Latest news with #Mataró
South China Morning Post
9 hours ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
A tale of two cities: why China appears so different when viewed from Barcelona and Prague
In a gleaming white technology campus half an hour's drive north of Barcelona, Josep Maria Gomes wants to turbocharge an already thriving partnership between Spain and China. Advertisement His job at TecnoCampus, a hybrid facility housing a university and business and technology park in the city of Mataro, is to connect local start-ups with cutting edge tech innovations. More and more these days, he sees these coming from China. 'In sectors like cybersecurity, Internet of Things, sensory robotics and artificial intelligence, they are much more developed than us,' says Gomes, who in a previous role for the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce tried to lure Chinese investments into sectors including AI and electric vehicles. In recent months, organisations such as these have ridden the crest of a wave, as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez raced to establish himself as Europe's 'anti-Trump'. As some European leaders dally over climate commitments, Sanchez has doubled down on the green energy and push for cleantech that helped Spain become the EU's fastest-growing economy last year. Advertisement Amid a widespread backlash against immigration, the Spanish government has made clear that it needs new arrivals to power growth and enrich its society. And with President Donald Trump doing much to burn the transatlantic relationship, Sanchez has wasted little time in pivoting to China as an alternative, publicly pushing for a new EU approach.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
FC Barcelona's 17-year-old star Lamine Yamal credits grandmother for his success
Lamine Yamal, Barcelona and Spain's 17-year-old football sensation, was about to sign a new contract with his club when he realised his grandmother wasn't there and said they couldn't go ahead if she wasn't in the photo along with his agent, the FC Barcelona president and the rest of his family. Lamine Yamal, who has won hearts and minds not just with his talent on the pitch but for his humility, credits Fatima, his paternal grandmother, with keeping his feet on the ground after his parents separated when he was three years old. The contract, which will keep Lamine Yamal at Barcelona until 2031, when he will still be only 24, is in fact a pre-contract as the player is still a minor. He will officially sign when he turns 18 in July, with Fatima in attendance. The contract has a buyout clause of €1bn (£840m) Fatima left Morocco in 1990 and arrived in Barcelona accompanied by her five children, among them Lamine Yamal's father Mounir Nasraoui. She played a key role in Lamine Yamal's upbringing after his mother, Sheila Ebana, from Equatorial Guinea, and Nasraoui separated. When Lamine Yamal offered to buy Fatima a house she refused, saying she preferred to stay where she was in Rocafonda, the working-class neighbourhood in Mataró, a coastal town north of Barcelona. True to his origins, Lamine Yamal celebrates his goals with his hands forming the numbers 304, the Rocafonda postal code. Already rated by many pundits as the best player in the world, Lamine signed for Barcelona in 2014 when he was six years old and was raised in La Masia, the club's famous school-cum-football academy. He made his first-team debut in 2023. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion At the Uefa European Championship last year he became the youngest player to appear in the competition, scoring the goal of the tournament against France in the semi-finals. During the competition, which was held in Germany, Spain's use of their young star was constrained by local labour laws that forbid anyone under 18 to work after 8pm. Last year Lamine Yamal became the youngest player to be nominated for the coveted Ballon d'Or, winning the Kopa Trophy for best young player. At 16 he broke the record held by Barcelona teammate Gavi as Spain's youngest goalscorer.
