Former ESPN President John Skipper Leaving Meadowlark Media
Lamine Yamal is exceptional. A left-footed winger who plays on the right side, he is a great dribbler, a good passer, and already a star with a signature move: cutting inside on his left foot to shoot across the goal to the far post. He is a regular for FC Barcelona and the Spanish national team and, after his first full season as a first-teamer, finished eighth in voting for last year’s Ballon d’Or, the soccer award for the world’s best male player.
But Yamal is also only a teenager. With the time he’s seen on the pitch this season, it’s hard to believe he’s only just begun; at age 17, he has played 2,236 minutes as of early April, with another 1,200 in various cups. (Only 22 players born in 2007 have played any minutes at all in the top divisions in England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and France this year.) At the same age, Cristiano Ronaldo played 1,080 minutes in the less intense Portuguese league; Lionel Messi, who was beginning his own career with Barcelona, played just 70.
The greater the success that Yamal and Barcelona enjoy on the field—the team remains in with a shout of winning LaLiga, the Champions League, and the Copa del Rey—the more the wunderkind’s rise poses major questions for a club that is still emerging from an economic crisis. Can it even afford to keep its prodigy? And if so, how much should they play him at the risk of pushing him too hard? They are questions Barcelona will have to answer—and soon—especially as it scrambles to dig itself out of a hole it dug through years of excessive spending.
Barcelona’s willingness to do whatever it took to keep Lionel Messi happy effectively brought it to the brink of financial ruin.
The club offered the Argentine playmaker nine contracts over 13 years. Only some of these extended the number of years, but all raised his level of compensation. The final deal, signed in 2017, was so big that Messi alone accounted for almost one-third of the club’s wage bill.
Nevertheless, Messi’s 2017 contract ushered in a period of “big financial degradation,” says Jon Sindreu of The Wall Street Journal, as wages rose from 68% of revenue to 83% by 2020. In these years the club bought unwisely in the transfer market, and its on-field performance declined. Messi left in 2021, disillusioned. Barcelona is still recovering. It continues to bump up against LaLiga’s squad-cost limits and remains constrained in its transfer dealings.
Now, pressure is building to sort out Yamal’s contract. His current deal, signed in 2023, is estimated to pay him €32,000 a week and expires in the summer of 2026. A three-year contract was the longest contract Barcelona could offer him at the time, given that he was under 18. The club is readying a new offer on his 18th birthday in July 2025; his representative, Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes, has already held talks with the Barcelona president, Joan Laporta.
Across all competitions this season, Yamal has played the fourth-most minutes of any member of the squad. To make him the fourth-highest earner would involve lifting his salary to €265,000 per week, adding €12 million a year to the wage bill. However, Mendes likely has greater ambitions. To make Yamal the eighth-highest-paid player in the European leagues, roughly in line with his position in the Ballon d’Or voting, would mean paying him around €420,000 per week, which works out to an additional €20 million a year.
To afford granting Yamal a contract of this size, Barça must reduce spending on other players or significantly grow its revenue (as the squad-cost limit is determined as a proportion of revenue). The latter option is more straightforward. The team is already in line to receive €12.5 million in prize money for reaching the Champions League quarterfinals, an amount that would double if it reached the final. Similarly, the difference between finishing third and first in LaLiga is around €14 million.
The club also has grander plans to increase its revenue base. It is currently playing its home games at the city’s Olympic Stadium, while it expands and redevelops Camp Nou. This will entail a squeeze on match-day revenue for the current season but will eventually lead to a major increase in income from hosting games.
The other question surrounding Yamal is less straightforward than coming to terms on salary. The relationship among physical development, playing time, and injury risk is complicated, says Sean Cumming, professor of growth and maturation in sport at the University of Bath. If it locks down Yamal, it needs to figure out exactly how much it actually play him for the best of the club’s present and future.
Of course, young players are ambitious—Yamal has already said, “I like to play all the possible minutes”—and coaches are under huge pressure to deliver trophies. But soccer is littered with examples of stars who were overplayed by their clubs in their early years and whose careers suffered as a result.
English footballer Michael Owen played 3,003 minutes in his equivalent season, scored that 1998 World Cup goal against Argentina at the end of it, sustained a series of hamstring pulls, and was essentially finished by his mid-20s. And Barcelona knows firsthand, too—perhaps better than most. Teen prodigy Pedri González, who signed in 2019 at age 16, has battled injuries both acute and chronic that have hampered his career.
As for Yamal, Cumming is inclined to give Barcelona and its trainers the benefit of the doubt. Sport science, he argues, has come on “in leaps and bounds” in the past generation, reducing the risk to young players. Given his value to Barcelona, Cumming thinks the club will be watching Yamal “like a hawk.” That said, “If he’s robust and he’s physically able to cope with that load, then they will continue to play him.”
There is no better demonstration of the difficulty in managing the early careers of talented players than the fact that Barcelona’s ability to afford its current prodigy is being compromised by the wages it is still paying to its previous one.
In 2019, Barcelona promoted a young Spanish player of Guinean descent, Ansu Fati, to the first team. He made a barnstorming start, scoring 11 goals in 1,500 minutes across his ages 16 and 17 seasons. He became the youngest player to score at Camp Nou, in the Champions League, and for the Spanish national team. The media made comparisons to Messi. Then, in late 2020, he sustained a serious knee injury while being tackled. He was out for nine months. Immediately after he returned, the club offered him a huge contract, worth around €265,000 a week for six years, and the No. 10 shirt vacated by Messi.
Fati has since struggled with a series of injuries and has drifted to the edges of the squad, but the club is compelled to continue to pay his very high salary.
This summer, Barcelona will offer a long-term contract to Yamal. He will get a big salary bump that once again pushes Barça to the edge of its squad-cost limit. Yamal will be on track to becoming one of the world’s best-paid players, but it will probably require one more contract to get there. As a sweetener to Mendes, Barça could promise to review Yamal’s salary at a fixed point in the contract or if he or the club meets performance criteria.
Yamal wants to win, and he appears well-positioned to do that at Barcelona. He has yet to express any desire to play for a different team. The club’s strong performance in LaLiga and in Europe this season makes a long-term commitment more attractive to both parties, despite the risks involved.
