Lamine Yamal wins third straight Ballon d'Or young talent award

BarcelonaBarcelonaLaLiga · Spain's Lamine YamalLamine YamalBarcelona · Spain · Forward won the best young talent award at the Ballon d'Or for a third consecutive year at Monday's ceremony, missing out on the senior men's prize. The 19-year-old is reported to have greeted the outcome with patience rather than disappointment.

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Season 2025/26

A third year as the outstanding young player

The sequence is the striking part. One young-player award can be the product of a single strong season; taking the same category three years running means staying ahead of a field that changes around you each time, and doing it while the attention on you grows.

Yamal was 19 at the time of Monday's ceremony. The young talent honour is handed out as part of the Ballon d'Or programme, in which the senior men's award is the headline prize.

For a player of his profile, the run matters more than any single trophy. Each year he has been measured against a fresh intake of young players and finished ahead of them. The senior award is the next comparison, and a considerably harder one.

Yamal's reaction to missing the main prize

Bryan Berlin · CC BY-SA 4.0

The reported response was calm. Yamal is quoted as saying "good things take time", a line that treats the senior award as a question of timing rather than of whether it arrives at all.

That framing fits where he stands. Missing the main prize at 19 leaves a long career ahead of him, and the young talent award gives him a concrete marker of progress while he waits. He is understood to have his sights set firmly on the bigger prize.

Why the two awards are not the same race

Bryan Berlin · CC BY-SA 4.0

The young talent category is decided within a narrow group of emerging players. The Ballon d'Or itself is voted across the whole of the senior game, where club form, international tournaments and honours all weigh in. Dominating the first does not guarantee the second, and the gap between them is where Yamal's next few years will be judged.

What is not yet known

Barcelona have not commented publicly on the award, and a full account of Yamal's remarks has not been published, so it is not clear what else he said about the senior prize or about the season ahead.

No date has been set for the next Ballon d'Or ceremony and no nomination process for it has opened. Whether a third young talent award turns into a first serious challenge for the main prize will be settled over a season of football, not at a ceremony.