Lamine Yamal questions Ballon d’Or criteria and cites Messi and Ronaldo

After several days of promotional clips, the full interview with Barcelona youngster Lamine Yamal has been broadcast on Universo Valdano, the programme shown on Movistar Plus.

While the initial extracts focused on his views about the Ballon d’Or, the complete interview offered a wider and more controversial assessment of the way individual awards are judged.

Yamal criticised the current approach to selecting the Ballon d’Or winner, saying the award had been viewed differently when Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were at their peak.

“The award is assessed in a completely different way now,” Yamal said, according to Spanish newspaper Mundo Deportivo. “When Messi and Cristiano were there, everyone knew they were the best in the world, so the award was between them.”

He argued that team success and individual achievement should not be treated as the same thing.

“The problem today is that people judge things which have nothing to do with the Ballon d’Or,” he said. “For example, they say it should go to a Paris Saint-Germain player because he won the Champions League.

“When you win the Champions League, the trophy is given to the team as the best group, and that is their achievement. But an individual award is something completely different. It should go to the best player in the world, and that is all.

“It should not go to a player simply because he scored 80 goals. Someone who scores 80 goals receives the top scorer’s award. These are different things that people do not understand.

“The best player is the one you enjoy watching as a commentator during a match, the one who looks different from everyone else. When the award goes back to the genuinely best player, rather than the player who scores the most or wins the most trophies, it will regain its true value.”

Yamal also explained that his understanding of football was based on watching matches in full, rather than judging performances through statistics.

“The way I grew up with football was by watching the entire match, from the first minute to the 90th,” he said. “I did not open applications to see how many goals a player had scored or how many assists he had made. Everyone enjoyed the game.

“You could watch a playmaker who did not score 20 goals but offered extraordinary entertainment, such as Mesut Ozil, whom I liked very much.”

The Barcelona forward said he could be satisfied with a performance even when he had not scored, because he viewed football as more than a collection of numbers.

“I think the current generation enters matches through applications and says: ‘Lamine scored two goals and made two assists, so he had a great game,’” he said. “But in many matches I feel I have put on an entertaining performance without scoring, and I go to sleep very happy because I know football is not just about scoring a goal. It is the whole build-up, from the goalkeeper playing the ball out.”

Yamal added that his frustration after games was not connected to failing to score.

“I sometimes arrive home angry, and my mother always asks whether I am upset because I did not score,” he said. “I tell her I would never be angry for that reason. Scoring is only a number in the statistics.

“I am genuinely angry when I have not touched the ball or enjoyed playing. That is what annoys me most.”

He also described the tactical conversations he has with team-mates during training, including Fermin, Eric and Jules.

“I tell them I prefer them to go past me on the inside,” Yamal said. “If they do that, they will either go through or draw a defender away from the covering position, so they are no longer in my way.

“We always try to discuss these details. The simplest things in football are the most effective. When a player runs into space and the defence stops, there is one second when he will be unmarked. That is the exact moment we need to practise and time accurately.”