FCBARCELONA.CAT

21.04.2010 11:45

'The Mail on Sunday' hails Barca youth policy

www.fcbarcelona.cat

The British Sunday newspaper, 'The Mail on Sunday', has published an article explaining the work of the FC Barcelona youth academy. They highlight the fact that most big clubs try to buy success while Barça has succeeded in nurturing its own talent.

The article is illustrated with photos of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta, under which can be read this label – “FREE”. The four-page article begins, “Chelsea, Manchester United and the other top English clubs have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on transfer fees for the world’s best players in the hope of buying success. But the best team in the world rely on a set of home-grown players who cost nothing to buy”.

Seven of our own in the final

According to the ‘Mail on Sunday’, “Barcelona are undisputedly the best football club in the world at present”. They remind their readers that Barca won six competitions last season and that in the Champions League final in Rome no fewer than seven Barca players were raised in the youth academy. At this point the article ponders the policy of the big Premier League clubs: “While English Premier League football clubs spent much of the past decade splashing their borrowed cash to sign up millionaire star players, or poaching teenage boys, like Fabregas, from the youth academies of the clubs that did produce good young players, Barcelona were quietly growing their own team”.

The article, which is liberally garnished with photos of established stars such as Cesc, Iniesta, Piqué and Reina in the Barca youth teams, asserts that the main different between the reigning world champions and the big English clubs is that FC Barcelona produce most of their own stars, the opposite of what happens in the Premier League.

A golden generation?

However, the article makes it clear that this success is no passing phase: “The fact that Messi, Iniesta, Xavi and Fabregas all exhibit the same exquisite control of the ball and a style of passing that might have been cloned suggests that Barcelona have not simply been fortunate to inherit a golden generation of players, as some have suggested”.