Joan Laporta is Barcelona president once more.
As part of his re-election campaign, he made a series of promises,
including that he would extend Lionel Messi’s contract and sign high-quality players.
But he also pledged to restore the reputation of La Masia, the club’s academy.
But with production having slowed to a trickle, how can that be done?
The first clue comes from Laporta himself.
“(La Masia) will be our pillar,
the backbone of the club's values" he claimed during the election campaign.
It’s a remark that reveals that Laporta believes La Masia to have become
too peripheral. In a previous video, we covered the story of its fading relevance in detail.
And there’s no single way to restore it. Rather,
it requires a different type of thinking that will, over time, re-emphasise its importance.
Not since the late Tito Vilanova has the club employed a head-coach who grew up in
the system and around Barcelona’s methodology. The effect, in combination with the post-Laporta trend
of signing many more players from outside the club, has been a dilution of identity.
The same identity which La Masia was established to preserve.
But there’s good news on that front. Laporta has inherited a head-coach
in Ronald Koeman who has flaws, but who – unlike his predecessor - has shown faith in
young players and willingness to give them opportunities.
Laporta’s role will be to incubate that change and encourage it further. Mostly, that involves
intangibles. Patience, good faith, and resilience to criticism. As important as homegrown talent is,
allowing it to mature can sometimes require the sacrifice of short-term ambitions.
The first step for Laporta is to employ a head-coach who believes in the club
academy – and he might have that already. But the second will be protect that coach
from the criticism of those who are unwilling to make such a compromise.
The transfer-market, too, is clearly a key issue.
During his first term as president, Laporta never depended entirely on La Masia. He regularly
supported first Frank Rijkaard and then Pep Guardiola with plenty of external signings.
As he may do again, but likely with more control over the aim of the policy. It will be difficult.
Balancing ideals with competitive strength is probably harder now than ever before.
The mistake the club made in the past, though, was not limiting their
external recruitment to players who were genuinely rare or absolutely necessary.
Most likely, Laporta will make that change early, reverting to a strategy that privileges players of
a certain age profile. He might also mandate that signings should only garnish the first-team squad,
not just stock it for depth, add to the wage bill,
and create obstructions for young players who are already at the club.
In the first instance because those chances would help players fulfil their potential.
In the second because it would stop them believing that they have to leave the club
to get that chance – an issue which has led to one of the biggest talent-drains in Europe.
So far though, the measures proposed are only philosophical.
They’re tweaks and adjustments made to the atmosphere outside La Masia.
But Laporta will probably reason that full restoration will require
material change to the system of production itself. There are inefficiencies there as well.
In 2017, Goal.com published an interview with a former youth coach, quoting him anonymously
as saying that “the club's idea is different to what it was before” and that a greater physical
emphasis had crept into an academy which, previously, had favoured touch and technique.
But it’s no surprise that things have changed, or that the methodology in production and talent
selection has become muddled. Dozens of youth coaches have left Barcelona over the past decade.
What was apparently once an almost familial atmosphere led by veteran coaches,
has changed in tone. There have been frustrations over reported ‘blockages’ in the club’s pipeline,
particularly concerning the composition and use of the B-team,
and – in some cases – there’s been outright acrimony.
In late 2019, for instance, legendary former goalkeeper Victor Valdes was dismissed as an
u19 coach, following a series of disagreements with, among others,
Patrick Kluivert, the club’s academy director.
Kluivert’s contract is due to expire in June 2021 and it’s not expected to be renewed. And
within that lies a further indication as to Laporta’s likely thinking. Kluivert may have
played at Camp Nou, but he was raised at Ajax and – in spite of the crossover between the two
clubs’ culture – doesn’t obviously espouse the virtues associated with young Barcelona players.
He was a strange appointment. According to recent reports,
he is likely to be replaced by José Ramón Alexanko,
who won three La Liga titles and a European Cup under Johann Cruyff in the late 80s and early 90s.
And Johann’s son Jordi Cruyff’s is expected to join the new football department and work
under new sporting director Mateu Alemany. Very obviously, Laporta is furnishing the
club’s technical structure with like-minded people and, as a result, it wouldn’t be a
surprise if some of those La Masia coaches who departed over recent years started to return.
The intention would be to harmonise the thinking inside the club and restore some of the idealism.
Which isn’t to say that Laporta’s return is destined to provoke a great gush of La Masia
talent. The academy’s modern reputation is partly sustained by the success of the classes of ’87
and ’91 and of those who graduated from the classes before and shortly after, and it would be
naïve to expect the club to ever reproduce so many good players in such a short space of time again.
In addition to which, that kind of ability is now more vulnerable at a young age.
More so than it was before, when Barcelona lost Gerard Pique to Manchester United,
and Cesc Fabregas and Hector Bellerin to Arsenal. The wealthy English clubs might be
kept at bay by post-Brexit legislation, but the threat remains elsewere.
Having joined Barcelona at the age of 7, for instance, Xavi Simons was snatched away as a
15-year-old by Paris Saint-Germain, who reportedly offered him a €1m/year contract in 2019.
Barcelona have always been unwilling to reward their youth prospects so decadently. And today,
with such a substantial debit and a vast wage bill to reduce,
Joan Laporta isn’t really in position to reverse that policy.
So, he’s restricted. He also needs to find different solutions to several different problems,
all at the same time, some of which have no obvious answers.
But a process seems to have begun and the path forward seems vaguely clear. Should everyone
at Barcelona start thinking about La Masia in the same way, that would certainly be a start.