CITY SPECIAL Forget Barca, this is the print

AS Txiki Begiristain waited for his easyJet flight back to Manchester on Friday night after watching City’s Under-19s exit the UEFA Youth League at the semi-final stage, he will have been thinking the Blues are just where he wants them to be.

As recently as three years ago, behind the doors of the club’s academy there was an ambition to catch up with champions of English youth football Chelsea.

Helped by a new, impressive £200m facility, the club felt they could compete with neighbours United for players and were focused on overhauling the London club’s domination of FA Youth Cups and other significant tournaments.

That has proven unsuccessful, with three consecutive Youth Cup final defeats at Stamford Bridge, but Chelsea were quickly replaced as the target for City by Barcelona.

If Pep Guardiola wasn’t behind the shift in approach, the arrival at the Etihad of the man every coach at the Camp Nou is now measured against certainly helped to accelerate it.

Having come through the famed La Masia as a player, he became more synonymous with the Barcelona academy as he coached no fewer than seven of its graduates to a Champions League final win at Wembley in 2011.

City’s model is not simply a Barcelona Lite, just as La Masia is not the only successful youth system in the world.

The 4-3-3 system across the academy had already been adopted, with players training in specific positions up the age groups and former Barcelona academy supremo Rodolfo Borrell recruited.

However, it is hard to separate the Barcelona way from the Guardiola way, and the summer of 2016 brought a clear policy shift.

“What we are going to do is go very young in both age groups,” said Jason Wilcox, then under-18 coach and now head of the academy.

“So we will have under-17s playing in an under-18s league and under-19s playing in the Under-21s league. And then after that we have to bridge to the first team.

“It is an interesting concept. When you speak to people about Barcelona - [Andres] Iniesta, Xavi – they never played up a level.”

Phil Foden is probably the best example of this, kept at Under-16 level for as long as possible because coaches did not want his development on the ball to be prematurely stunted by the physical challenges of playing against older, stronger opponents. The 17-year-old is still at the beginning of his professional career, but the sight of him dancing past three Swansea defenders on Sunday sums up how fearless his start to first-team life has been.

Guardiola has paid more attention to City’s prospects than predecessor Manuel Pellegrini - in part because it is his remit, chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak has pledged the coach will unearth the gems from the academy - and players now have specific programmes tailored to their individual development.

This season has seen a lesser emphasis on results, with the need for certain players to learn from a performance or system seen as more important.

On top of current players adapting, Begiristain has also gone straight to the source to oversee the transformation: highly-rated teenage defender Eric Garcia was lured away from Barcelona last summer, and 16-year-old midfielder Adrian Bernabe could follow his compatriot this year.

Unlike the departures of Jordi Mboula and Sergio Gomez to Monaco and Dortmund respectively, there has been little criticism of Guardiola or the City hierarchy from Barcelona supporters for