At the European Championship last July, Arda Guler put himself in exclusive company. By setting up one of the goals against Austria that would put Turkey through to the quarter-finals on a wild evening in Leipzig, he became only the third teenager to score and assist in the history of the prestigious competition. The others on the list? Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney, fully 20 years earlier.
But their elite three-man club would be quickly gatecrashed. A week after Guler, 19 years and four months old at the time, had set his landmark for prodigious achievement, a new wunderkind struck a stunning goal in a winning semi-final to add to the three assists he had already decorated the tournament with. Lamine Yamal would turn 17 on the eve of the final, when, in between his school homework assignments, he became a European champion with Spain.
Yamal has picked up two more trophies, a Spanish Cup and Super Cup since and, although he finished on the wrong side of a dazzling Uefa Champions League semi-final on Tuesday for his club Barcelona, beaten 7-6 on aggregate by Internazionale, there is no real debate about who in world football owns the status of Most Exciting Prodigy. Yamal is still more than two months shy of being old enough to apply for a driver’s licence and has rewritten the rules on how old is old enough to be thriving among the sport’s elite grown-ups.
On Sunday, up on Montjuic, the stadium Barcelona are borrowing while their Camp Nou home is renovated, Yamal will play his 103rd senior club match, as the star attraction of the most famous fixture in football, Barca versus Real Madrid.
By coincidence, Madrid’s Guler goes into this Clasico also hopeful of notching up the 103rd club game of his career. Both have bolted upwards at speed to have reached their centuries of matches so young. But Lamine’s turbocharged rise makes Guler’s ascent look rather like a gentle, sluggish amble to the top.
Guler turned 20 in February and when you consider that he made his senior club debut – in the Europa League no less – for Fenerbahce’s first team as a 16-year-old, joining Real Madrid two summers later, the obvious frustration that he feels at his scant number of full matches so far for Madrid is understandable.
In almost two seasons at the Bernabeu he has started just 19 times. “At Madrid you need to spend time on the substitutes bench to earn yourself a place in the side,” counselled his club head coach Carlo Ancelotti, hinting that Guler has finally reached a significant threshold – and is under serious consideration to start against Barcelona, a clash with a potentially huge bearing on the Liga title race, given Barca’s four-point lead with four matchdays remaining.
Ancelotti’s words about the need for the young to be patient would certainly resonate with the likes of Endrick, the Brazilian teenager signed last July but in Ancelotti’s starting XI only twice in the club’s league and European campaigns so far. Less so, perhaps, with Jude Bellingham, who was recruited at 19, albeit with three impressive seasons already under his belt at Borussia Dortmund, and immediately responded to the challenge of being a mainstay in the starting XI.
Madrid are by nature more cautious with ‘kids’ than their great rivals. If Yamal’s exceptional brilliance has made his place in the Barca team uncontestable over the past 18 months, he is also at a club more inclined to take the brakes off a very young player’s ascent.
A comprehensive study published this week by the CIES Football Observatory, found that of all the clubs in the leading five leagues of Europe, Barcelona ranked second – behind only France’s Strasbourg – in how many minutes on the pitch they have given to footballers aged 21 or under this season. It’s an average of 38 minutes per game. Real Madrid’s ratio is barely a third of that.
The gifted Guler would be forgiven for wondering if his career might have been better served over the past two years at Barca, who were among the several clubs interested in him while he was at Fenerbahce.
In his time at Madrid, he has watched six Clasicos from the bench or the grandstands, and come on only in one, last month’s Copa del Rey final, where he was instrumental in turning a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 Real lead before Barca triumphed 3-2 in extra-time. In the same period, Yamal has played in all six Clasicos, and in his four starts in the fixture contributed two goals and two assists.
Ancelotti more than anybody recognises the impact Yamal has had. He was instrumental in Barca putting four unanswered goals past Madrid in the Liga meeting at the Bernabeu in October, and he scored the first of Barca’s five goals in the 5-2 Spanish Super Cup final win in Jeddah, two significant events in pushing Ancelotti, who led Madrid to a Liga and European Cup double last season, to a probable exit from his job this summer.
But what Ancelotti may yet leave for his successor – Xabi Alonso, of Bayer Leverkusen is the favourite to take over – is the prospect of a similar prodigy for Madrid to, at last, make the most of. Similar not because Guler can yet boast the breathtaking possibilities of Yamal, but for the fact the two tyros have much in common: the fabulous left foot, the bold readiness to try the unexpected. There are the uncanny statistical parallels, too. Exactly the same number of senior club matches; 19 senior international caps apiece, too, and so far four goals each for their countries.
And finally, there’s a likelihood that Guler can face Yamal in a Clasico on equal terms, both in the starting XI. Ancelotti has put the Turk in the initial line-up for four of Madrid’s last six Liga outings, and Guler has responded by decisively shaping a series of narrow victories to keep Madrid’s defence of their title alive.
He scored the kind of glorious goal – a left-foot strike, angled across the keeper – that Yamal often attempts, against Celta Vigo last weekend and then set up another goal in the 3-2 win.
That drew praise from his coach. Ancelotti, so sparing in the opportunities he has granted Guler for most of the time they have coincided, is suddenly trusting the player, giving him new, responsible roles, notably as a midfield creator and lauding his maturity, his diligence, his resilience.
“What’s clear is that Guler is not the same player he was last September,” said Ancelotti. “He’s maintained his high quality but I see a different profile of player physically. He’s tougher.”
