Yamal, soccer star and son of African migrants, personifies a changing Spain

People watch Spain’s World Cup semifinal soccer match against France on a giant screen, which shows Spain’s Lamine Yamal (19), at Parc Central near the Rocafonda neighborhood of Mataró, Spain, on July 14, 2026. As he prepared for the World Cup final, Yamal, 19, was at the heart of a national debate about what it means to be Spanish in an increasingly multicultural society. (María Contreras Coll/The New York Times)

By JASON HOROWITZ

Shortly before Spain’s soccer team won a place in the World Cup final, the grandmother of the team’s 19-year-old star player, Lamine Yamal, sat on a playground bench watching children of North and West African descent kick around balls.

This was the place, she said, where her grandson, the child of a Moroccan father and an Equatorial Guinean mother, first honed his skills. It is also where his portrait, spray-painted onto a wall behind the goal, now looms over a neighborhood that lionizes him.

Yet as hundreds of Spaniards, many wearing his name on their backs, made their way to a nearby park to watch him play on a big screen, his grandmother, Fatima Romani, remembered a time when Spaniards showed less love for him.

After he scored a goal as a child, Romani recalled, she could hear the taunts of Spaniards around them: “‘Bloody Moor. Look at the Black guy.’

“Many things have happened to him,” she added, wearing a navy hijab and leaning on a wooden walking stick. Her voice went quiet as another of her more than 20 grandchildren consoled her in the family’s hometown, Rocafonda, Spain, about an hour outside Barcelona. Then her eyes welled when she considered how far her grandson, and also Spain, had come.

“It has changed a lot,” said Romani, who said she was in her early 70s.

As Yamal, who still wears braces, prepared for the biggest game of his life Sunday, he was also at the heart of a national debate about what it means to be Spanish, and whether the country is changing too much, too fast or not enough.

Last week, Yamal — whose full name is Lamine Yamal Nasraoui Ebana — said that the ultimate purpose of soccer was to “bring people together,” adding that Spain, and the Spanish team, was “an example of integration.”

He was responding in a news briefing to a question about a column by Mariano Rajoy, a conservative former prime minister of Spain. Rajoy had written that the French team, which has many players of African descent, was a team “without French people.”

Yamal’s response was interpreted as a criticism of the implication that players of immigrant background do not completely belong to the countries that they play for. In countries like France and Spain, where the children of nonwhite immigrants sometimes struggle to penetrate the establishment, soccer provides a rare opportunity to become national icons.

Yamal, born and raised in Spain, has also felt the sting of anti-Muslim slurs in soccer stadiums. Spanish fans, who almost certainly knew that their star player was Muslim, tried to motivate the crowd to jump up and down in a game against Egypt this year by chanting “You’re a Muslim if you don’t jump.” That prompted Yamal to lament “ignorant, racist” fans who were “disrespectful” to Muslims. He has also faced criticism from Moroccans who felt betrayed by Yamal’s playing for Spain and not Morocco, where his father was born.

Those reactions reveal broader tensions in a transforming society in Spain. The country, which still rules enclaves in North Africa, some of the last vestiges of a once-sprawling empire, has long been a landing point for African migrants seeking work and sanctuary in Europe. It is also a magnet for Spanish-speaking migrants from Latin America.

More than 4 million immigrants have arrived in the last five years to a country of less than 50 million people. This year, more than 1 million immigrants came out of the shadows after the government invited them to regularize their status. The left-wing prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, has argued that immigrants lift the country’s economy, buoy its low birthrate and inject dynamism into its culture. Many soccer aficionados say that players like Yamal and his teammate Nico Williams, who was born in Spain to Ghanaian parents, reflect an increasingly multicultural — and increasingly successful — Spain and Spanish team.

But that is far from a universal view. While most of Spain’s immigrants come from Latin America, and speak the language and often have the same religion, Morocco accounts for more immigrants to Spain than any other country, and many Spaniards are not happy about it. Right-wing, anti-immigrant parties have surged in recent years, feeding on fears and grievances over Muslim arrivals.

At times they have focused on Yamal, including after he prostrated in a moment of worship after scoring a goal in an early World Cup match. Revuelta, a far-right youth organization closely associated with the far-right party Vox, posted the image on social media with a warning: “Whoever tolerates Islam for the sake of a goal will one day have neither a national team nor a nation.”

For many on the far right, Yamal’s hometown, Rocafonda, is a foreboding example of what Spain will look like if Muslims and Africans keep coming and traditional Spanish identity fades. On streets named after Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, Spanish flags are draped over Arabic groceries. Women in hijabs shoot the breeze behind their toddlers, men watch the game in a packed cafe, and struggling migrants rent rooftops and sleep under laundry lines. Violence is not unusual. In 2024, Yamal’s father, who was fined for knocking off the glasses of a Vox activist campaigning for deportations, was stabbed on a Rocafonda street.

Despite that, Yamal is proud of his hometown, often celebrating a goal by using his fingers to form the number 304, part of the neighborhood’s postal code.

Much has changed for Yamal, but also, Romani said, for the neighborhood.

“It’s Morocco,” she said with a laugh in the playground.

“Don’t say that!” her granddaughter, Yamal’s cousin, Huda El Abdellaoui, chastised her with a smile.

“It’s OK, hombre,” Romani said, using a Spanish term of endearment. “It’s not bad, it’s good,” she said of the area’s multiculturalism.

Around Rocafonda, in Middle Eastern groceries and the halal butcher shop, on street corners and playgrounds, Yamal is a hero. But El Abdellaoui said that Yamal represented more than just an immigrant enclave in a corner of the country.

“He is the face of Spain,” she said.

As Spain’s semifinal game was about to begin, the two women returned home to watch with extended family. The teenagers playing soccer nearby joined thousands of others watching the game at a park. There, a television channel broadcast live from “the city of Yamal” and the park filled with white Spaniards and those of African descent.

When Yamal drew a foul that resulted in the game’s first goal, the crowd erupted.

Bilal El Kenfaoui, 15, who wore a Spain team jersey, was ecstatic. He played the position of right wing, like Yamal, but was also realizing that maybe he wasn’t quite as good as his idol and was focusing on his math classes.

Soon after, the crowd lost its collective mind when Yamal scored what would have been Spain’s third goal, and then booed lustily when the referee took it away because he had been offside. Back in the Yamal family home, Romani complained vigorously at the television set. But victory seemed certain.

Watching in the park, Mariam Drammeh, 18, wore a red Spain jersey with her hijab. She recounted how, as the child of Gambian parents, she had endured frequent racist taunts to “go back to your country” as she went to school to get her nursing degree.

She saw Yamal as a source of pride for “those of us whose parents are immigrants.”

With victory at hand, the crowd waved Spanish flags and began embracing. The final whistle blew. Everyone jumped.

“I am Spanish,” the crowd sang in unison. “Spanish. Spanish.”