Lamine Yamal mania sweeps Barcelona as teen sensation faces big international call

In the summer Lamine Yamal was born, a few miles from Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, Robert Lewandowski already had 30-odd professional goals to his name.

Ilkay Gundogan had just announced his great potential, with a scoring debut for Bochum under-19s. It was 2007, and 16 years on, Lewandowski and Gundogan are the evergreens maintaining Barcelona’s proud status as a club stars want to join.

It’s an important role at an institution battling financial difficulties and the tricky legacy of a relatively fallow recent period in the harvest of talent coming up from Barca’s academy. But from there, there’s sudden, high hope that a genuine superstar is emerging.

He is Yamal, who has only just turned 16. Since being fast-tracked, 10 days ago, to the starting XI of the senior Barcelona side, positioned to the right of centre-forward Lewandowski, 19 years his senior, and ahead of Gundogan, a midfielder twice Yamal’s age, he has outshone both.

Two starts, two direct assists; several shots that stung opposition goalkeepers’ palms or fingertips and two efforts that ricocheted back off the frame of the goal are Yamal’s core statistics so far.

They look like landmarks in an express journey into senior football that will leap forward again in the next three days. Yamal, who spent May guiding Spain to the semi-finals of the European Under-17 championship, his four goals making him the tournament’s joint leading scorer, is earmarked for his first senior international call-up.

The greater suspense is not over whether he will be invited to become a strikingly precocious full international but with which country it happens. Morocco, for whom Yamal is eligible through his Moroccan-born father, have been in touch through their manager