The Premier League can't produce stars like Lamine Yamal - and Gary Neville has explained why

Gog Magog Golf Club, four miles south of Cambridge, is a beautiful, but tough, course that hosts Open qualifying tournaments and the Lagonda Trophy, one of Britain’s most prestigious mens’ amateur events. A 19-year-old Lee Westwood won the Lagonda Trophy in 1992, recording a one-under par score over four rounds.

Last weekend at Gog Magog, Sabrina Wong carded a three-round aggregate of ten-under par to win the R&A Girls’ U16 Amateur Championship. Sabrina is 13 years old.

Earlier this week, Vaibhav Suryavanashi hit the second-fastest century in the history of cricket’s Indian Premier League, reaching three figures in 35 balls for Rajasthan Royals. Vaibhav is 14 years old.

In that context, Lamine Yamal, at 17, is a sporting veteran but his deeds for Barcelona against Inter in the Champions League represented a teenage performance for the footballing ages. As a standalone exhibition, it was a performance for the footballing ages.

But it had a wider significance. It was Yamal’s 100th appearance for Barcelona. At the same age, Lionel Messi had made only nine appearances for Barcelona’s senior team and had scored once.

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Yamal’s goal against Inter was his 22nd for Barca. He also has 27 assists. More than likely, Yamal is about to add a second La Liga winners medal (although he appeared only briefly in the successful 2022-23 campaign) to a collection that already includes a Copa Del Rey winners medal and a European Championship winners medal.

But never mind the trophies and the numbers, it is the nature of his game that is truly exhilarating. The ingenuity, the instinct, the bravado, the touch, the audacity, the speed of thought.

It is truly special. If we can take our Premier League blinkers off, we are witnessing a phenomenon.

When watching Yamal’s remarkable performance against Inter, I began to think about a mantra that is trotted out by so many followers of this country’s elite football competition. And that is that the Premier League has the best players in the world.

Really? It certainly has a lot of very good players, a lot of world-class talent, no arguments. But how many players currently get you out of the seat in the way Yamal did the other night?

Or as quite a few of the PSG players can do? Quite rightly, Arne Slot bridles when it is suggested this has not been the most competitive edition of the Premier League.

As always, it has been ferociously tough to win and Liverpool’s consistent excellence and convincing margin of triumph should get the thunderous acclaim it deserves. But the general product of Premier League 2024-25 has been dull, there is no getting away from that.

Yamal’s talent is freakish, that is beyond doubt. It would surely flourish wherever he was playing. But is this Premier League a perfect environment for his sort of creativity and impudence? No. It is creating automatons.

“This robotic nature of not leaving our positions, being micro-managed to within an inch of our lives, not having any freedom to take a risk and try and win a football match is becoming an illness in the game. It’s becoming a disease in the game,” Gary Neville said recently.

And he is absolutely spot-on, assuming he means the Premier League when he refers to ‘the game’. Because as Yamal and Barcelona have been showing and as Luis Enrique’s PSG have been showing, successful football does not have to be robotic.

Yamal is going to be a true great, he is going to win the Ballon D’Or multiple times, he is a player that, as Inter manager Simone Inzaghi said, comes along once every 50 years. But in the here and now, he is a reminder that, in large parts of the modern game, individual brilliance is not being allowed to fully flourish. And the Premier League is one of those parts.

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