Teenager was a revelation across an incredible semi-final tie and Spanish side have much to be proud of in defeat

On the afternoon before the first leg of the 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 for ever, their everything; one day, they knew, he may be part of the epic stories they tell.

Now the subject of a documentary, the former striker opens up on his strict upbringing in Argentina, the heart troubles that ended his career and that Manchester City goal

During a visit to Madrid in 2007, Anatoliy Byshovets, the then head coach of Lokomotiv Moscow, said watching Sergio Agüero was like visiting the Prado. Pep Guardiola said he was a legend. Jorge Valdano said he could invent anything, anywhere, a unique footballer who had lost all fear, although he was wrong on that. Lionel Messi said he did the impossible. Diego Maradona said Agüero reminded him of himself, phoning one day to apologise for not playing him more. “I was a dickhead,” Maradona said.

Sometimes it can feel like the one person who never said Agüero was good was the one person he really wanted to. When the former Manchester City striker announced he was retiring at the age of 33, forced to stop by a heart problem, all the stress accumulated beneath the surface since his debut at 15, his dad called and said he had never seen a better footballer. He had played 786 games and scored 427 goals by then. “You waited until I retired to tell me that?!” Agüero replied. “I was happy and sad at the same time,” he says. “At last, he said something good.”

From flop in Manchester to prince of Seville, flying winger is rivalling his new best friend for title of La Liga’s finest payer

Antony Matheus dos Santos has played football with some bad men. Raised in Inferninho (Little Hell), a favela outside São Paulo, the way the Real Betis winger tells it, he grew up without shoes to play in or a bed of his own to sleep in, surrounded by drugs and guns. Some days he wouldn’t eat and one day, when he was six or seven, he had to jump over a dead body to get to school. Life was just the way it was, even on the rough concrete courts where his bleeding feet moved faster than the rest. “I played against traffickers and all sorts,” he said. “If you ask if I was scared, of course I was. But I always had a strong personality and the harder it was, the more I wanted to be there.”

So when someone threatened to kidnap him a week ago, Antony just laughed – and so did everyone else. This wasn’t São Paulo, this was Seville. And, like a lot of what is said there, it was just a joke, even if there were true words said in jest, born of fondness and admiration, a kind of desperation too, a disbelief that he is here with them and a determination to keep it that way. There was no anonymous letter this time, no ransom note cut from newspaper letters; instead, there was a message on Isco’s Instagram. “Antonio of Triana,” it read, “we’re going to kidnap you: this is your first warning.” A few days later, the second came. “If I have to provide the car to kidnap him, I will,” said former Betis player Joaquín. “However it happens, he has to stay.”