Not so long ago, Barca were winning title after title while regularly fielding entire teams consisting of homegrown products, basking in the glory of a group of superstars such as Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi ably complemented by a valuable backbone of players like Victor Valdes, Carles Puyol, Sergio Busquets, Cesc Fabregas and Pedro.
Barca’s ability to churn out brilliant youngsters dripping with the club’s DNA was the envy of the world, with jealous clubs from the Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A and far beyond routinely sending their youth development staff on spying missions with the task of discovering just how they did it.
More recently, however, a series of setbacks have seen much of that lustre lost, and La Masia’s status as the undoubted industry leader come under heavy questioning.
Most seriously, the club was hit by a transfer ban from FIFA after being found guilty of breaking regulations on the signing of junior players from overseas. Were Barca, the question was whispered, only so good at bringing through youngsters because they had been cheating?
At the same time, the production line started to dry up. Whereas once Camp Nou coaches had been able to replace outgoing players by calling upon the latest recruits from their academy, now they were forced into splurging vast sums on exports such as Neymar, Luis Suarez and Ousmane Dembele.
Ousmane Dembele.
Even worse, many of the most promising prospects to emerge through the system decided they didn’t want to play for Barca after all, with Eric Garcia (to Manchester City), Jordi Mboula (to Monaco) and Xavi Simons (to Paris St Germain) among those to quit the club for pastures new when they were on the verge of challenging for first team football.
Perhaps, however, the main problem wasn’t that La Masia’s standards had dropped; maybe instead Barca were simply a victim of their own success.
Bringing through players like Messi, Iniesta and Xavi at more or less the same time is a freakish, once-in-a-lifetime achievement, which can never be replicated and set unrealistically high expectations. Similarly, the quality of that batch of players – and the long list of trophies they secured – meant that the club’s standards had been raised up a notch or five, making it much, much harder for young players to break into the first team than it ever had been before.
La Masia’s standards, it could be argued, had not slipped to below par. They had merely reverted to the norm, dropping from a fantastically high level to a more reasonable rate of production.
Riqui Puig.
Just looking around La Liga’s squad lists, which are peppered with players who came through La Masia, makes it clear that Barca hadn’t stopped producing top-quality professionals. From Marc Cucurella (Getafe) and Munir El Haddadi (Sevilla) to Xavi Quintilla (Villarreal) and Rodrigo Tarin (Leganes), the club’s youth graduates are scattered liberally across the country, and it’s very rare indeed to watch any La Liga game that doesn’t feature at least one former Barca trainee.
And now, in a startling reassertion of its powers, La Masia appears to have struck genuine 24-carat gold with the emergence of the man (or boy) of the moment: Ansu Fati.
The freakishly gifted 16 year-old winger isn’t alone. Many Barca fans, for example, are desperate to see more playing time for another starlet, Riqui Puig, whose ability to control the midfield is uncannily similar to the skillset previously displayed by Xavi.
Then there’s Carles Perez, who has burst onto the scene this season to serve as a more than capable deputy for Lionel Messi, and looks likely to become a very valuable member of the squad for years to come – as does Carles Alenya, despite falling out of favour in recent weeks.
So we should probably conclude that reports of La Masia’s demise were grossly exaggerated…and if Fati continues like he has started, Barca’s status as the world’s greatest producer of youth talent will surely be regained.
