Lamine: Use Your Brain, Grab a Pen and Write an Opinion

Dear Lamine,

You are eighteen, you have just won La Liga, you have tens of millions of followers, and you have celebrated however you saw fit. I believe you have every right. Congratulations! We have also watched the world quarrel about you these last hours, and the quarrel itself is what nobody is helping you understand. Before some defend you and others accuse you, allow me to urge you toward something that could solidify your image beyond the athletic realm, something that will take you to another level as a person and as a thinking human being.

Very well. You raised a flag on that open-top bus. Somebody handed it to you in the middle of the parade, in the most euphoric afternoon of your young life. You smiled, you held it up against the wind, and the cameras caught everything. The video crossed continents before the buses had reached the stadium. Within a day, Israel’s Defense Minister had named you personally and accused you of inciting hatred. The press divided into the two armies it always divides into, and you, the boy with the magical feet, became a matter of State before the champagne had dried.

That is the price one pays for being so famous. Everything you say and everything you do will generate a reaction proportional to the magnitude of your fame. Now then, did you know what you were really doing? I ask because you are almost an adult and you are world-famous. Loved by many, hated by others, but surely respected by all for your football, for your game, and for the success you have managed to achieve in so few years.

But, given that you are barely eighteen, have not yet been to university, and no one holds that against you at your age, do you really believe you have the knowledge and the intellectual capacity to step into those political controversies simply by waving a flag that represents so much to so many people in the middle of a celebration, and to come out unscathed at your young age?

The excuse that you are only a teenager and that you do not understand what you are doing is no longer valid at this point. If Israel’s Defense Minister condemned your action, it is because he believes you had the age to understand perfectly what you were doing, but it is fair to ask you: what is it that you know or understand about the conflict in the Middle East that has the world so polarized? Have you studied the subject in depth? If you have not, with what aim did you do what you did? To gain followers? To incite hatred toward the Jews? Or did you simply let yourself be carried away by social media propaganda? I ask because at your age I understood nothing about a conflict that has existed for so many decades.

A few years ago you were probably still carrying a lunchbox to school. Regardless of the position a person may hold on the matter, it is not an easy subject to understand. One must be self-taught and study a great deal about it.

The thing is, the world is used to seeing footballers as people who entertain us with their game, but not as people who can politically influence the public, especially because among the conglomerate of fans of footballers there will be some who hold one political stance and others who hold a radically opposite one.

But, obviously, every athlete has the right to hold his own political position and also to express it. What you must understand is that the voice of a football star can have a reach and an impact that is difficult to measure. Could you be one of the first in this regard? Of course! Why not? But not in that way. Not in the way where you are only using your fame and current success as a footballer, without using the most specialized cortical functions of your brain.

Anyone can wave a Palestinian or an Israeli flag. You just have to take it in your hands and shake it. In a case like yours, it is only cheap populism. You cannot stop there. You have to go further. We want to know what Lamine Yamal really thinks about the conflict in the Middle East. We want to know what analysis you make of such a complex situation, and what solutions you offer. But for that you must first study, read widely, inform yourself.

You do not need to enroll in a geopolitics course. You have the capacity to soak yourself in information, form your own position, and then express it in the best way.

Do you want to influence your fans or future generations with your opinion on the subject, using your fame as a footballer as leverage? That seems fine to me, but allow me to give you another piece of advice. Do it in writing, and not spoken or in an interview. Why? Because in writing you have more control over what you express. You do not get nervous before a tricky question, you do not let yourself be carried away by emotions, and you can review and, if necessary, edit what you wrote in your first drafts. You can give precise data, you can argue better, you can articulate your ideas more clearly, and above all, you can leave a legacy.

One day your career and your fame can come to an end, whether through the passing of years or through an injury at an early age that takes you away from your current level or even from the football pitch altogether (you would not be the first nor the last), but your ideas would remain in time.

For example, Albert Camus was a French Algerian writer, born in 1913 to a poor family in French Algeria and raised by an illiterate mother, who in his youth played goalkeeper for the junior team of Racing Universitaire d’Alger between 1928 and 1930, a university club where he nurtured the ambition of reaching professional football until tuberculosis pulled him from the pitch at the age of seventeen.

After leaving sport, he devoted himself to writing and philosophical thought, published novels such as The Stranger and The Plague, essays such as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at the age of forty-four, becoming one of the youngest authors ever to receive it. He died at the age of forty-six in a car accident, with the manuscript of his last novel, The First Man, in the trunk of the car. Today, nearly seven decades after his death, his books continue to be read, translated, and studied throughout the world.

If Camus had not fallen ill with tuberculosis, perhaps he would have become a very famous professional footballer in his day, but fate had something even better in store for him: to be remembered as a great writer and philosopher.

And with all due respect, Lamine, winning a Nobel Prize in Literature has more long-term impact than winning a Ballon d’Or, a trophy you will most surely claim sooner rather than later. The great achievements and inventions of humanity were already happening long before football was invented. And the best part, Lamine, is that if you set your mind to it, you can go very far.

Allow me to tell you a small story, not because my life is interesting, but because it might illuminate a little of yours. I began writing scientific opinion pieces at the age of forty. Not before. I am a Honduran ophthalmologist practicing in my own country, but I had no training in research, no degree in journalism, no contact whatsoever in the publishing world.

