Álvaro Morata Champions Lamine Yamal for Ballon d'Or Glory

Álvaro Morata has seen enough. From the dressing room, from the training pitch, from the biggest stages in international football. And as the Ballon d'Or debate heats up ahead of the 2026 ceremony in London, the Madrid-born forward is in no doubt: Lamine Yamal belongs at the very front of the queue.

Now at Leganes in the Segunda Division, Morata might be operating away from the glare of the elite, but his voice still carries weight. He has captained Spain, shared dressing rooms with some of the game’s biggest stars, and watched Yamal’s rise from impossibly close range. When he talks about contenders for football’s most prestigious individual prize, he talks with conviction.

He places Yamal in elite company. Rodri, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Kylian Mbappe – and the Barcelona winger. No hesitation. No caveats. For Morata, Spanish talent, and Yamal in particular, fully merits the sport’s highest individual recognition.

What really strikes him is not just the talent the world sees every week, but the work the world rarely notices. Morata underlined the teenager’s obsessive preparation, his willingness to live the game in the hours nobody films.

"He is much smarter and far more hard-working than many people think, in terms of how he studies matches and how he prepares for them," Morata said in an interview with Cadena COPE, lifting the curtain slightly on the habits behind the highlight reels.

This is not a veteran dazzled by a few tricks in training. Morata’s admiration goes back to Yamal’s first steps on the European stage. He remembers the shock of it, the sense that something abnormal was unfolding.

"He was dominating Europe at 16 years of age, and what I have seen with my own eyes is truly incredible," the former Spain skipper recalled.

The numbers back up the feeling. Since Yamal’s international debut in September 2023 – a statement night in Georgia where the winger scored and Morata hit a hat-trick in an emphatic Spain win – the pair have shared the pitch 15 times for La Roja. Those games have charted the winger’s rapid transformation from prodigy to pillar of the national team.

At club level, the rise has been just as ruthless. A La Masia graduate with the swagger of the street and the discipline of the academy, Yamal already owns a trophy cabinet most veterans would envy. His haul stands at eight major titles, including a domestic treble with Barcelona in the 2024-25 season.

Then came the international coronation. Euro 2024. Nations League. And, towering above them all, the 2026 World Cup. Spain’s run to global glory confirmed Yamal as the defining figure of a new generation, and the teenager now stands alone in history as the youngest footballer ever to lift both of the international game’s greatest prizes.

Those achievements have carried him naturally onto the 30-man shortlist for the 2026 Ballon d'Or, a list that usually rewards years of dominance rather than teenage surges. His presence there does more than flatter his potential; it underlines his current status as one of the frontrunners for the Golden Ball.

The stage is set. On October 26 in London, under the lights and the cameras, football will crown its next individual king. Until that night, Yamal’s task is brutally simple: keep delivering. In La Liga. In Europe. Week after week for Barcelona.

If he does, the question in London will not be whether he’s too young for the Ballon d'Or. It will be how long he intends to keep it.