Is Lamine Yamal overrated?

We as a people are biologically wired to like gambles. We enjoy the risk of making a gamble and the payoff of it coming to fruition. Because of this you will often see people make these gambles and the game of football is of course no exemption to this. However what I will write about is not monetary gambling but rather another form of it.

We want to be seen as visionaries, most everybody want to be special in a sense which often makes us say things with no real backing in the hope that it comes true. For in that case we have predicted the future with only instinct. More and more I hear the most outlandish claims thrown about this sport, with the person making knowing it to be temporarily false and hopefully true in a short time. Why? well gambling, people gamble their credibility for the bragging right of being right before everybody else. This is mostly seen in young players. As the world of sports is evolving we have seen even younger players introduced and starting in top clubs these days. When people see a young player they just can’t help themselves but say ”he is one of the best talents in the game”. The big problem here is that this is fairly often not true. Fans of the club always wants their academy graduates to succeed and lead the club for many years. This creates an obvious bias which makes for fairly exaggerated claims. For non rival fans they see an opportunity to make an investment.

Of course the age is not the only factor in making football fans shout that a player is the new Maradona there is one more variable and that is performance. You are probably calling me an idiot right now thinking this is rather obvious and that a player performing is a good thing, and it is, but it depends how you measure it. If we have three players all playing to the same level and scoring say 10 goals. Two are 18 and 22. If I asked the average fan to evaluate who has the most talent they would on average put the 18 year olds in first place and the 22 year old in third. Sure if this is all the information you have its a reasonable argument but as along as you can see the player you have more information. Here is where I would like to introduce a term which is the third most important variable in these discussions: physical maturity.

There is an athletic ceiling all players have, it is the reason I and many of you are watching the premier league as opposed to playing in it. Not all players can become athletes, not alla athletes can become the world class athletes. Now how does this affect our three players? well if the two 18 year olds which are performing at the same level have different physical maturity. If one of them clearly has entered his physical prime whilst the other clearly has more to come, the scrawnier one has more upside. Now imagine the 22 year old like one of the 18 year olds still hasn’t hit his physical peak and also has a high athletic ceiling. With this information you could make the case that the 22 year old has the biggest potential of the three.

Fans, experts and media seem to believe all player trajectories look the same. Therefore every young player most improve massively from where they our otherwise its wasted potential, but that’s not the case. Some players are just young, they are not fantastic or groundbreaking just young. If you compare their current level to a big talent who hasn’t hit his physical maturity yet but are the same age then sure in that comparison he might be good. We should however not only compare players to their age mate but rather the players who are in the same part of their career. A player with 4 seasons under his belt at 21 might be because of his extreme talent and potential or because his body allowed him to start at that age. Not all trajectories are linear, some players won’t get better and some will get a lot better. Think of it as a kids hight chart. Some grow steadily and become 190 cm tall some has a giant growth spurt at 13 and stay at 169 cm. It’s the same case with players.

Now with the introduction out of the way we can introduce the player this article is about: Lamine Yamal. Over the last few weeks the internet have been filled with players making their case as to why they deserve to win the Balon d’or. One of these players has been Lamine Yamal. I will not make this article about whether he will win it or not, as predicting the Ballon d’or is rather difficult because of the pretty vague method they use to decide. What I will do is talk about whether he deserves it only based on player performance. Trophies and off pitch behaviour will not be taken in to account.

With that out of the way, Lamine Yamal is only 19 years old. Having made his debut in 2023, he has already had a career most players would only dream of, having won many major honours. The question have asked and will want to answer is are we overrating him because of this and because of his age. Are we putting him in these conversations already because we know he will at one point reach them or because he is already there?

Well let’s see, Yamal is without a doubt one of if ot the most complete winger in the world. As seen in the radars below he ranks in the top 11 players in all four winger categories. With his two main strong points being Playmaking and duelling.

Well as a playmaking winger no one ranks above him. BCC, XA and KP are all at an elite level with only cross percentage lacking a little bit. Illustrating a chance creating level at the absolute top of football

He is ranked number two in La Liga as a duelist and also here it an elite level. Ground duels and dribbles are in the 98th percentile.

Lamine Yamal · Barcelona · LaLiga 25/26

Playmaking WingerElite · 1 of 93

Rank 99.5%Score 96.4%Qualified

Stat profile

Role-shaped metrics vs La Liga pool (radar = percentile).

• xA98(0.39)
• Key passes97(2.86)
• Big chances100(0.99)
• Cross %79(28%)

He is ranked a bit lower on wide runner and box winger whilst still being at a great level. Here however we can see a less full radar. The stand outs are of course dribbling, goals, NPXG, On-ball separation and clinical. With the lesser ones being: fast breaks, break xg, pocket shots and off-ball separations. These can easily be explained as suffering from the play style off Barcelona and the role Lamine has been asked to play. As we can see that they play more with the ball rather than counter attacking. Therefore Yamal seems to mostly create space with the ball rather than running into it.

