Spanish football phenom Lamine Yamal, at just 16 years old, became the youngest player ever to score a goal during the European Championships last Tuesday, after curling a 25-yard strike around the goalkeeper in the semifinal game against France.

But Yamal was a soccer prodigy long before he announced his arrival on the Euro 2024 stage.

The teenager, who turned 17 on Saturday — the day before Spain defeated England in the Euro 2024 final — plays club football for La Liga’s FC Barcelona. He is seen as one of the best players to ever come out of Barcelona’s youth program, the same program that developed football legend Lionel Messi.

As is often the case with young soccer stars, other clubs are also interested in Yamal.

Clubs across Europe frequently look to poach promising young players by offering large sums of money — even to players who are currently under contract with their clubs. By paying what is referred to as a release clause, a new team can buy out a player’s contract, transfer the player to its club and then negotiate a new deal with them.

The money that the acquiring team spends to “release” the player from their contract goes to the player’s old team as payment.

The highest release-clause price ever paid for a soccer player’s transfer was in 2017, when French club Paris Saint-Germain triggered Brazilian footballer Neymar’s release clause in his Barcelona contract for $262 million.

When clubs negotiate contracts with players, the team inserts an official release clause into the contract. In rare instances, a team sets a player’s release clause so high that it’s basically a message to other teams that the player is unavailable in transfer talks. Barcelona has at times put gigantic release clauses into contracts for young stars, including Ferran Torres, Pedri and Gavi.

Yamal’s release clause is set at about $1.08 billion, Barcelona said during Yamal’s last contract announcement.

Would a rival club actually consider paying over a billion dollars for Yamal’s services, given how successful he’s been so far?

“I don’t think so,” Victor Matheson, a sports and economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., told MarketWatch. “You just never know — that kid is one serious injury away from not playing again. There’s always a limit to what you’re willing to pay.”

Matheson added: “He could be the next Messi, who was spectacular at 17, or Pele, who made his debut in the World Cup at 17 years old, or he could also be Freddy Adu.”

Adu was touted as the next big soccer star, becoming the youngest-ever professional athlete in major U.S. sports at 14 years old, but he never reached the highest levels of the sport.

For a team to pay such an outrageously high fee to get Yamal to switch clubs, the acquiring team would need to believe that they could make that money back in revenue by having him on the squad in the coming years, something that isn’t likely to happen, according to Matheson.

Another reason a team may not want to spend such big money on Yamal — or on any single player — is that UEFA, the governing body of European soccer, has financial regulations that don’t allow teams to spend more money than they make in revenue, among other rules.

Clubs in Saudi Arabia, which have recently been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at high-profile soccer players, could make an offer for Yamal because they are not governed by UEFA, but such a move seems unlikely, as that country has mostly targeted more established names for transfers. Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo is earning an estimated $213 million this year from Al Nassr, while Frenchman Karim Benzema of Real Madrid fame is reportedly collecting a total of $214 million through his two-year contract with ​​Al-Ittihad.

Yamal’s official release-clause price of $1.08 billion must be accepted by Barcelona if a rival team wants to trigger it. Barcelona could also negotiate a lower transfer fee for Yamal with a rival team, but there doesn’t appear to be an eagerness to do that.

Only time will tell if a rival club would ever entertain a billion-dollar payout for Yamal, but the huge offers are still coming in.

Barcelona president Joan Laporta said that his club has turned down multiple offers over $200 million for Yamal, according to Forbes.

“We trust in the boy, in his sporting projection, and we don’t have the need [to accept those offers],” Laporta said. “On the contrary, we are in a process of economic recovery and can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Barcelona is happy either way, Matheson said. “Either you’ve got this potentially spectacular player moving forward through his career at Barcelona, or you have a pretty valuable chip to trade.”

Shortly after his semifinal performance that won him the “man of the match” title against France, Yamal was happy about his goal, but he knows there’s still work to be done.

“We are very happy to reach the final. Now comes the most important part — winning the title,” Yamal said.