The FC Barcelona Youth Academy is located on the training ground of the club, in an industrial area outside the city. The apartment building, made of glass and steel, in which the players live, is surrounded by lavishly landscaped gardens. It looks like the campus of an expensive American college.
In the lobby, a photograph hangs on the wall depicting three La Masia alumni: Lionel Messi with the Golden Ball in hand, the 2010 Footballer of the Year award, flanked by second and third placed Andrés Iniesta and Xavi. Another photo shows Pep Guardiola in his teens, he too a La Masia graduate, as he receives a prize.
Head down the steps past a mural reminiscent of FC Barcelona's 4-0 win at Levante on 25 November 2012. The special feature: On that day, Barça played for a time with eleven players who were trained in La Masia. One was Messi, seven others had won the 2010 World Cup with Spain. The only one who did not embody a world class was Martin Montoya. He now plays in Brighton, England. Even coach Tito Vilanova, who died of cancer in 2014, was a graduate of the Academy.
"Masia" is the Catalan word for farmhouse
The game against Levante was the pinnacle of La Masia history. Never before and never again in football was the influence of a young talent promotion of a club so impressive. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Academy, two questions arise: Why did this academy become so good? And why is not she today?
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The old La Masia building
In 1979, the Barcelona scout Oriol Tort had the idea for a training center where the football talents can also live. This enabled Barcelona to engage young people from outside the metropolitan area. The original residence was a 18th century brick farmhouse next to the Camp Nou stadium; "Masia" is a Catalan word for farmhouse. In 2011, the academy moved to the new building.
It really started with the success, as Johan Cruyff 1988 coach of the first team was. Cruyff came from Ajax, whose youth academy at that time was significantly higher in standing than that of FC Barcelona. The Dutchman believed in using young players in the first team. There is a story that one day he saw a Barça youth game and said, "Take the boy out at half-time." "Why?" The coach asked. "Because I'm getting him into the first team," Cruyff replied.
The boy was Pep Guardiola. He should win in 1992 under Cruyff the Champions League. And years later, when Guardiola himself was Barcelona coach, he also recruited players from La Masia.
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Johan Cruyff
One of the reasons for the success of the Ajax and Barcelona academies was and still is because they are authentic clubs. They are mainly run by people who grew up around the stadium. And they spent half their lives drinking coffee in the club canteen. These men take care of the adolescent footballers who may play in the first team a decade later; they expect to be there themselves to see them as professionals. In many other clubs, decision-makers often only spend a certain amount of time, sometimes a whole life here.
Cruyff was not only a great footballer and coach. He was also a great football thinker. He gave La Masia her philosophy. And his right hand, Paco Seirul-lo, remained and institutionalized her. Seirul-lo was actually handball coach and today is a man in his sixties with a magnificent mane of white hair. Hardly anyone knows him outside the club.
But until today, it is something like Barcelona's USB stick, a walking database of decades of thinking about club thinking. He presides over the new "Metodología" department. "I'm the only one left, everyone else is gone!" He says. "So I have an obligation to shape all the new coaches and equip them with the ideas I've learned from people like Johan Cruyff."
Keep your head up
Cruyff's realization was that the most important thing in football was not passion, size, speed or duels - but the passing game. La Masia became the academy of the pass. The main training method was the "Rondo", an exercise that is basically a "piggy in the middle" game. You can play it with as many players as you want, but mostly it's a five-on-two: Five players stand in a circle and have to adjust the ball, while two in the middle try to conquer it.
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The new La Masia building
For Cruyff, the "Rondo" included everything that is important in football. The defenders learn coordinated pressing as the appropriate players learn to develop their pass lines. And while player one fits player two, "the third man," as Cruyff called him, has to position himself to get the next pass.
To fit well, players need to keep their heads up (Xavi says this was the first thing he learned in La Masia), they need to position their bodies so they have full view of the game. To constantly look around, take in information, act.
A diagonal pass is almost always the best solution, and the eleven La Masia players who defeated Levante in November 2012 knew that. They had spent many mornings of their youth balling in the triangle. Seirul-lo says, "Big players like Messi, Iniesta, Xavi showed us complex dynamic systems that would not teach us a book."
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La Masia graduates Andrés Iniesta, Lionel Messi, Pedro (from left to right)
"Football is a game of interaction"
The club does not waste the time of youth players exercising without a ball. "In our exercises, we look for ways to fit, 98.93 percent of the time," says Seirul-lo. The mindset of the club has always been: if you're good at rondo, you can play for Barcelona. And then the coach does not have to explain much to you. Passing is like communicating, Seirul-lo says: "Football is a game of interaction."
La Masia had a few other cruy-peculiarities that hardly existed until the beginning of the millennium:
- The goal of a youth team is not to win games. But the development of footballers.
- The junior footballers are constantly playing in different positions, often more than two in a match, says Patrick Kluivert, the director of La Masia. This is how the former Dutch national player got to know it at the Academy of Ajax. Although Kluivert was apparently born to be a striker, he also sometimes played in central defense. "Just to learn," he explains. "As an attacker, you're the only player with your back to the opposing goal, but sometimes it helps to see what it's like to have the game in front of you."
- In Cruyff's words: "The attacker is the first defender, the goalie is the first attacker." This means that the attacker must know how to press and the goalkeeper is a footballer with gloves. In a way, Cruyff invented the game of Manuel Neuer thirty years before it appeared. In La Masia, there were not goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and attackers, but only: footballers.
