"The player who has passed through La Masia has something different to the rest, it's a plus that only comes from having competed in a Barcelona shirt from the time you were a child."
– Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola
La Masia, located next to the Camp Nou, is the heart of the Barcelona youth system. This residential training facility is used to develop the young players that have had to leave their families in order to train at FC Barcelona both in a sporting and intellectual sense.
La Masia is not just a youth training academy that we find here in the UK. It is a philosophy, a belief, and a way of thinking for the whole club.
Barcelona believe football should be dedicated to free-flowing attacking play - the kind of 'Total Football' that Cruyff and his Dutch colleagues produced in the 1970s to worldwide acclaim. This philosophy became a fixture when Cruyff returned to Catalonia in the 1980’s as manager and now, thanks to Cruyff's continued involvement in the club, is deeply entrenched.
Arguably their two most influential players; Xavi and Iniesta have been at Barcelona since they were 11 and 12 respectively and that message has been drummed into them since the day they arrived. It is a message based around ball retention, superior technique, lightning-quick passing and the ability to utilise wide open spaces on the pitch.
It is a coaching system that has helped produce what many La Liga experts are calling the greatest Spanish team since the Real Madrid of the 1950s, and it is not by chance that this has come about.
"It's just different at Barca. The kids are taught from such a young age about how the ball should move, how to protect the ball at all times, how to never give it away. "At Barcelona the physical aspect has never been the most important thing, the emphasis is always on technique - that's why every footballer wants to play for this team”
– YAYA TOURE
Barcelona’s recent and continued success is a product of this philosophy to pass teams into submission without ever even contemplating falling back on a Plan B - take the Champions League semi-finals, for instance. Over two legs against Chelsea, Barcelona attempted a mind-blowing 1,359 passes, with 82.1% of them finding their intended target. Their opponents, in the same 180 minutes, attempted 687 passes, with a success rate of 59.5%.
Former technical director, Pep Segura, attributes the club's success to its "philosophy of play": "It is about creating one philosophy, one mentality, from the bottom of the club to the top". The philosophy consists of the application of total football mixed with traditional Spanish one-touch play (tiqui-taka).
In 2010, la Masia achieved a record breaking honor becoming the first youth academy to have all three finalists for the Ballon d'Or in one same year, with Andres Iniesta, Lionel Messi and Xavi Hernandez
On 11 July 2010, Spain won the World Cup final with eight players from Barcelona; seven were from La Masia, and six of them were in the starting line-up: Gerard Piqué, Carlos Puyol, Andrés Iniesta, Xavi Hernández, Sergio Busquets and Pedro Rodríguez. This set a record for the most players to be provided by a club side for a team in a World Cup final. A recent report suggested that Spain's World Cup success was possibly due to La Masia??
Compare this with our National team where the majority of players come from the traditional big four teams (Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool). This season 70% of La Liga players are eligible to play for Spain, where as in the Premier League only 45% of players are eligible to play for England. This stat would suggest that having the best domestic football league in the world, is at the detriment to the National Team.
In this country can we ever replicate the La Masia model? As a demanding nation, and in a world of foreign club owners becoming increasingly involved in the game looking to buy quick success, do we have, or are we allowed the patience to build a club philosophy?
....Or are we, as a nation, doomed to be a product of our own Premier League environment???
