Rocafonda is where Lamine Yamal grew up — if you can tell a 16-year-old that.
The Barcelona winger’s football development has progressed at an impressive pace since his first-team debut, against Real Betis, at the age of 15 years, nine months and 16 days on April 29.
That night, he became the club’s youngest player since La Liga was formed more than 90 years ago and earlier this month, on October 8, he became the competition’s youngest goalscorer after finding the net in a 2-2 draw with Granada.
This weekend, Real Madrid will consider him one of their most dangerous potential opponents in El Clasico and everyone who has watched him play will be expecting him to put chaos in his stride. His talent has, inevitably, been compared to Lionel Messi – with Barca continuing to talk and more about the need to carefully guard his development, too.
At Rocafonda, they always knew he was special and he remains strongly connected to the area. It was his “family and emotional core”, as one resident put it.
Rocafonda is a neighborhood that is part of Mataro — a town of about 120,000 inhabitants about 40 minutes up the coast from Barcelona. It is located in a good geographical position but a low-lying area in the middle of a region of rich cities.
If you look down from its hills on a Sunday afternoon, the Mediterranean Sea shines a beautiful turquoise in the sun. It’s October, but people are walking the streets in short sleeves, the temperature is more typical of August than autumn.
The area around the local municipal sports ground was filled with children and parents, ready to watch Rocafonda’s Juvenil A (under-17s) on the field. Some spectators came forward and rested their elbows on the bars at the edge of the pitch — a very typical picture of Spanish regional football in grounds without stands.
Yamal has never played in this stadium. But he started on the concrete football court right next door, where kids who couldn’t afford the registration fees at local clubs often played. It is one of the focal points of the neighborhood and has graffiti on its head: ‘Rocafonda’.
The concrete football court where Yamal used to play in Rocafonda (Laia Cervello Herrero/The Athletic)
There’s also graffiti, with just a number: 304. It’s on walls, on trash cans, everywhere. It refers to the local postcode: 08304. When Yamal celebrated his first Barca goal, he made a gesture in reference to the code, a symbol of identity, of belonging.
Across the street, there are more signs of the connection between Yamal and this place — in a small bakery run by one of his 23 cousins and an uncle, Abdul. At the entrance, there is a mural of Yamal in his Barcelona shirt, complemented by the flags of Morocco (his father’s country of origin), Equatorial Guinea (his mother’s) and Spain, where he was born.
Surrounded by fresh pastries, bags of crisps and soft drinks, Abdul and his son wait for the rush to arrive. Since Yamal’s debut in the Barca first team, the bakery has become more crowded than its strategic position allows. Soon, many children, who are hungry after playing football, will rush here to buy their favorite snack.
Yamal’s grandmother Fatima appears. She is very petite and very kind, always grateful to anyone who shows interest in her grandson. He was the first to move his family from Morocco to Spain 35 years ago. He came first, alone, and then he brought his children. Abdul has lived in Rocafonda for 30 years.
Many members of Yamal’s family live in the neighborhood (Laia Cervello Herrero/The Athletic)
Fatima was present in her grandson’s childhood, as was Abdul and his children. They grew up together. But when Yamal was three years old, his parents separated and he lived for a while with his mother Sheila in La Torreta, one of the neighborhoods of Roca del Valles, very close to Granollers, a city north of Mataro .
His mother found a new job at a fast food chain and there he met Inocente Diez, one of the main people in the turn that Yamal’s future would take.
Diez was known as ‘Kubala’ (after Barcelona legend Laszlo Kubala) from his time as a local footballer, and he persuaded Yamine’s mother Sheila to sign her son up to the club if where he was the coordinator, La Torreta.
“You could tell he was special,” Diez said The Athletic. “At that age, you never know what’s going to happen, it’s a big industry. But it was as if a magic wand had touched him.
“When he returned to live in Mataro, for many days his father could not accompany him to practice, so he called me and asked me to come with me and pick him up by car. On the way there we always talked and I would tell him that one day, Barca would come and sign him. He would tell me no, no, no.
