One word. One emoji. One black-and-white photo. Lamine Yamal’s Instagram story this week looked like a riddle, and that was the point.

The image showed him alongside Pedri and Eric García, with no explanation beyond the caption “Mamba” and a snake. Fans quickly worked out what the Barcelona teenager was hinting at: Pedri wears the number 8 at Barcelona, Eric García wears the number 24, and those were the two shirts Kobe Bryant pulled on through his career with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Bryant wore 8 from 1996 to 2006 and then switched to 24, which he wore until his retirement in 2016. The Lakers have retired both.

@dahood.original and an AI tribute

The photo was first shared by @dahood.original, the agency that handles Yamal’s image. Alongside the Barcelona picture, the agency posted an AI-generated illustration showing the two phases of Bryant’s Lakers career, the number 8 version and the number 24 version, embracing on a basketball court.

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Yamal then carried the material onto his own Instagram story, and the puzzle took off from there.

The Barcelona kit that already carried Kobe’s logo

The tribute lands on top of one that is already on the pitch. Barcelona’s 2025/26 away shirt is an official Nike homage to Bryant, released on 29 July 2025: a gold and purple palette lifted straight from the Lakers, a snakeskin texture carried across the shirt and the club crest, and Nike’s swoosh replaced with the Kobe “Sheath” logo from Bryant’s brand.

It made Barcelona the first football club to wear Bryant’s brand mark in place of the swoosh on official matchwear. Pedri wears that shirt with number 8 on the back. Eric García wears it with number 24. Yamal’s post simply lined them up together and let the numbers do the work.

An Adidas player wearing a Nike-made Kobe shirt

The irony is sitting in Yamal’s boots. He is an Adidas athlete, having chosen the German brand over Nike as a teenager in 2024, a decision that is still being chewed over in Oregon. Economist Xavier Sala i Martín told Catalan radio station RAC1 that a senior Nike executive had privately described losing Yamal to Adidas as the company’s biggest mistake in decades. The executive was not named and no direct quote has been published.

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Yamal has previously said he picked Adidas because he could see a path to becoming the face of the brand, while Nike’s football marketing was already built around Kylian Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior.

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