'I never think about defeat...'

Newly released footage from the Spanish national team, captured in the build-up to the World Cup final against Argentina, shows the Barcelona winger radiating the kind of certainty most players spend a whole career chasing.

“We are going to Spain as world champions,” he says — delivered not as a hope, but as a fact already settled in his mind.

That serenity, relayed by Mundo Deportivo and carried by Barça Universal, has quickly become the defining image of Spain's triumph for Culers.

La Roja lifted the trophy with a heavy Blaugrana accent: as many as eight Barcelona players featured in the World Cup-winning squad, among them Dani Olmo, Pau Cubarsí, Ferran Torres and Pedri, and a Barça man scored the decisive goal in the final.

For a club preparing for its first full season back at the Spotify Camp Nou, it is the perfect prelude to the campaign ahead.

Lamine Yamal's ice-cold mentality

What stands out in the visuals is not bravado but composure.

“I'm not nervous. I think we are still not aware that we are going to play a World Cup final,” Yamal admitted, treating the occasion with the ease of a training-ground kickabout.

Pushed on the possibility of losing to Lionel Messi's Argentina, his answer left no room for doubt.

“I never think about defeat. In my mind, it doesn't enter my mind to lose. All I imagine is raising the cup.”

For a teenager who only recently returned from injury, it was a remarkable display of self-belief — and it was matched on the pitch, where he was central to Spain's sharpest attacking moves throughout the tournament.

He may not have produced his most eye-catching individual football, but few players carried more responsibility, and fewer still handled it so lightly.

A World Champion returns to Flick

The reward for that mentality is a summer few teenagers could dream of.

Yamal is now a world champion, adding the game's biggest prize to the back-to-back LaLiga titles he has already won with Barcelona.

It is a haul that would flatter a seasoned veteran, let alone a player still in his teens, and it underlines why La Masia's latest gem is talked about in such rarefied company.

Attention now turns to his return.

Yamal is expected back in training next week, with Spain's Barcelona contingent due to link up in Catalonia on August 12 before reporting to Hansi Flick.

It caps a whirlwind stretch for the No 10, who has gone from an injury scare to the top of the world in a matter of weeks.

None of it, encouragingly, appears to have gone to his head.

The same words that carried him through a final — no nerves, no fear, only the trophy — are exactly the ones Flick will hope can power a LaLiga title defence and a renewed Champions League push.

Barcelona have long known what they have in Lamine Yamal. Now the rest of the football world does too, and the most thrilling part is that, at his age, this may only be the beginning.