital with stitches and “craniofacial trauma”. This time it was Marcus Rashford who delivered the sporting knockout blow.
Barcelona had lived like nomads, playing in three different home grounds and winning in every single one. This clásico was their 11th straight victory, their 23rd in 25 games since the last meeting with Madrid, 600km to the west. They closed like a machine.
It hadn’t always looked that way. In late October, with the season barely formed, Barcelona were wobbling. Flick warned that “ego kills success”. Rayo Vallecano had found the weak spots in what became known as The Flick Line. Sevilla sliced them open. Madrid went five points clear with a 2-1 win at the Santiago Bernabéu.
That night Jude Bellingham mocked Lamine Yamal’s words as “cheap”, soundtracked by Elvis’s “A Little Less Conversation”. Dani Carvajal added a jibber-jabber gesture for good measure. Madrid had their fun. They also had their own storm brewing.
Vinícius Júnior stomped off with 18 minutes left in that game, and from there Madrid slowly came apart. Xabi Alonso tried to insist he would focus on what really mattered. It turned out the thing he wanted to ignore was exactly what really mattered. With the coach isolated, the cracks widened. The authority he felt had come too soon evaporated just as quickly.
Barcelona’s Super Cup win in the next clásico closed Alonso’s brief spell “in charge” of the rivalry. He headed reluctantly to the Club World Cup, and by the time he came back his cycle was already over. Madrid turned to Álvaro Arbeloa, who spoke in soothing tones and offered his players a grey sofa to open up on, plus doughnuts for good performances. The problem was there weren’t many of those.
“I’m not Gandalf,” Arbeloa said. He wasn’t, and he certainly wasn’t Carlo Ancelotti either.
By the time the great rivals met again in May, Madrid were out of Europe, out of the Copa del Rey and almost out of their minds. The squad was divided, exhausted and desperate for it all to end. Ninety minutes later, it did. Barcelona beat them, went 12 points clear with nine left on the table, and Madrid were empty-handed again, just like last season.
As for Kylian Mbappé, he was simply gone, slipping away to Sicily. When Madrid were already 2-0 down in that decisive clásico, he posted: “Let’s go Madrid!” from afar. It felt like parody.
Two days later, Florentino Pérez emerged for his first press conference in more than a decade and delivered a rambling performance that managed to say nothing and everything at once. He raged, deflected, hinted at conspiracies. At least, in his mind, he found the root of Madrid’s problems: the ABC newspaper. So he cancelled his subscription.
Trophies, near-misses and a wild middle class
Barcelona finished with the league trophy and the Super Cup paraded through the city on the same bus. The European Cup, the one they crave most, stayed out of reach. It did for Madrid too. They had their best nights in that competition again, but still not good enough.
Villarreal and Athletic Club didn’t even make it out of the league phase, although champions PSG failed to score at only one ground: San Mamés. Atlético Madrid, who had knocked Barcelona out of both domestic cups and drifted away from the league race long before the end, came closest of the Spanish sides. They reached a first European semi-final in a decade but fell to Arsenal. Then, in their first Copa del Rey final in 13 years, they were “Matarazzoed”.
Real Sociedad, coached by Rino Matarazzo – the same man a ChatGPT search had once dismissed as not suitable for them – beat Atlético on penalties. A backup goalkeeper made the decisive save, then kissed the cheek of a former ballboy, who promptly scored the winner. That former ballboy was Álvaro Odriozola. He didn’t play a single minute in the final but still said he wouldn’t swap this for “anything in humanity”.
Barcelona, Madrid, Atlético and Villarreal – who finished third – will be back in the Champions League next season, joined by Betis, who claimed Spain’s new fifth spot. Below them, Copa del Rey winners Real Sociedad go into Europe with Celta Vigo and Getafe.
Getafe’s presence there might be the most improbable of all. When the season started, they had 13 first-team players available, two of them goalkeepers. At halfway they were in the relegation zone, desperate enough to stick full-back Allan Nyom up front. Pepe Bordalás, the manager who has inflicted more suffering on others than most, admitted: “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”
Then came January. Four little-known loanees arrived. Getafe clawed their way up the table. By the end they were seventh, back in Europe, and they had done it in pure Bordalás style: second fewest goals, lowest possession, fewest shots, most fouls. A footballing stub of a pencil, still scratching out results.
