The Anxiety of Genius: Yamal, Croatia, and the Gap Between the Scoreline and What Happens on the Pitch

At the end of the press conference, as the recorders were being switched off and the room began to empty, Luis de la Fuente mentioned Lamine Yamal and used a phrase that made me stop. "He carries within him the anxiety of a genius." He added that it was understandable, because the boy always wants to be the best, always wants more than he has, and that very hunger sometimes makes a person miserable.

In football, we are used to talking about the pressure on thirty-year-old players — men who have been through a few transfer windows, who have tasted the bench, who understand that a career is a curve with a peak and a slope. Here, though, we are talking about an eighteen-year-old who has just scored the opening goal in all three of Spain's matches during the latest international window. He scores like an adult, but people still call him "the kid."

I sat for a long time after switching off the screen, and one question kept coming back: which anxiety is heavier — the anxiety of someone who cannot bear the expectation, or the anxiety of someone who can bear everything, and therefore is never allowed to fall?

Three matches, three opening goals, and a pair of legs too young to be rested

De la Fuente did not confirm that Yamal would start. He said the coaching staff would "assess how suitable" each player is, that they always want to pick the best possible line-up. But at the same time, he described Yamal as the most involved player across the whole window. Put those two statements side by side, and anyone who has watched football long enough understands what they are saying: this is not a genuinely open competition, but a squad in which the key man is being load-managed.

Based on my experience of following matches, this is the familiar pattern of big teams when they possess an outstanding young player. They dare not say out loud that he will start, because saying it out loud means admitting dependence. But they also cannot rest him, because every match without him is a match in which the attack becomes slower, duller, less imaginative. That contradiction is not hesitation; it is a method of management.

The most telling detail in De la Fuente's remarks was not Yamal's name, but the fact that he scored the opening goal in all three matches. This is a narrow but genuine tactical signal. It shows that Yamal is not being thrown on as a late-game impact card at the seventieth minute, but deployed in the role that opens the scoring — the player who touches the ball early, who forces the opponent to drop back and adjust their defending before the match has even taken shape. A player who opens the scoring three matches in a row is not lucky; he is placed where the match begins.

And that is precisely where the anxiety becomes a professional issue rather than just a touching story. A young player of eighteen, playing for Barcelona at a punishing density, and then the most involved player for the national team, is accumulating minutes that a body of that age was never designed to withstand. In modern football, injuries to young talents rarely come from a single collision. They come from hundreds of accumulated minutes, from matches where people say "he's young, he recovers quickly," until the day the body answers with a hamstring injury no one saw coming.

What is interesting is that De la Fuente does not hide that he is rotating. He spoke about Dani Olmo, who started against England and the Czech Republic but sat out the earlier meeting with Croatia, saying his minutes would be "assessed." Olmo is a player at his peak, someone who knows Croatia better than most, and the fact that the coach mentions him as a variable shows the staff is using rotation as a dual tool: to preserve fitness, and to keep every key player feeling important.

I once heard a coach say he never lets a player understand exactly why he is on the bench. Not because he likes power, but because once the reason is spoken, it instantly becomes a judgment. The way De la Fuente speaks about Olmo and Yamal carries exactly that spirit: he does not demote anyone, he simply opens a space for everyone to step into. In a squad full of stars, that is the hardest skill of all — keeping everyone's ego from colliding.

When two generations change hands on the same pitch

There is another layer to this match that is often overlooked when people look only at the table.

Spain are on the way up. Yamal, at eighteen, has scored the opening goal in all three matches, and that says something not just about an individual; it says something about a generation arriving. A team with a teenage player carrying the scoring burden is a team in transition — they have moved past dependence on the old names and are building a new core on the foundation of those still there to guide them.

Croatia are on the other side of the curve. De la Fuente called them "one of the most important national teams in recent years." That phrasing is both respect and a way of positioning them in time: important in recent years. A generation that reached a World Cup final, that made all of Europe speak their name with respect, is now at the end of its cycle. When a team enters a transition, it is not only fighting the opponent in front of it; it is fighting its own image from the past.

