This Sunday, millions of soccer fans across the globe will be glued to their screens watching Spain and Argentina battle for the World Cup title. And Spain’s 19-year-old superstar, Lamine Yamal, will become the tournament’s third-youngest finalist. Just a few years ago, Yamal was a teenager growing up in Spain’s working-class neighborhood of Rocafonda; he’s been training for this day since he was scouted at six years old.
“Look, my mum had me when she was 16,” Yamal recently said during an interview with Spanish radio station Cadena SER. “My dad also had to go out and look for a life, sometimes picking up stuff in the streets to try to come back home with food for us. To me, this is real pressure, not what I have.”
He was raised in a migrant hub in Mataró, Catalonia, Spain, just 20 miles northeast of Barcelona.
Studies suggest that half of the Rocafonda’s population lives under the poverty line. And Yamal is proud of his roots; whenever he scores a goal, he flashes the number “304” in homage to his hometown’s area code, 08304. The footballer’s father, Mounir Nasraoui, emigrated to the working-class enclave from Morocco; and his mother, Sheila Ebana, came from Equatorial Guinea.
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