Survival, heartbreak and chaos at the bottom
Somewhere in the middle of Getafe’s pitch invasion on the final day, a dozen red shirts lingered. Osasuna’s players were still out there, waiting, phones and tablets in hand, radios pressed to ears, their fate in other people’s boots. Their captain called those final minutes “agonising, the worst feeling I’ve ever had”.
When survival was finally confirmed, they exploded, leaping around with Getafe fans and Nyom, who insisted he would only disappear into the dressing room once he knew Osasuna were safe. “It’s been … weird,” their coach Alesio Lisci said. That was putting it gently.
Osasuna had already celebrated staying up a month earlier after a 99th-minute winner against Sevilla. They thought they were done. They were not. They survived in the end because others fell, not because they soared.
It was that kind of season. The top of the table settled early, the same five or six in the same positions for months. The bottom was a storm. Teams plunged, then rose again. Biblical resurrections, sudden collapses. Only Real Oviedo went down quietly.
Oviedo returned to the top flight after 24 years and brought Santi Cazorla home, finally making his Primera debut for the club he had joined at eight and rejoined at 38 on the minimum wage. Romance met reality. They scored nine home goals all year. They had more managers (three) than away wins (two). There was no great escape.
The other two relegation spots became a bloodbath. In a league where a team could look like European contenders one month and relegation fodder the next, the line between glory and disaster almost disappeared. For most of the season, a tiny gap separated Europe from the abyss.
Nine clubs went into the penultimate round trying to avoid the last two relegation places. Espanyol, Sevilla, Alavés and Valencia scrambled clear that weekend. Five remained in danger on the final day, their fates tangled together.
Elche and Girona met at Montilivi in a straight shootout. All or nothing. A late Thomas Lemar shot crashed off the bar, the thin metal between Girona staying up or falling. They fell. Four points from their last eight matches dragged them under. Two years after they challenged for the title, one year after they played in the Champions League, Girona dropped to the second division with 41 points – a total that would have been enough to stay up in any other season this decade.
Mallorca went with them. They finished bottom of a three-team head-to-head mini-league with Osasuna and Levante, all level on 42 points. They had a striker who scored 23 league goals, a mark no one had matched in 26 seasons, and still went down.
“This hurts,” said Mallorca coach Martín Demichelis.
“Football has been cruel,” Girona’s Míchel Sánchez added.
“This league was really crazy,” said Elche’s Eder Sarabia. His team survived. Just.
Rayo’s fairytale and the season’s oddities
There was one last story, saved for the end. Rayo Vallecano, the club that went from little Rayo to Rayo effing Vallecano, reached their first ever European final, in the Conference League, and took their travelling rebellion to Germany. They couldn’t quite bring the trophy back from Leipzig. Somehow, that felt right for them too.
At the end, a banner stretched across their end summed up the entire season, and maybe the entire club, better than silver ever could: “I have known no greater victory than being with you in defeat.”
If there was a more perfect line anywhere in Spain this year, no one found it.
The rest of the campaign played out in the margins, where the game often feels most human. Rayo’s president Raúl Martín Presa called his own supporters “drunk, brainless and idle”. Oviedo’s owner Jesús Martínez sacked the coach who had kept them safe and demanded talk of Europe in week eight; two days later they dropped into the bottom three and never escaped.
San Mamés delivered the best atmosphere of the year when Euskadi played Palestine. Atlético fans turned the Metropolitano into a bog-roll blizzard and got fined for it, Sevilla supporters copying them and getting the same treatment. Rayo’s players belted out “A Pirate’s Life” with CD Yuncos in a post-match singalong that felt more like a village fiesta than professional football.
Real Sociedad’s Copa del Rey celebrations turned into a two-day odyssey of hotel discos, 4.45am taxis to a club, duty-free drinks on the flight home, a bus parade under the sun and then, still half-cut, a league game against Getafe. Of course it was Getafe.
