Mounir Nasraoui, father of Barcelona and Spanish national team striker Lamine Yamal, is recovering well at the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital in Badalona, Can Ruti, from the injuries he suffered of varying severity after being stabbed on Wednesday night in a car park in Mataró (Barcelona). After being advised by the Blaugrana club not to visit his father on the same day of the attack to avoid too much media attention, Lamine Yamal was with his father yesterday after training with Hansi Flick’s team. The Mossos d’Esquadra reported the existence of a fourth person arrested for his alleged participation in the attack.
After collecting images and testimonies from neighbours in the area, Catalan police had already confirmed on Wednesday the arrest of three people for attempted murder just two hours after the events. According to sources from the investigation, the stabbing was the result of a previous argument that had taken place on Wednesday afternoon. When Nasraoui was sprayed with water from a balcony while he was walking his dog. It was then that an argument broke out between those people and the father of the Barça striker, which ended with minor injuries after the intervention of the local police of Mataró. Hours later, at 9.10 pm, the people who had accosted Nasraoui went to the car park where he was and stabbed him three times.
“Mounir is stable, out of danger. But he remains under observation,” explained sources close to the Barça player. Nasraoui, according to the same sources, remains in the intensive care unit “more for privacy reasons than medical reasons.” At midday he wanted to make public the progress in his health: “Thank you all for your encouragement, I am better now, a big hug for everyone,” the father of the La Roja footballer reported on his Instagram account. The message, to which he added two icons (the arm of strength and a heart), was accompanied by the song by the rapper Morad. “Now they come to me as ‘fool’, and they want to stain my name (no). And they don’t know where to catch me (no), and they don’t know where to hit me (no). I have seen the death of people from the neighborhood, that nobody remembers it (no),” are the lyrics of the fragment of the song that Mounir published on social networks.
It is not surprising that Nasraoui used Instagram to communicate his progress. The Barça player’s father is usually active on social media, especially to show off his son, a promising Spanish footballer, a record player after beating Pelé’s record for precocity in a major competition: at 17 years and one day old he became the youngest player to win a European Championship. In Germany, Mounir did not want to miss any of his son’s matches. On all of his trips to Spain, Nasraoui was there, always dressed in the colours of La Roja.
Mounir Nasraoui was one of the pillars in the development of Lamine Yamal’s career when his football was beginning to take off in Barcelona’s youth system. “When other parents arrived by car an hour before the match, I had to get up three, four and sometimes even five hours before to take my child,” he recalls. There was a time when the management of the Barcelona youth system decided that the best option for Lamine Yamal was to settle in La Masia. Mounir Nasraoui used to change jobs, some more regular than others, while the player’s mother, Sheila Ebana, had moved to Granollers with her new partner. “He had to be protected from everything,” explained, at the time, a source from Barcelona’s youth system. “It was a way of controlling his studies, his diet, his hours of rest,” explained Jordi Roura, former coordinator of Barcelona’s youth system.
“I did everything possible to support my son and my wife,” Mounir often recalls when asked about his past. Nasraoui found financial security when his son signed with Portuguese agent Jorge Mendes. The money did not prevent him from having problems with the law. Last year, he was sentenced to pay a fine of 546 euros for minor offences of abuse and damage. According to the sentence, he attacked a Vox tent in Mataró during the last election campaign,
Nasraoui, despite everything, never wanted to leave Mataró. His son, in a way, didn’t either. Lamine Yamal: he celebrates his goals by making the 304 with his hands, the last three digits of his postcode (08304).
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