The pandemic arrived. We were working voluntarily with other physicians, some more experienced researchers and others novice researchers as I was at the time, trying to better understand COVID-19, a virus that brought the world to its knees for a couple of years. I had something to say about that work, and I decided to write about it. A national magazine published the article in December of 2020.

The following month, on my very first attempt to publish in an international scientific journal, I submitted a manuscript to The Lancet, considered one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. Less than 5% of manuscripts submitted to The Lancet are ultimately published, and I was a complete unknown. To my own astonishment, I succeeded on my first attempt. Subsequently, I published other articles on the pandemic in high-impact scientific journals.

From there, a year and a half ago, I decided to step into geopolitics. I sent a piece to The Times of Israel without knowing what to expect, and they accepted it. More than eighty articles later, seven of them the most-read on a site where serious figures of the Jewish intellectual world publish, I am still writing.

Less than a year ago I began writing articles on the ethics of artificial intelligence. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist by profession and a former consultant to the US Intelligence Community, read one of my texts on the subject and suggested I attempt a book on it. I did not just write one. I wrote and published two.

I tell you all this not to boast but to suggest the opposite. It means that if I could do it, you too will one day be able to do it, if you decide to step into the world of geopolitics, and especially into a topic as polarizing as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And here is where I want to invite you to something nobody has invited you to yet. Study, investigate, and then write. Not because you must take a position on the Middle East, but because writing is the slow discipline that turns a famous boy into a man who thinks, into someone with deep opinions.

I and other readers will not always agree with you, but that is what happens with written opinions: not everyone will ever agree with you. Joan Didion, an American writer of the previous century, once said: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

You do not have your real opinion on anything until you have written it down and read it back to yourself cold. Speaking is easy, because the voice escapes the mouth carried by emotion, by the noise of a crowd, by the adrenaline of victory, and once spoken it cannot be taken back.

Writing, on the other hand, is harder, because the blank page does not forgive vagueness. It forces you to know whether you actually understand something or only think you do.

But if you do decide to write, you must understand what writing demands of the writer. To publish an opinion on a serious subject is to claim that you have earned the right to be read on it, and that right is not bought with fame. It is earned with study. With history. With philosophy. With politics. With the slow accumulation of knowledge that turns a reaction into an argument.

Anyone can wave a flag in front of a camera. Very few can defend, in writing, what that flag means and why they hold it. The first act demands nothing of the mind. The second distinguishes a thinker from a provocateur. And writing good opinions, especially on subjects like this one, is also a gift that God gives, but like every divine gift, it requires preparation and training beforehand. Not training of the body, like yours, but of the mind.

You will be remembered, Lamine, as one of the great footballers of your generation, as long as injuries respect you, but if you want some part of you to remain after you hang up the cleats, you will have to do what Camus did. You will have to write.

You chose, on that bus, to take a public position on the most complex conflict on earth. Very well. Then take it seriously. Stop being a teenager who provokes simply because he is famous. Study the history before you take a side in it. Read both sides, slowly, until the opinion is yours and not that of the algorithm that teaches you what to see and what not to see on your social networks. Then write what you think, with arguments and with care, and publish it in whatever language you choose.

Tell us, in your own words and not with a borrowed gesture, what that flag means to you and why you raised it. Show us that the flag you waved was waved by a man who thought, not by an icon who posed. Until then, what the world saw was not a position. It was a pose.

You are eighteen, Lamine. You are not a father, you are not a politician, you are not yet responsible for anyone but yourself. You have, by my count, all the time in the world. Use it. Cultivate the brain inside your head with the same patience with which you cultivated the feet beneath it.

If you do, you will not just be a footballer the world admired for many years. You will be a voice that survives those years, that travels into rooms where football never reaches, that lives quietly in libraries long after the stadiums have been rebuilt and renamed.

But if one day you decide not to study anymore, not to learn about the world, not to cultivate your mind, not to write and leave your thoughts and opinions in writing, then do not enter swampy lands from which you will not be able to escape.

Your image will be that of a young talented but immature footballer, and it would have been better for you to simply be the footballer you are. There is no sin in that. But if you are going to express yourself on controversial topics, contribute at least something of interest to the debate.

And consider the children who watch you. Most will never possess the talent that God placed in your feet. That gift is yours alone. But writing is a discipline any of them can cultivate. If you read seriously, they may read. If you study before you opine, they may learn to do the same. The example you set off the pitch could shape more young minds than the example you set on it.

Somebody passed you a flag on a bus, and you waved it without thinking. That is the past. That act will most likely be forgotten, and in the long run it will be understood that it was the product of imprudence and the immaturity of your age. But you are growing up, and you must begin to change the image you project. Do not let your image be used for political ends when you do not understand the first thing about the matter at hand.

Waving a flag does not mean that you understand the problem, nor that you have formed an opinion about it. At eighteen years old, we cannot expect you to be an expert on these matters.

My advice is for you to consider for the future, but you will have to begin today. Otherwise, there are subjects one does not handle well, and it is better not to opine on them. King Solomon said it masterfully three thousand years ago in the book of Proverbs: “Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.”

But the future is still yours to write. So allow an older man to pass you something else.

A pen.

What you do with it is up to you.

Cultivate your mind, be different, become a man who sets the example, use your brain, write and publish your opinions, and you will see how fulfilling it can become. But do it with humility, knowing that everything you have and everything you are is temporary.