That is why this match, seen from afar, resembles a handover more than an ordinary group-stage fixture. One side is learning to trust its young players; the other is trying to prove that age has not erased its class. In football, matches like this often end in ways no one predicts, because emotion turns into energy, and energy is not contained in any statistic.

Croatia: the seven-goal storm and the trap of collective memory

Then comes the part that made me put down my pen.

Before this window, Croatia lost to England by seven goals. Seven. At national-team level, where the gap between sides is usually measured in half-goals rather than seven, a scoreline like that is not a defeat — it is a tear. It rips apart the image of a generation that reached a World Cup final, that was runner-up, that was spoken of as a phenomenon.

De la Fuente called it "a one-off incident." He said Croatia remain one of the most important national teams in recent years. And I believe he was not merely being polite to an opponent.

Because those seven goals, seen from a data perspective, are an extreme outlier. In football, scorelines like that almost always reflect a divergence between result and true quality: the winner is rarely seven goals better, and the loser is rarely seven goals worse. A match can collapse after the second or third goal, when one team decides there is nothing left to save, and from then on the score inflates without corresponding to anything actually happening on the pitch. Seven is a real number, but it is the number of an evening, not the number of a team.

Our collective memory reads the scoreline differently. We look at the table and believe the number is the truth. Seven goals means Croatia are weak. Three points means Croatia are in crisis. And then we walk into the next match with a belief already set, when football has never worked that way.

This is the biggest blind spot of football memory: it records the scoreline as a verdict, but forgets that a scoreline is only a frozen moment, not a personality. I learned this long ago, on a July night in Kazan, when Antoine Griezmann scored and Diego Godin sat down on the grass, tears streaming under the lights. Griezmann did not celebrate, Godin wept — the match ended, but the brotherhood did not. That night taught me that a match ends differently from how people imagine, and the human part lies where the camera usually looks away.

Croatia after the England defeat are the same. That team did not become a bad team because of one bad evening. What it became is a wounded team, and a wounded team in football is a far more dangerous animal than a winning one.

The blind spot: when the wounded become more dangerous than the winners

The table before the match said Spain were top with nine points from three wins, while Croatia were third with three points. Reading only that, one would conclude this is a match Spain need to win to confirm their lead, and Croatia need a result to keep a sliver of hope. But the table does not measure the most important thing in matches like this: motivation.

A team that has just lost by seven walks into the next match with two opposing emotions at once. They are afraid — afraid the tear is still there, afraid the whole world is waiting to see if they shatter again. But they are also angry, and in football, collective anger is more powerful than any tactical session. A team humiliated on someone else's pitch will play the next match as if their entire career is being weighed minute by minute.

Spain are in the opposite position. Three wins, nine points, a coach under no pressure, a squad finding its rhythm. This is the state every team wishes for, but it is also the most dangerous state in which to enter a match considered easy. The confidence that comes from a winning run is not the same as the confidence of someone who has lost; it is thinner, because it has never been tested. A team that has never been pushed into a position of having to suffer does not yet know how it will react when it must suffer.

De la Fuente seems to understand this. The time he spends praising Croatia, calling that defeat "a one-off incident," describing the coming atmosphere as "passionate and emotional" — all of it, in press-conference language, is a way of sending a message home: do not think we have won before the match is played. When a coach spends time praising an opponent who just lost by seven, he is not talking about the opponent. He is talking to his own players.

I have written a great deal about matches in which the stronger side enters with a sense of superiority. And I have realized that the biggest accident in football does not come from the weaker side playing better, but from the stronger side believing it does not need to play at full intensity. In football, the gap between playing at full intensity and playing just enough is sometimes one percent, but that one percent sits exactly where the first goal is born.

What is really more worrying: Croatia, or Yamal's legs?

