Football’s first Gen Z star

Borja B Hojas/Getty Images 

Like count: Yamal is filling the engagement gap left by Ronaldo and Messi.

Yamal is changing how footballers define themselves, writes Rory Smith

‘When Messi steps away, whenever that might be, 

Yamal will be the face of Adidas’

   - Mayowa Quadri, VERSUS

Rory Smith

10 May 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

Just before Christmas, Lamine Yamal found himself briefly at the centre of a minor squall. These things happen, every so often, for a player of his prominence; this was not the first, nor the most serious, of the year. He had faced a flurry of criticism over his 18th birthday party, a few months before. His various romantic entanglements, too, had increasingly been played out in public.

This, then, was just another learning experience. In December, Yamal launched his own YouTube channel by posting a video in which he guided fans around his home. It was not, he told his 2.24 million subscribers, “like 50 Cent’s house,” but it did have “some cool stuff in it.” Among these cool things was the pink iPhone that remained glued to his hand throughout.

The hitch was that Yamal, as of February last year, is the global brand ambassador for Oppo, a Chinese smartphone company. The specifics of that contract remain unknown, but it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the optics were hardly ideal. The controversy did not trouble Spain’s legacy media, but on various social platforms, Yamal was accused of an “own goal.”

He seems to have come through it. In April, he posted a series of images to his 42 million Instagram followers taken with his new Oppo camera. Whatever damage was done does not appear to have been lasting. It was a reminder, though, of the awkward line Yamal must pick between public and private, authentic and commercial, as football’s first Gen Z superstar.

The 18-year-old will be absent when Barcelona entertain Real Madrid on Sunday, thanks to a hamstring injury sustained in his team’s victory against Celta Vigo last month. That will be a source of frustration for him, of course: he would, like the rest of his teammates, relish the chance of claiming the Spanish title by avoiding defeat in the clásico.

All he can do, though, is focus on recovering from injury in order to be fit for a World Cup in which he will play a starring role: on the pitch, ideally, but certainly off it. When Adidas released its pre-tournament advert this week, Yamal was front and centre, placing him in a lineage that stretches back from Lionel Messi to Zinedine Zidane.

“He’s a unique case study, because he is on his own,” said Mayowa Quadri, Head of Brand at VERSUS, a football and culture media platform that works extensively with both players and brands. “You could maybe put Desiré Doué in there, too, but they’re on different levels. Yamal has this air of being the chosen one. It’s rare to have a superstar who is just by himself.”

That, certainly, has not been the case for some time. The diarchy of Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo dominated world football for the better part of two decades. As their stars waned, they left a vacuum that was only ever partly filled: by Neymar, for a while, then Kylian Mbappé, and finally by Erling Haaland.

None, though, quite have the magnetism or the star quality – and as a result the ability to transcend the fractured media landscape – that Yamal seems to possess. “When Messi steps away, whenever that might be, Yamal will be the face of Adidas,” Quadri said. “It will be the Lamine Yamal brand.”

That is not the only difference. The images of all of Yamal’s predecessors as the game’s Main Characters have been cultivated and curated with the utmost care. They have, in that sense, borrowed from a playbook that has dominated the world of celebrity for decades, detaching the public self in order to protect the private one.

Asif Kapadia, the celebrated director of Diego Maradona’s biopic, observed the trend in him: Diego and Maradona, he said, were different people. Tostao, the great Brazilian forward, once told The Blizzard that Pelé – not a player unwilling to monetise his image – was the public self who came to consume Edson, the private.

Yamal, on the other hand, has come of age in a generation that does not recognise that delineation. Generation Z – the cohort to which Yamal belongs – and the subsequent Generation Alpha are not only used to their stars living their lives in full public view, but do it themselves; Ernst & Young found in 2021 that they value “authenticity and transparency.”

At 18, it is no surprise that Yamal seems to fit that description. “When you see him dancing on TikTok, he’s not trying to catch a trend; he’s native to it,” said Quadri. “He’s behaving as a teenager should: that’s why he has all the haircuts, why he posts videos with Pokémon cards or Capri Suns or eating McDonald’s on his private jet. He can let people see the real him.”

The issue, as the phone faux pas indicated, is how he maintains that while making the most of his commercial opportunities. Quadri believes it is important that the partnerships he chooses “align” in such a way that feels natural both to him and his audience; as Richard Gillis, the host of Unofficial Partner, the sports business podcast, one of the markers of Generation Z is that they “share a scepticism to mediated communication, which includes sports sponsorship.”

All of that should, in theory, prevent Yamal following the established blueprints. He cannot borrow from Messi, and retreat from public life. He cannot be as aggressively commercial as David Beckham or Ronaldo, with a suite of endorsements so vast that he had one deal with Egyptian Steel. Nor can he construct a character for himself to play, in the manner of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, whose public pronouncements often suggested he self-identified as a lion.

And yet, as Gillis said, his commercial profile thus far is “a classic Ronaldo or Neymar profile. Look at who has signed him up,” he said. “Adidas, Oppo, Beats Electronics, Powerade and Visa. Same categories, same logic. You could swap the face out for almost any elite athlete of the last 20 years and the architecture would be identical.”

As far as Gillis can tell, there is nothing “specifically” novel about how he is being marketed. The change, instead, is in how those partnerships are projected, through platforms Yamal himself controls, where he can cultivate and curate his own image, where he alone can determine what is, and what feels, authentic.

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