Culture
Lamine Yamal’s trademark trivela: Dissecting the Barcelona star’s work of art
It is a piece of skill Lamine Yamal is making an art form — and yet another reason the 17-year-old is one of the most exciting players in world football.
The Barcelona forward has used the ‘trivela’ — an outside-of-the-boot shot or pass — to provide three of his nine assists in La Liga this season.
His latest came against Mallorca last week and there was one in the Barcelona derby against Espanyol on November 3, but the trivela versus Villarreal in September was a thing of beauty.
Trivela is a Portuguese word, and the story behind the action getting that name remains unclear. In Brazil, where Portuguese is the official language, such strikes are named ‘Tres Dedos’, as they are produced by using the three outer toes of your foot. The prefix ‘tri-’ means three of something.
The most established theory to explain the trivela refers to a physics phenomenon named trivelocidade, as Professor Salvato Trigo, from Fernando Pessoa University in the Portuguese city of Porto, explained in 2018. “Trivela would be a sort of acronym to that word. It is difficult to find any other etymological origin to the word, as it only started to be used in the 20th century and fully related to football,” he wrote.
There is another less accepted but equally fitting story. According to this theory, the word trivela was used in Porto to refer to buckled shoes mainly linked to higher social classes. These buckles, or trivelas, were placed on the outer side of the shoe, so shooting with them helped give the ball spin.
Legendary Brazil left-back Roberto Carlos, former Portugal forward Ricardo Quaresma, Real Madrid’s Luka Modric and the 1970 World Cup-winning Brazilian attacking midfielder Rivellino were masters of the trivela with their free kicks, shots and passes in the past.
Today, it is becoming Yamal’s trademark.
“Lamine has been using this since a very young age,” Jordi Font, who managed Yamal in Barcelona’s under-10s and used to pick him up from his dad’s house in Rocafonda, north of Barcelona, to drive him to games, tells The Athletic.
“I think it comes from the street football he’s grown into. Playing in the futsal pitch of his neighbourhood, where you can use the walls to pass the ball and dribble past players, and being a bit cheeky while playing against older opponents.”
GO DEEPER
Lamine Yamal: Barcelona’s young prodigy and the proud neighbourhood that shaped him
Albert Puig saw the same two years later as manager of Barca’s under-12s.
“This is not a type of strike that is worked on in La Masia (the club’s famed academy), we did not have instructions to apply it,” Puig tells The Athletic. “I am aware that now there is a rule in Barca’s youth ranks that they want to make kids play at one or two touches at most. This has pros and cons, but Lamine got this touch we are talking about by allowing him to have more time with the ball.
“Back in the day, Lamine was still not doing crosses with it, like he did in Mallorca, because you need to add a layer of strength he did not have yet. But ball-carrying, passing and combining with his team-mates, as well as finishing situations…we have seen plenty of those with Lamine using the outside of his left foot.”
Quaresma was one of the trivela’s main proponents (Getty Images; design by Eamonn Dalton)
Before any game, Yamal likes to go on YouTube and search for videos of different players’ highlights such as Neymar, his favourite player growing up, or another Barca predecessor, Lionel Messi. But the trivela has come more naturally.
All three of his trivela assists this season vouch for that, as they all came in situations where defenders could not expect that pass.
This is the position where he received the ball against Villarreal, when he spotted Raphinha getting ready for a run behind the defensive line.
This is the pass he then made.
Against Espanyol last month, he provided a trivela assist for Dani Olmo as the attacking midfielder crashed into the box.
Then there was his most recent trivela against Mallorca, where his former manager Puig highlights how difficult it was for the defender to predict the pass.
“If you look at his body shape, it does not look like he is going to cut inside his left foot and dribble,” says Puig. “The defender tries to give him space to run towards his right foot, but then he pulls out his trick.”
The teenager’s confidence has grown so much that he is now trying to score with a trivela — and almost managed it against Sevilla in October.
Yamal receives the ball on the left side of the pitch, near the edge of the opposition box, and surprised everyone with what seemed an impossible shot…
… only for goalkeeper Orjan Nyland to produce a save at full stretch.
“Lamine must keep using the trivela because he’s proved it’s effective, it’s far from a luxury touch,” says Font. “A cross like this is extremely useful to send the ball past the first defenders in position to intercept the pass, as the curve makes it tougher. Lamine is going to keep trying new things because his technical skill set allows him to do things others can’t think about.”
Puig agrees: “His creativity, altogether with how his physicality evolves, will keep shaping Lamine as a player.
“That is not a comparison with Messi, because I don’t think it’s any good to make them with Lamine, but if you look at how the Argentinian was when he started at Barca and the player he is now, it is totally different. Messi went from an out-and-out, super-explosive winger who started off on the right-hand side and could not be stopped to a footballer who learnt how to manage his efforts, read the game and roam from a more central position, which gave Barca an incredible weapon.
“We don’t know exactly what player Lamine is going to evolve into, but he has the talent and the intelligence to keep trying new things and make them useful with the best football he can play at every moment.”
Yamal’s trivela assist against Mallorca (Getty Images; design by Eamonn Dalton)
After his latest trivela masterclass against Mallorca, Yamal was interviewed by Catalan television station TV3.
“Is there any way to do those passes you do in video games?,” one journalist asked.
Yamal, an avid gamer, laughed as he replied: “Yes, you can, to be fair. You need to press the L2 button and then pass, go and try it! I think it is a pass that I can do very well, I am confident with it, so I will not stop trying.”
The morning after the game, the city of Barcelona woke up with Yamal’s pass immortalised on its streets.
Local artist Miki Noelle turned a picture of Yamal executing a trivela into a sticker he printed off and glued to a wall in the Gracia district. Noelle has produced various Barca-themed stickers this season, illustrating their best moments so far under new coach Hansi Flick.
The Yamal sticker, topped with the caption “L2 + X”, referring to how he said his pass could be replicated on PlayStation, went viral on social media. Yamal himself spotted it, shared it and changed his Instagram profile picture to it for a week.
It will not be the last time Yamal’s trivelas are venerated in Barcelona.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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