Managing La Masia: The quiet makeover of Barça B

Read more: http://www.totalbarca.com/2014/youth/manag.../#ixzz3D72nmKCD

Much has been made of the overhaul Barcelona’s first team has undergone this summer. 2014 has seen the departure of Victor Valdés and Carles Puyol, over 150 million euros spent in the transfer market, and what feels like a return to Pep Guardiola’s values with Luis Enrique. In particular, much has been made of Luis Enrique’s use of the youth team in preseason and the first two Liga games, in which 19-year-olds Munir El Haddadi and Sandro Ramirez each made their first-team debuts and scored.

A statistic making the rounds of late shows that Luis Enrique has already featured Barça B players more than Gerardo Martino did all last season. With Luis Suárez still banned and a sulking Gerard Deulofeu shipped out on loan, culés are delighted to have a seemingly ceaseless conveyor belt of talented youths to fill the gaps. Indeed, Barcelona B is brimming with talent in nearly every position, and seems perfectly situated to supplement the first team through the 2015 transfer ban. The timing couldn’t be better. Yet amidst the overwhelming focus on Luis Enrique and Andoni Zubizarreta’s renewal of the first team, few have drawn attention to the quiet work at Barcelona B over the last few years that have brought these talents to the surface. Read on after the jump.


Historically, Barcelona B has featured a mixture of young, promising academy players and older, early-20s players who are able to keep the team competitive in La Liga’s Segunda Division. In the 2010/11 season, Luis Enrique’s Barça B finished third in the league with a squad that featured eight players 23 or older, with an average age of 20.84 years. Those veterans were supplemented by what was known as the class of 1991, a group of talented Masia products born around 1991 who were all tipped for the first team: Marc Bartra, Martín Montoya, Cristian Tello, Thiago Alcántara, Marc Muniesa, Oriol Romeu, and Jonathan Dos Santos,  joined the following season by Isaac Cuenca. The class of ’91 was the first really promising group in La Masia since Lionel Messi, Cesc Fábregas, Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets and Pedro Rodríguez. Unfortunately, few of them have succeeded at Barcelona. Muniesa and Cuenca fell victim to injuries; Romeu and Thiago both left Barcelona – the latter much more controversially; and Tello and Dos Santos failed to impress through several seasons in the first team. Bartra and Montoya are the only ones to have secured spots in the first team, and even Montoya has still failed to shine consistently.

Worse yet, the departure of the class of ’91 from Barça B has coincided with the arrival of new manager Eusebio. Eusebio has been widely criticized by La Masia’s followers for not following the Barça playing style, depending on older, less talented players, and using bizarre lineups with players out of position. Barça B finished eighth and ninth in the 11/12 and 12/13 seasons respectively, largely carried by the individual genius of Gerard Deulofeu and Rafinha Alcántara. With the pair loaned out in the summer of 2013, concerns were raised about the fate of Barça B. A slew of Juvenil A players joined the ranks, leaving Barça B with an average age of 19.6 – the youngest in the reserve team’s history – and just six players aged 22 or older. The team was too inexperienced, it was said, and would suffer against the hardened professionals of the Segunda.

Indeed, Eusebio’s team had a very poor start to the 13/14 season. Barça B lost four games in a row in the fall, going on to lose eight out of a 10-game stretch and drop into the relegation zone near the season’s halfway point. But in the latter half of the season, something changed. Eusebio began to use younger players more, giving Sergi Samper and Adama Traore more starts and calling up Munir from Juvenil A, benching the likes of Dani Nieto and Ilie Sanchez. Indeed, it seemed that the younger the B team got, the better it played. Starting in March, Eusebio’s boys went on a nine-game undefeated run, and in the space of 20 games climbed from 17th in the table to a third-place finish. But it didn’t end there.

This summer, while all attention was focused on Luis Suárez and the hunt for centre-backs, Barça B had a mini-clearout of its own. Eight of the nine oldest players from the 13/14 squad have departed, and in their place Barcelona have signed young, talented players: Alen Halilović (18), Gerard Gumbau (19), Diawandou Diagne (20), Javier “Bicho” Fernandez (18), and Juan Camará (20). Halilović is a prodigy, Diagne looks quite promising, and Bicho is regarded as the best talent Deportivo has produced in years. Though it rarely makes the papers, Zubizarreta has made some excellent signings for the reserves in the past two years, including two of Manchester City’s best youth products, Joan Román and Denis Suárez, each 19 at the time; Barça B’s best current center-back, Edgar Ié, signed from Sporting at age 18 along with Agostinho Cá; and Joan Campins, a promising young right-back who was hit with injury last season. The average age of this current squad? 19.3 years.

