Lamine Yamal admits he is Lionel Messi 'reborn' with viral photo

The photo went viral last week when Yamal's father posted it on Instagram with the text: "The beginning of two legends."

So, what's the story behind the photo?

In 2007, a 20-year-old Messi posed for a charity photoshoot with a six-month-old Yamal and his mother in the dressing room of Camp Nou in Barcelona. The shoot was part of a UNICEF fundraising initiative in Mataro, where Yamal's parents (of Moroccan and Equatoguinean ancestry) had found a home. 

Yamal's family won the UNICEF raffle to have their pictures taken with a Barcelona player, who just happened to be Messi. The photographer, Joan Monfort of the Associated Press, had little to no idea the Argentine was bathing a future Barcelona superstar. 

"Messi is a pretty introverted guy, he's shy," Monfort recalled. "He was coming out of the locker room and suddenly he finds himself in another locker room with a plastic tub full of water and a baby in it. It was complicated. He didn't even know how to hold him at first."

Messi would eventually get comfortable nursing baby Yamal, per Monfort.  

When Yamal was seven, he moved to Barcelona with his family and joined the club's popular youth academy, La Masia. Messi, too, migrated with his family to Barcelona as a teenager to join the same farm system. 

Like Messi, Yamal would go on to play for Barcelona, becoming the club's youngest starter and goalscorer, not to mention the youngest scorer in Spanish league history.

Their similar journies no longer feel as eerie since we now have photographic evidence of Messi blessing (baptizing?) his spiritual successor.