- The mission of La Masia is not to produce good players, but good people.
The last sentence may sound like empty talk, but many people within FC Barcelona sincerely believe it. A visit to La Masia ten years ago, back then in the old farmhouse. It was noticeable that, unlike in other academies, where military rigor prevails, the Barcelona coaches spoke more like Catholic mothers.
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A look inside La Masia
In this family, the sons ate home cooking, they practiced hard, did not bother to tattoos. If a boy had to leave the club, his rival was crying out of guilt to have been better. Even after the boys became stars, they still came home. The former chief scout Pep Boade said then: "Messi and Iniesta come over for dinner, they come to us with their problems, as if we were their mothers and fathers."
The thinnest boy in the picture: Guardiola
During this visit, the La Masia coaches talked about their reluctance to turn young talents into millionaires. They said that they had recently lost interest in a promising young talent from Ajax, Christian Eriksen, because his agent had demanded too much money. The departure of talents to more paying English clubs - it was talked about by Gerard Piqué (Manchester United) and Cesc Fabregas (Arsenal) - was grudgingly accepted.
The then first team was like an extended family. On a whitewashed wall in the farmhouse hung a photograph of the 1988 players: 20 teenagers with long-haired hair. The thinnest boy in the picture, Guardiola, was Barça's coach in 2009.
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Barcelona coach and La Masia graduate Pep Guardiola (3rd from right)
He knew in his coaching the quality of each junior player of the Academy and was already thinking about which could strengthen the first team in three years. His relationship with the academy changed Spanish football. Every coach would have brought Messi into the first team. But Pedro was no genius. Under another coach, says Capellas, the small attacker would have probably had a career in the second Spanish league. He was close to leaving the club and faced a move to underclass club Gavà Mar. Guardiola then gave him a chance.
A year later, Pedro was world champion with Spain, now he plays at Chelsea. Similarly, it began with Sergio Busquets, a slow, clumsy giant Guardiola took to the first team because the coach of the B-team, Luis Enrique, did not want him. Like Cruyff, Guardiola had the vision and the courage to bet on such players.
Hardly any players come to the first team
But the situation has changed, both in La Masia and in Barcelona. The old culture of caring persists even today in the academy. Walking through the atrium and the small library you can see the staff, many of them women talking to the players.
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Barcelona fans defend La Masia
The La Masia Kids - also in other sports such as basketball or handball - are surrounded by teachers, doctors, nutritionists, psychologists. Even the drivers, who bring children to the academy, who live in the surrounding area, are encouraged by the association to pay attention to behavioral changes of the adolescents and to tell them something about nutrition.
But today La Masia hardly brings players to the first team. The only one who has established himself in the first team in the past ten years is Sergi Roberto. And even the 27-year-old is still not a regular player. At the moment, Barcelona's hopes are for Ansu Fati, 17, and occasional goalkeeper Ricky Puig (20) and Carles Pérez (21).
But it's a tough fight in a club that has become accustomed to buying superstars. And who is no longer married to the pass-intensive pressing game that is taught in La Masia. Seirul-lo says, "Pep Guardiola was probably the culmination of our system, and after him we had many coaches and different influences, and we may have forgotten a bit of our original idea of the game."
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Top Talent Ansu Fati (center)
"Life does not end with Barcelona"
La Masia still produces decent footballers. 34 of their graduates are currently playing for teams in Europe's five major leagues. Only Real Madrid has produced more junior players (39), as the CIES Football Observatory has determined. But many young players have understood that they probably have better prospects of a professional career elsewhere than Barça.
Arnau Tenas, an 18-year-old who was the third keeper to drive to Eibar last month, said: "Life does not end with Barcelona, if you do not get the trust, you have to find a club where they can give you that Give confidence and the minutes. " But few La Masia exports in recent years have been stars elsewhere. Perhaps the best-known Academy graduates under the age of 30 are Marc Bartra (formerly at Dortmund, now at Betis Sevilla), Andre Onana (Ajax goalkeeper) and Hector Bellerín (Arsenal).
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La Masia graduate Hector Bellerín
Players who have been raised with Barcelona's Passing Football can also torment themselves in other clubs. How do you fit in when you end up in Watford, a team that rarely owns the ball? Even a Busquets would hardly be able to retrieve its potential there.
Barcelona style in Brentford
But perhaps the main reason why La Masia no longer has the former dominance, this: The academy was so good that everyone else copied it. She changed the football. If a TV broadcaster shows a contribution to any club's football practice, it's likely to be the "Rondo", says Pere Gratacos, who works as a coach in La Masia.
Messi, Iniesta and Xavi have shown the world that small players who can fit are better than big ones who can not. Coaches like Guardiola and Capellas (currently active at Denmark's U21) are spreading the teachings of La Masia in the world. Most football academies want to be like La Masia.
Take France, for example, when Antoine Griezmann, then 14 years old, had to go to Real Sociedad in Spain because six French academies thought he was too small. Other Frenchmen like N'Golo Kanté, Franck Ribéry, Nabil Fekir and Matthieu Valbuena were rejected in their youth or thrown out of the academy. That would not happen today.
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Barcelona Talent Ricky Puig (r.)
Germany and England now bring out a number of small footballers, in both countries Guardiola has worked as a club coach. Capellas reports that he saw the English second division match between Queens Park Rangers and Brentford the other day - and both sides tried to run the game with lots of passes. Barça style!
You can never be long in football. But it was glorious as long as it lasted.