“He was a very shy child, very reserved. She is very sweet and charming. He listened to me when I gave him advice, and sometimes still comes to me. He is very humble and he is still very close to his old friends. He doesn’t like to show off.”
La Torreta helped Yamal and his family when they had financial problems, as they did with other children, so they could continue playing.
It is common to see scouts at matches from regional lower-league clubs trying to invest in youth players, such as Damm or UE Cornella. But Yamal’s case is rare. He went straight to Barca.
As the story goes: one day a man saw him from the stands and from there he called Barca and said they just had to give Yamal a trial. He only took one, and in 2014, when he was seven years old, he started training with them.
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Despite studying in Granollers and playing in La Torreta, for Yamal, Rocafonda is still home. There he lived with his friends and cousins. Even when he moved into residence at Barcelona’s youth academy, in the west of the city, that connection remained.
When he first joined Barca, the club would provide a taxi service for him and some of the other kids to get to training during the week. On weekends, when he is with his mother at La Torreta, she takes him to Barca games. When he’s with his father, who doesn’t have a car, one of his youth coaches, Jordi Font, often picks him up early in the morning.
“He usually spends the trips sleeping,” said Font, who coached Yamal with Barca’s under-10s in the 2016-17 season. “At that age, the movement of cars was like a lull for children and more than the times we had to travel. He is not very talkative, only with his colleagues. But he was never one of the most talkative in general.”
Rocafonda is a neighborhood that developed mostly of new construction in the 1970s. It is a simple neighborhood of working people — for locals and for economic migrants from other parts of Spain.
Over the years, that demographic has changed. Little by little, Rocafonda removed the first families who arrived and the fact that many of the residential buildings were flats without elevators meant that when people got old, they left. At the time of its construction, the area looked like a modern urban development in a city where the historical part was very old, but in some buildings, the construction was not of the highest quality and the renovations had not been done. Some flats still have no heating.
“This is a neighborhood that, with a different urban planning, is one of the best in the city,” said Maria Majo, a former teacher and member of the Rocafonda Neighborhood Association.
“It’s a place that has a lot of possibilities but also has a lot of limitations.”
Rocafonda has a reputation as a troubled area in the wider region, due to reports of violence between rival gangs in some areas, or the high number of vacant buildings occupied by squatters in recent years. Residents say yes, there can be fights, but it’s generally a safe neighborhood with lots of family life.
“The quality of people is very good, but the economic and family situations are sometimes very difficult,” said Majo. He worked here for 41 years and saw how many in the neighborhood with unfavorable family situations graduated from university.
He believes that since Yamal debuted at Barca he has served as an example for many children who have seen how, through hard work and effort, he was able to build a successful future for himself.
The past few months have been a whirlwind in Yamal’s life. He went from being an unknown teenager to an international star compared to Messi.
He set record after record: the youngest to play for Barca in a century, the youngest to play in La Liga, the youngest to start a Champions League match, the youngest to play for Spain, the youngest to score for Spain.
… and Spain’s youngest goalscorer
He became one of the players Xavi looked up to. The Spanish Football Federation rushed to hand him his international debut — not that he looked out of place. He made Barca fans forget about Ousmane Dembele. All this at the age of just 16 — he celebrated his birthday in July.
Yamal’s family and those who have closely followed his remarkable rise say that his special bond for the neighborhood where he grew up has been important to it. And even if his world changes, his cousins, uncle and grandmother Fatima still live here. His father no longer lives in Rocafonda, but he frequents its streets. He frequents the local bar El Cordobes, which proudly displays another Yamal Barca shirt.
Many people here say they know the football player, and they point to his humility; the little he changed despite everything. They know he never forgets the narrow streets of Rocafonda, the smell of the sea in the air, or the three numbers that are part of his identity: three, zero, four.
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(Top photo: Eric Alonso/Getty Images)
