It’s been quite the month for Mayssa Baha, the 15-year-old Moroccan international who became the youngest player to start for Barcelona’s Femeni team on September 26.
Mayssa started the league match against Logrono, scoring her first senior goal. She is the youngest player to score for a Barcelona senior side, male or female, breaking a record set by Lamine Yamal. She is also the youngest player to score in Spain’s Liga F.
In the preceding weeks, the forward had been coming on as a substitute for a side that win every week. European champions in three of the past four seasons and Spain’s champions in each of the past seven, Barca won 29 of their 30 league games last season and defeated Real Madrid 7-0 on Sunday in front of 40,000 fans.
Mayssa was a substitute alongside the world’s best player, Aitana Bonmarti. She won’t be old enough to play in the Uefa Champions League until she turns 16 in January.
She was born in Malaga, Spain, in 2011, while her father, the former Morocco international Nabil Baha, was at the club. She started playing football at FUS Rabat when her father played there from 2014 to 2016. She then returned to Malaga, where she and her brother Ziyad continued to play youth football. Mayssa played in teams two or three years up from her age group.
Her brother, Ziyad, now 17, is in Olympique Marseille’s youth side and Morocco’s under-17 men’s team, where his father is head coach. Mayssa already plays for Morocco’s under-17 women's team, having made her debut aged just 12, another record. At last year’s Under-17 World Cup, she was the youngest player in the tournament. She could still choose to play for Spain when she is an adult.
The siblings’ mother is Spanish-Moroccan model Farah Farabian, who spends much of her time watching her children play football.
“People wonder why I quit my job for my kids like I had no life left,” Farabian recently wrote. “But today, my life is also accompanying them in theirs. Every weekend I travel miles between Barcelona and Marseille to share their matches, joys and progress. It's not a sacrifice; it's my choice, my happiness.
“A career can wait, but their childhood and adolescence will never come back. So, yes, I choose them and I would do it a thousand times over. Because seeing them grow and reach their dreams is also my greatest achievement.”
Mayssa joined Barcelona at age 13, living at La Masia academy and moving quickly through the ranks with the C team last season. She started this season with the B team, but during pre-season she was invited to train with the first team at a camp in Andorra and kept her place among some of the best players in the world.
Rated the top player in the world for her age, she’s mentally and physically mature. She’s strong, confident, powerful and fast, but, at 15, she has much to learn about the game. Right now, she’s playing in the best possible place to advance her career.