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Fearless Lamine Yamal leaves his mark to give Barcelona hope for the future
On the afternoon before the most extraordinary Champions League semi-final anyone could remember, Lamine Yamal said he had left fear behind in the park in Mataró years ago. Everything else he left behind at Montjuïc and San Siro, a statement stronger than any he had delivered in the press room. If that line was a promise, a demonstration of personality, it was kept, but Barcelona couldn't reach their first final in a decade so he made another. 'We won't stop until this club is where it deserves to be: at the summit,' he wrote in the dark moments after defeat. Here Barcelona had been stopped within touching distance. Lamine Yamal departed the pitch in silence holding Marcus Thuram's shirt, Inter's players coming to embrace this boy they had survived, a child born every 50 years in the words of their manager, Simone Inzaghi. There has been something revelatory about the 17-year-old's performance over two astonishing nights and at the end of it all there was almost a kind of reverence, a respect towards him. Inter had reached the final again and will talk of this forever, their everything; one day, they knew, he may be part of the epic stories they tell. The big night, the pressure, had not beaten him, but Inter had, the weight released, the place rightly going wild. Before the second leg, Dani Olmo claimed that Barcelona's younger players treated being in the semi-final like a party, as if unaware of the transcendence of it all, treating it as if it didn't matter. 'The older players are here to tell them,' he said. The result, the hurt, would have showed them. Perhaps a result such as this will introduce fear and maybe there are even moments when that's not a bad thing: Carlo Ancelotti talks about the value of having pessimistic defenders, prepared not for the best but the worst. Lamine Yamal had played without fear, as he promised, although now there was a lost look. Gerard Martín embraced him, sobbing. It is not just about him, although he expressed it so well; there's a broader context, an identity. Barcelona held their nerve and held their line, even if inside somewhere a part of them might have been desperate not to. Life has been good lived on the edge, and it is worth adding that their approach is the product of analysis too, not some wild act of irresponsibility. Here, though, they were defeated. They had gone a goal down inside 30 seconds and two down within 20 minutes of the first leg, and played. They went 3-2 down, and they played. They went two down in the second leg, and they played. And how they had played. That was what put them back in this. Lamine Yamal embodied that attitude. He scored that goal, hit the woodwork twice in the first leg. At the end of that match he was annoyed that they had not won, barely smiling when handed a shirt to commemorate his 100th game for the club, but he had a chance to do it again, so he did. View image in fullscreen Lamine Yamal departed the pitch in silence with Marcus Thuram's shirt. Photograph: Spada/LaPresse/REX/Shutterstock San Siro. So? Two down again. And? He was not alone, make no mistake: Pedri and Frenkie de Jong especially stood out, the former described by Toni Kroos this week as the best in the world. For a while, the two full-backs, neither of whom was supposed to be a starter, were unstoppable. But they looked to Lamine Yamal, everyone did. Inter's supporters whistled him, and he didn't care. They double-teamed him, triple-teamed him, pushed and kicked, and he kept going at them. Yann Sommer made two extraordinary saves from him. The fear was still back in Mataró. When he got the ball on the edge of the area with Barcelona leading as the third minute of stoppage time began after the regulation 90, he didn't head to the corner, didn't run down the clock, didn't wonder what could go wrong; didn't draw the foul, draw the sting, those last few seconds between them and the final. Instead, he fired off a shot. Again, it hit the post. You know what comes next. Forty-two seconds later, Inter scored. Maybe it is the enthusiasm, the unconsciousness of youth, of talent. Maybe there is a lesson there. View image in fullscreen Barcelona were within touching distance of the Champions League final. Photograph: Daniele Mascolo/Reuters But what if it's the wrong one? What if it is not a lesson to learn? What if what you 'fix' is worth less than what you lose in doing so? Michael Robinson used to say that if you stop the tape on any goal, go back far enough, you will always find a mistake, something that seemed to change everything; something that diminishes the achievement, that serves to find someone to blame, to decontextualise. Over these two legs there were errors from Barcelona, plenty of them. There were mistakes, bad ones. But an analysis, an identification of errors, need not be a reproach, at least not of an entire identity. skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Football Daily Free daily newsletter Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football Enter your email address Sign up Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy . We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion There is also a 7-6, for goodness sake, a tie that was this close. Results condition everything, change every analysis, but can turn on a moment, and Lamine Yamal even had another chance on 95:45. Every detail is magnified, including the refereeing ones about which Barcelona complained. Pedri said Uefa should look at Szymon Marciniak. Ronald Araújo insisted there was a foul on Martín on the equaliser. Eric García said: 'For A or for B, something always happens here.' Hansi Flick claimed every 50-50 had gone Inter's way. And yet at the end of his press conference he stopped himself and said he didn't like to talk so much about the official and wanted to look elsewhere. Thing is, it hurt. 'I am disappointed,' he said, 'but not with my players.' 'Football has been cruel to us,' García said. They have been good to football. 'We go with our heads held high,' Martínez said. 'My father would have been proud,' Jordi Cruyff said. That word pride kept coming up post-game. Which it would of course and there is an element of self-protection in that, some consolation sought when there is none, but that is not all. Barcelona had reached a semi-final for the first time in six years. They have won the Copa del Rey. They are top of the league. They have scored more than 160 goals. This is a young team, a transitional season, they said. There wasn't much hope of the winning anything, let alone like this. And in the 93rd minute of the semi-final, a treble was still there, still in their hands. Perhaps it still should be, regrets to face, but few truly expected them to get here at all, let alone have so much fun doing so. And plenty now expect them to be back. 'I will fulfil my promise and bring the Champions League to Barcelona,' Lamine Yamal vowed, and if the last week has shown anything, and it has shown everything, it's that he's as good as his word.