All of which is to say that there has been a clear change of philosophy at Barça B. Where once the B team signed 22+ year-olds to provide Segunda-level experience alongside La Masia’s best young talents, now the focus has shifted to adding even more talent in the critical 18-20 year-old age group. Barcelona B is mirroring the prevailing patterns of Europe’s super-clubs, who in order to compete at the highest level amass quality in depth and fill their bench with stars. The result is that the 2014/15 Barcelona B side is jam-packed with more talent than it has ever had. Even the fabled “golden generation,” the once-in-a-lifetime group of homegrown stars that won everything there was to win under Pep Guardiola, were spread out through the academy over many years. The depth of talent currently waiting in the wings at Barça B is, quite simply, unprecedented.

I believe this growth and change in policy is in part a reaction to the so-called “Bojan effect” – the lessons taught by the failure of one Bojan Krkić. Bojan was made a first-team player by age 18, but his subsequent loss of form and eventual sale has made every cule wary of overhyping Masia products. It has also made Barcelona hesitant to depend on 18-20 year-olds in the first team. As a result, La Masia’s most promising phenomenons, like Rafinha, Deulofeu, Munir, and Sergi Samper, have either been sent out on loan or moved much more slowly through the academy, delaying their rise to the first team. Munir, despite his obvious talent, was kept in Juvenil B for a second year after he joined the club and, surprisingly for a player of his ability, didn’t even make his B-team debut until age 18. In previous years he would have been fast-tracked through the system like Bojan or Messi.

So instead of having 18-20 year-olds compete in the first team to prove their quality, now Barcelona has simply increased competition at the B team. Barça B players are competing less with their opponents in the Segunda than with each other. Just last season La Masia had four top-notch 18-year-old strikers: Munir, Sandro, Jean-Marie Dongou, and Antonio Sanabria. Sanabria was impatient and moved, Dongou struggled with the competition and lost form, and Munir and Sandro have risen to the top. Competition in action. Indeed, Barcelona are so invested in having depth at the B team that they considered a deadline day move for Mallorca’s Marcos Asensio, just in case Munir would be spending more time with the first team this season. By signing teenagers alongside those promoted from Juvenil A, Barcelona hope to avoid a repeat of the failures in the class of ’91.

Loans, which were once considered the kiss of death for a Barcelona player, sent away never to return, have now become a vital part of maintaining competition. When Rafinha became too good for the B team, he was sent on loan to Celta, and has now joined the first team at age 21. In his place was signed Denis Suárez, who became easily the B team’s best player in his debut season, and is currently on loan to Sevilla. He in turn has been replaced by Halilović, an even bigger talent. All three players occupy more or less similar positions, and all three clearly have clear first-team potential – but it is extremely unlikely all three will end up there together. By slowing down their advancement through the ranks and loaning players out, Barcelona are encouraging competition without jeopardizing the youngsters’ playing time or the success of the first team. We will soon be seeing the fruits of this policy; with Xavi’s impending departure and the transfer ban in effect, there will be a key midfield spot open next season. Rafinha will get his audition this year, and if he falters, Denis Suárez and Halilović are waiting in the wings – not to mention the incredibly talented Sergi Samper, who plays a less attacking role but is sure to be promoted.

Josep Bartomeu, Sandro Rosell, and the Barcelona board have often been criticized for their ineptitude in leading the club’s sporting project, and Andoni Zubizarreta has been ruthlessly mocked time and again for his perceived failures in the transfer market. The transfer ban has been the ultimate example of both the board and Zubizarreta’s failings – Barça have had to scramble in one year to fix problems that have developed over five. One of strongest criticisms of the board has been that they have counted on the golden conveyor belt of La Masia to bail the team out of their own mistakes, and with the rise of players like Munir, Adama, and Samper in the face of the transfer ban, that would seem to be proven true once again. But these talents don’t arise out of thin air. Barça B has undergone significant changes in the last two years, growing stronger and stronger as the first team has descended into chaos. As a result, the first team’s future looks safe and sound despite the transfer ban, with a host of incredibly talented youngsters all competing for promotion in 2015. This is no happy coincidence. So while the transfer ban is arguably the Barcelona board’s most monumental failure to date, the work done to change the B team’s makeup and the way youth players are tracked through La Masia should be acknowledged as one of their key successes.



Read more: http://www.totalbarca.com/2014/youth/manag.../#ixzz3D727lhtI