Eat, sleep and respect the ball: inside Barcelona’s modern La Masia
The dimly lit, studiously grey lecture room carries the feel of a sixth-form block in a suburban high-school. On the opposite side of the street, about the width of a football pitch away, stands a typical Aldi supermarket, intensifying the acute sense of suburban normality. But this is no conventional school environment.
This is the heart of La Masia 2.0, Barcelona’s modern incarnation of the famous residential farmhouse that helped nurture the finest generation of footballers the club has ever seen. The place where Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández, Carles Puyol, Andrés Iniesta and the rest of the tiki-taka brigade were schooled in the art of strangling the opposition with relentlessly mesmeric ball-hogging manoeuvres.
“It’s not luck but we had a lot of stars at the same time,” explains Marc Carmona, Barcelona’s head of coach education. “The Spain team won three consecutive tournaments between 2008 and 2012 – and it coincided with Barça’s best period in history.”
Sitting in La Masia’s main lecture hall a couple of days after Spain got their chaotic World Cup bid off to a stuttering start with a 3-3 draw against Portugal, Carmona goes on to explain that one of the high points for La Masia, founded in 1979 at the insistence of Johan Cruyff, came in 2010. An astonishing nine La Masia graduates dominated the Spain squad that made history by winning a first World Cup. Two of those players – Xavi and Iniesta – joined another La Masia graduate, a certain diminutive Argentinian, on the Ballon d’Or shortlist the same year.
It was the first and only time all three players on the shortlist have hailed from the same club. Messi won it – his second of five so far – and, remarkably, the club has had at least one player on the final shortlist every year since 2004. “We are working to repeat this period,” says Carmona. “But it’s very difficult.”
This difficulty has become clear in recent years. Just 12 months after La Masia 2.0 opened in 2011, Tito Villanova made history by fielding a starting 11 comprising all La Masia graduates. But since then only Sergio Roberto has established himself in the first team after coming through the ranks.
A little over two years ago, the club introduced La Masia 360, an attempt to widen the net to produce the next wave of superstar players as the game evolves but also with a nod to the legion of players who might not make it to the top. The club now extends the holistic approach to developing its residential players, currently 76 youngsters, to include the 550 or so other players within the academy programme across five professional sports: football (male and female), basketball, futsal, handball and roller hockey.
“For about 70 youth players, they live here, sleep here, eat here, study here, train here. They have a lot of attention,” says Carmona. “One day the strategy department decided that if we take care of these 70 young athletes in all ways, why are Barça not giving this same attention to all the youth professional players? So now, we are trying to give the same attention for the nonresidents. They don’t live here but we are trying to control their family situation, their study situation too.”
The club’s commitment to its Mes que un club philosophy is clear. The 360 programme focuses on the whole child and is up front about the psychosocial characteristics required to make it at Barça: humility, effort, ambition, respect, teamwork.
“For us behaviour is very important. You have to win by respecting the opponent, the referee and the rules of the play,” says Carmona. “But also by respecting our three big treasures in football, the three Ps: possession of the ball, position of the ball and pressing after losing the ball. This is our way to understand football. This is clear from watching any Barcelona game.”
The five-storey building – full name La Masia Centre de formacio Oriol Tort – is situated in the heart of the club’s suburban training complex, Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper, about three miles east of Camp Nou. It replaced the famous old farmhouse as the central nervous system of the FC Barcelona behemoth.
The rear end of the ground-floor corridor leads to the restaurant before a door paves the way to an outdoor playground that rams home the focus on learning and play: next to a tablefootball table stands an oversize tabletennis table, which is oval, carries football pitch markings and lends itself to 2v2 games (table tennis and head tennis) between the players. “It’s just like you see in the public parks of Barcelona,” says Carmona.
Real Madrid’s €100m investment in its academy set-up, not to mention its first team’s recent dominance in Europe, raises the difficult question of whether modern football is leaving Barça’s purism behind. Carmona is quick to defend the clear thread of playing style and philosophy that runs through the age groups at La Masia, from the Under-10s right up to the first team.
“During the season, you can see the training session for the U10, then the U16 then Barça B and you will see the same,” he says. “Different exercises because of the age of the players but the idea of the session, and the kind of exercises, are very similar. You can smell it, you can see it in the session; this is our DNA.
“It is about games in a small space, a lot of rondos, a lot of games with possession, a lot of games 4v4, 5v5, so you can see that the ball is very important. To pass the ball, control the ball, to move with the ball … this is the DNA in football. And the coaches are trying to transmit the understanding at all ages.”
The subject of Real’s ruthlessly destructive victory over Liverpool in May’s Champions League final crops up. Can Barça’s goalposts be moved when considering “the way we win”? “I think sometimes, we maybe need our [Sergio] Ramos too,” Carmona concedes. “Because Barça in the last five seasons, in four of them [we have been] eliminated in the quarter-final in Europe. So we have to think about, maybe, our way to play is a good option to win the Spanish league – Barça won seven of the last 10 leagues. But maybe not enough to compete in Europe, because opponents have very big players.”
Carmona was the hugely successful head coach of Barcelona’s futsal team before he took on the role of ensuring all the club’s youth coaches are tuned into the Barça DNA. The benefits of futsal – the Fifa-sanctioned version of five a side – have been long espoused by Messi, Xavi and Iniesta among many others. It is clear Barcelona is also trying to succeed by nurturing football’s little brother too. “In futsal you touch the ball more, participate a lot, are in contact with the ball a lot,” Carmona says. “Sometimes in football you can touch the ball once every three minutes. It is a very good practice for football to play futsal.”
Jordi Torras, a former Barcelona and Spain futsal star who is now head of youth futsal coaching at the club, explains how the match-realistic scenarios are crucial given the importance of the tournament to come. “At this stage of the championship we will work more on the strategic aspects and a lot of real situations that you can find with the rival and the match,” he says. “The philosophy is the same as the one requested by the club: we have to win by being an example in everything and that is what makes us different.”
As well the residencies at its training ground, Barcelona’s clear commitment to a professional futsal team is another marker of difference between them and Real. The Madrid club flirted with futsal in the mid-80s but has not had a professional team.
“They [Real Madrid] want the best football club in Europe, they have it,” says Carmona. “Here in Barça we have special feeling with all our pro sections but also with our amateur sections too.
It is our identity. Athletics, volleyball [male and female], basketball for females, wheelchair basketball, ice skating, ice hockey rugby, grass hockey. They are all part of our identity.
“The DNA of Madrid is to win. The DNA of Barça is to play well. But the truth is that we have to win too.”