Lionel Messi slipped quietly into the Camp Nou one cold Sunday night in November, just to watch. Somewhere else, a Betis fan fell over a barrier at full-time trying to get Cédric Bakambu’s shirt and still didn’t get it. At Mallorca, Sergio Herrera gathered up Osasuna’s entire kit and hand-delivered it to the away end. One keeper shrugged. Another understood.
A Real Oviedo fan snuck onto the team’s charter flight home from Valencia after a rain-delayed match, only for his mum in Asturias to spot him in a club photo and announce publicly that they would be “having a word” when he got back. Celta fans painted their nails in solidarity with Borja Iglesias after homophobic abuse. El Periodico de Aragon ran the headline: “Zaragoza are going to shit.” No one could argue.
In the Copa del Rey, tiny Inter de Valdemoro found themselves 8-0 down to Getafe when Borja Mayoral came on to score two more, finally getting to batter his older brother Kity on the same pitch. Granada’s Jorge Pascual earned the red card of the season by calling an assistant “fucking moustache-face” and then, just to be sure, pointing to his own upper lip to demonstrate.
Sevilla, under Matías Almeyda, embraced “hand-me-down chic”, a coach describing his squad like a kid raiding the family wardrobe: grandad’s trousers, cousin’s T-shirt, anything that fits. Real Betis produced a scratch-and-sniff shirt that smelled of oranges. Before kick-off, at least.
Coaches, stars and the kid who owned it all
On the touchline, the cast list was just as wild. Luis Castro slipped on his backside kicking a ball on his debut and then led Levante to a miracle. Jokin Aperribay once asked ChatGPT if Rino Matarazzo was a good coach for Real Sociedad and got “no” back; four months later they had a historic Copa del Rey.
Bordalás compared his Getafe to a pencil worn down to the rubber and still somehow used it to scribble their way into Europe. Luis García walked into a funereal atmosphere at Sevilla and raised the dead in six weeks. Eder Sarabia talked about Elche fighting with a catapult while others had bazookas and tanks, then stayed up playing football that was actually easy on the eye. Manuel Pellegrini did Manuel Pellegrini things again. Claudio Giráldez impressed. Hansi Flick won the league again.
Yet the manager of the year was Iñigo Pérez. Villarreal have already taken him, but this season he belonged to Rayo Vallecano. No pitch to play on, no proper place to train, no hot water to wash with, constant turmoil around him. He still took Rayo to their highest-ever league finish and that first European final, doing it with a calm dignity that cut through the noise.
“It’s easier to reach success through love,” he said. Rayo proved him right.
On the pitch, Carlos Espí might just have been the most decisive player in the league, scoring 10 goals in the last 14 games – the only matches he started all season – and almost single-handedly dragging Levante to safety. When Levante fans jokingly pushed him for the Ballon d’Or, Vedat Muriqi twirled a finger at his temple and called them crazy. One more point and Muriqi might have been the one taking awards home instead of heading down with Mallorca.
Joan García produced a save against Espanyol that Lamine Yamal called “science fiction” and the stop of the season. Hugo Hard accepted his place on the bench at Real Sociedad with a shrug because Umar Sadiq was “playing like Pelé”. Vedat Muriqi himself responded to a promo billing him against Robert Lewandowski by saying: “There are few strikers that compete with Lewy … and I’m not one of them. Thanks, though.” Cucho Hernández apologised to Levante after scoring against them, only to remember he had never actually played for them – it was Huesca, who just happen to wear the same colours.
Through it all, one name sat above the rest.
Lamine Yamal finished with 24 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, the driving force of Barcelona’s surge from doubt to dominance. He said: “I would like to be everything everyone wants me to be.” It sounded like a confession and a burden. On the pitch, he carried it like a crown.
By the time he lifted that flag on the bus, he had become the face of a season that started with a last-minute winner and ended with a league title wrapped in politics, pain, joy and noise. Spain’s new No 10 didn’t just inherit a shirt. He inherited a league in chaos and made it his stage.
The question now is simple: after a year like this, what on earth does he do for an encore?
