By Belize Live News Staff: Come Sunday, households across Belize will be divided. The Argentina faithful, and there are plenty from Corozal to Punta Gorda, will be backing Lionel Messi one more time. The Spain camp will be riding with the teenager who has taken world football by storm. What many fans may not know is that the two men at the center of it all share one of the most remarkable photographs in the history of the sport.
Back in December 2007, Messi was a 20-year-old rising star at Barcelona when he posed for a charity calendar produced with UNICEF. His assignment was to bathe a baby boy in a little blue tub. That baby, only months old at the time, was Lamine Yamal.
Nobody in that studio could have guessed the future. The photos sat forgotten for years until Yamal’s father shared them before Euro 2024 with a caption that now looks like prophecy: the beginning of two legends. Yamal went on to light up that tournament as Spain won it all, and he has carried that form into this World Cup. He celebrated his 19th birthday on July 13, less than a week before the biggest match of his life.
The connections between the two run deep. Both were shaped by Barcelona’s famed La Masia academy, and Yamal now wears the number 10 for the club, the very shirt Messi wore for so many years. Messi, for his part, never let go of the cause behind that photoshoot. He has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2010, championing children’s causes around the world.
That is where this story touches home. UNICEF is active right here in Belize, working alongside government and communities on child health, education and protection. The organization that staged a calendar shoot in Barcelona nineteen years ago is the same one helping Belizean children get a stronger start in life today.
And maybe that is the real message for every young baller kicking a plastic bottle on a village field in Cayo or a street in Belize City. Every legend starts as a child with people willing to invest in them. One of them was a shy kid from Rosario. Another was a baby in a tub who could not even hold his own head up.
On Sunday they meet at MetLife Stadium with the World Cup on the line. Some stories really do write themselves.
