Beyond the photo: With Yamal, Williams and Euro victory, Spain crosses a race barrier

AN ICONIC football photograph was born on Sunday, after Nico Williams opened scoring for Spain, from a low Lamine Yamal cross, in the European Championship final against England in Berlin. Williams is beside the corner flag, flashing a broad grin. Yamal is clinging to his shoulder, his joyous face obscured by the spiked Rasta locks of Williams. It was a deeply symbolic moment in Spanish football history, that the two brightest stars of their fourth Euro triumph, beating England 2-1, were immigrants of African descent, that the national team has started to reflect all of its nation.

In the past, Spain had the occasional black player, such as midfielders Donato, Marcos Senna and striker Catanha, but they were Brazilians granted citizenship after moving to Spain to play professionally. Racism, though, was rampant in Spanish football. Last year, Williams was subjected to monkey chants in a game against Atletico Madrid. A furious Williams retorted: “There are fools in all places. So it’s not a big deal, we have to keep working so that this changes bit by bit, as in the end we are having an internal and external fight against this. It is what it is.”

The bitter reality is that Spain had not integrated immigrants into the game, unlike England, France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Yamal’s father Mounir Yamal was fined €600 for throwing eggs at a Vox campaign tent in May 2023.

In this light, the rise and fanfare of Yamal and Williams is more relevant, a symbol of Spanish cutting its racist undertones. Theirs is a staple but poignant tale of immigration, one of physical torture and mental anguish, of human trafficking and hope. To escape the abject poverty in Ghana, Williams’s parents fled the country. But they fell into the trap of human traffickers who promised to ferry them to the United Kingdom and left them stranded in the middle of the Sahara, without food, water and shelter, robbing their valuables.

La Roja are in 𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌𝐋𝐀𝐍𝐃 🇪🇸

Nico Williams slots it home to give Spain a 1️⃣-0️⃣ lead 🆚 England 🔥

Catch the action from the #EURO2024 Final now on the #SonySportsNetwork 🙌 pic.twitter.com/OXocNDPlmk

— Sony Sports Network (@SonySportsNetwk) July 14, 2024

Shattered, they kept walking aimlessly through the burning sands, even as his mother Maria was pregnant with their eldest son, Inaki, also a footballer who turns up for Ghana. After days, they ran into police in the Spanish enclave of Melilla, in the north of Africa. A kind police officer told them about the formalities to seek political asylum with the help of a lawyer. “He advised us to burn our passports and tell the court that we were from Liberia,” his mother once told Spanish news outlet, AS. She narrated the story to their children later, when they pestered her about blister scars on their father’s feet.

The lawyer introduced them to a Catholic priest Inaki Mardones. The priest found them state housing in Bilbao and took Sarah to a hospital. In gratitude, Felix and Maria named their first son after him. But raising the children was not easy. Felix moved to Chelsea in the UK, where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel and as a security guard on match days at Chelsea FC. Maria juggled up to three jobs a day.

Football was a distraction for the Williams brothers from their gruelling livelihood realities. They just happened to be exceptional at that. Nico would dedicate everything to his parents. “They risked their lives so that we, my brother and I, have a better future. I will forever appreciate what my father and my mother did for us — they are fighters, they instilled in us respect, hard work, every day, that nobody gifts you anything,” he would say.

Yamal’s story is not as tearful, but touching nonetheless. His mother, Sheila, illegally entered Spain from poverty-ridden Equatorial New Guinea when she was a teenager. In 2007, she met Mounir Nasraoui, a painter from Morocco, staying in the Catalan suburb of Rocafonda. They lived in a joint family with Mounir’s parents, uncles and cousins, before they divorced.

Most of the family ran local eateries or pavement stalls. On the streets of the impoverished Rocafonda, they played football all day long. Yamal was barely six when his football-mad father put him in a local club, CF La Torreta de Granollers, although he had to shell out a hefty sum as admission fee and for football gear. Two years later, his life changed as Barcelona’s scouts picked him for their famous academy.

With his first salary upon turning into a senior player, he bought a house for his mother, and subsequently one for his grandmother and father too. He frequents the neighbourhood and flies to meet his relatives in Morocco and New Guinea once a year.

Williams and Yamal consider each other brother, training, dining and hanging out together. “I look after him like my brother (Inaki) has looked after me,” Williams would say. The understanding was evident on the field too.

There are others, less successful than the wingers, from immigrant backgrounds too, like Ansu Fati, Roberto Sanchez and Alejandro Balde, who didn’t make the squad, but are in the national reckoning. The symbolism was not lost on coach Luis de la Fuente “They make us stronger and greater as a country. They could easily have chosen to play for other national sides but they choose to play for Spain. They’re Spanish and we’re happy that they are,” he recently told ABC.

Not just the immigrants, nine of their players, including the Euro winning goal-scorer Mikel Oyarzabal, are from the historically under-represented (usually a reserve of the Catalans and Madridistas) Basque country. As is their coach De la Fuente, signalling another significant shift in the composition of their football culture. Their triumph thus was different from their previous title-winning acts.

At the heart of the winds of change in the country are two wingers, 17 and 22, and their simple photograph contains deeper meanings and symbolism.

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