Lamine Yamal · Barcelona · LaLiga 25/26

Wide RunnerGreat · 7 of 58

Rank 88.8%Score 61.3%Qualified

Stat profile

Role-shaped metrics vs La Liga pool (radar = percentile).

• Break xG43(0.11)
• Wide channel89(25.1%)
• Fast break22(5%)
• Dribbles99(5.36)
• Crosses68(3.25)

From these four radars we can conclude that he is a very complete player that is almost impossible to stop as a defender. It is almost impossible for the defender to predict what he will do as he is an elite level scorer, dribbler and playmaker. As we have also seen he is in the 96th percentile in on ball separation and 99th in dribbles showing us the level of space and chances he can create with the ball and how rarely a defender manages to stop him cleanly.

An interesting thing we can also see is that his stats actually increase in the champions league. When compared with all wingers in the champions league last season he still ranks highest or att the top in all categories. The only caveat to this could be the fact that Barcelona went out in the quarter final meaning he unlike many other top wingers missed the more difficult games.

How does this tie the very long introduction on players being rated to high simply because of their age? It is clear looking at the stats and also looking at games that Lamine Yamal is no ordinary 19 year old. He possesses a talent of a one in a billion player but that is not enough to do what he does. It is clear that he is a player that has physically matured very early on making his age in my opinion irrelevant in this discussions. He is only in his only on his fifth season but are showing a great maturity in his play and mentality. It will be impossible to say if he has hit his peak or there are more to come and considering his career is still very young it would be foolish to say that this is the best we will see of him. I would however make the claim that I don’t think his improvement will be exponential or even linear beyond this point. When talking of exponential growth people are often talking about players hitting a physical evolution whether they know it or not. A player will not double their talent over a summer but a young player can double their physical presence and learn how to better use their frame. I therefore think that we shouldn’t see Yamal as a young player and shouldn’t talk about him as the player he might become but rather talk about the ability he has right now, which is ridiculously high. This is of course only speculation and I could very well be wrong.

Now, how does Yamal compare to some of his winger competitors? For this comparison I have picked the only other wingers with a 100 score on the gamebraker special grader: Olise and Saka. Quickly looking att the winger roles comparison we can see that Yamal and Saka don’t differ much in the categories with Olise only lacking as a wide runner.

If we deep dive into Yamals two best roles: Duelist and playmaking we can ones again see Saka and Yamal going toe to toe. Saka is a noticeable worse dribbler than Yamal whilst being a better crosser. Olise is far worse than the both of them as a dueller and crosser whilst being at the same level as an overall creator.

In the earlier roles we could see a fairly identical radar with only a few outliers. When watching the raumdeuter and wide runner roles we can start to see more differences. As a raumdeuter the clearest two visual differences are Yamals clearly higher clinical rank and Olise's off-ball separation. As earlier stated the off-ball separation can be credited to a different role and playing style. The clinical rank however is a clear advantage to Yamal.

As a wide runner we see three completely different radars. Saka being the most rounded one, Yamal having a few high and a few low ranks and oils really only having one. The crossing rank mostly shows us tactical decisions from the manager. The interesting thing we can however see is Olise’s high crossing number but low percentage showing him being a worse crosser than the other two and it not having to do with low sample size. The most notable difference here is Sakas far higher fast break rank but this is also mostly to do with tactics rather than ability.

Simply looking at the stats we can see that there isn’t much differentiating these players apart. With Saka and Yamal having very similar rankings among their respective leagues. These rankings are their stats compared to other wingers in their respective leagues. Meaning one could also use the leagues competition as an argument as to who’s is more impressive. Simply looking at the league ranks however has not really separated them. So therefore we will also look at the champions league stats:

Here we can see far bigger differences. Yamal improves his rankings in the Champions League whilst Olise and especially Saka decreases theirs. With Saka not qualifying for duelist winger and Olise for Wide runner. This is the most ”fair” comparison as it is the same competition. One should however of course take in to account that they faced different opposition and came to different parts of the tournament.

So what has this shown? Lamine Yamal is without a doubt one of the best wingers and players in the world. His unique and very complete profile makes him an extremely unpredictable and unstoppable winger in today’s game. His league stats can be matched by few but the thing differentiating him from the competition is his champions league performances. Whether he is overrated or not is a subjective opinion but whether or not he should be in the ballon d’or conversation is a no brainer. Will he win it? I don’t know. Does the stats back him winning it? Yes.