If I had to pick the single biggest risk for Spain in this match, I would not pick Croatia. I would pick the very player everyone is praising the most.

Read the facts again: Yamal scored the opening goal in all three matches, is described as the most involved player for the national team, plays for a club with a packed schedule, and is only eighteen. Those four facts together are not a story about a genius; they are a profile of physical risk. And this is what I want to make clear, because it is often obscured by praise: a young player who performs well is treated like an infinite resource, until the day the resource runs dry.

In sports medicine there is a principle every club doctor knows by heart: injuries do not come from one match, but from a run of matches in which the body is not rested enough. A young player recovers faster, but that very ability is the trap, because it makes people allow themselves to use him more. When the injury comes, it does not knock first; it simply appears, and people call it an accident.

What is striking is how deftly De la Fuente handles this risk. He does not say Yamal is overloaded; he says the boy is a natural competitor, that he never tires of competing. He turns accumulated minutes from a worry into a virtue. This is a smart media move, because it protects the young player from the "being overused" narrative while keeping his image intact. But media deftness does not make the risk on the pitch disappear.

If Yamal plays and endures a fourth consecutive match at maximum intensity, that is a gamble. If he sits out, that is an admission — and people will call it by a more polite name: load management. Both choices are right, and both have a price. What interests me is not which choice is made, but whether people are looking at Yamal as an eighteen-year-old human being or as a scoring machine placed in the right spot.

The anxiety of genius, read from the other side

I thought for a long time about the phrase "the anxiety of genius," and I believe it is not merely a pretty way of speaking.

When a young person is called a genius, people usually think of it as being handed a gift. But in truth, that gift always comes with a condition: he must prove it every day, before millions, and is not allowed to have an ordinary evening. An eighteen-year-old who scores three matches in a row is not allowed to score less. He has no right to be silent, and no right to play poorly without someone mentioning it.

The anxiety of genius, then, is the anxiety of someone who is not allowed to fail in a human way. That is why I always keep a certain suspicion toward labels attached too early. The label is not wrong; it simply places on a young person's shoulders a weight that even adults struggle to carry.

I was once called "the poet on the penalty spot" — a fine and cutting insult, and it took me years to understand that people were not mocking the poetry, they were mocking the way I hid behind it. The summer 2026 controversy did not kill football — it only forced us to write more accurately and more truthfully. I learned that when a person is labelled, the most important thing is not to deny the label, but to keep working until the label becomes too small for reality. And I also learned that what people remember is not the scoreline, but the moment — they may forget the result, but never the sight of a player drawing a circle around the ball.

For Yamal, I wish the same. Not that he proves he is not a genius, but that he is given the right to be an ordinary player for a few days — to play badly, to rest, to grow up without paying the price with an injury. When the pitch falls silent, we finally hear football's sigh; and the sigh of an eighteen-year-old is sometimes louder than the roar of the entire stand.

What remains after the whistle

The match between Spain and Croatia will end, and then people will read it by the scoreline again. If Spain win, the story will be about a team flying high and a young genius. If Croatia spring a surprise, the story will be about a revival, some "Croatian spirit" recalled as legend. Both stories will be partly true, and both will miss the largest part.

Football is not read through the scoreline, but through the heartbeat of those in the stands. And in this match there are two heartbeats worth listening to: the heartbeat of a team at the end of a cycle, trying to prove that one bad night does not define a generation; and the heartbeat of a boy carrying on his legs more than an eighteen-year-old should carry.

If you ask me what makes me most curious before this match, I will not talk about formations, pressing, or numbers. I will talk about whether De la Fuente dares to rest Yamal — because in such a decision, one sees what a coach truly believes in. Not belief in the match at hand, but belief in whether a young player will still be here in ten years, or is merely a means to win this week's match.

Writing about football is sitting with people, listening to them tell the story of the match they once were. And sometimes the only thing a writer can do is remind everyone that behind every scoreline, there is a person trying to sleep well after the whole world has just called him a genius.