FanPost

My opinion on the current state of La Masia

La Masia used to be known as the best football academy in the world. I say "used to" with a passion, because it seems as though the current Bartomeu administration has stripped away everything we know and love about the famed academy. It is easy to blame this on things like the changes in the transfer market landscape, but my problems with our youth system go beyond that. We have talented players, sure, but with those players we either sell them on obscenely low prices, waste their talent on redundant Chelsea-esque loan spells, or wait until it's too late to finally develop them.

We can go on about clubs like Dortmund, Ajax, Benfica, Southampton, and Lyon - famed for their youth production but quick to lose their players due to other clubs willing to splash the cash on them. What's different from us and those other clubs that I just mentioned is that we are not a selling club. In fact, we are really bad at selling players. We either let them go for much less than they are worth, or just keep sending them out on loan until their contract expires and they leave for free. What we do do, though, is set ridiculously high release clauses on players just to try and lure potential suitors away. Samuel Umtiti has a 500 million euro release clause, but knowing us we would end up selling him for a small fraction of that. There was genuine talk that he would move to England for only 50 odd million this summer. We certainly have the capacity to hold on to our players, but we disgracefully waste their early 20s before they end up becoming a big fish in a smaller pond.

Another problem that I see with our board is their lack of proactiveness in transfer planning. Let us consider the case of the left-back position. Our board first identified the need of signing a left-back to provide cover for Jordi Alba in 2016 when we signed Lucas Digne. It was not the best signing in the world and it was surely a gamble, and he had his moments but generally speaking he turned out to not be the player that we wanted. What should we have done? We should have taken it upon us to develop an academy gem in Marc Cucurella into someone special. Instead, we stalled and hoped that the former PSG and Roma man would improve.

When Digne was ultimately sold to Everton, we were left thin in the left-back department. Cucurella was loaned out and Juan Miranda, while given first-team opportunities, was still seen as too inexperienced to be promoted. In fact, the board said it themselves last summer - they would rather trust a youth player to deputize for Alba than sign someone else. Those comments were too little too late in my opinion, and this summer they had no choice but to dip into the market and sign Junior Firpo. Don't get me wrong, Junior is a great signing, but the opportunity cost of us signing him was the potential to have a much stronger Cucurella or Miranda on our books, without having to spend what could rise to 30 million euros. That's peanuts in this market, but still.

Right now, the board has a chance to rectify the mistake. This summer, following the signing of Antoine Griezmann, they publicly stated that they will wait on signing a new and young number 9 for now. What can we do in the meantime? Develop Abel Ruiz, probably the best striker out of La Masia in a really long time. I alluded to this in an earlier post where I said that Ruiz has the potential to break into the first team in a couple of seasons, but that would mean nothing if we do not give him chances now. If anyone in the coaching staff really believes that Ruiz can be a successor to Luis Suarez, then we ought to do something about it sooner rather than later.

So those are my problems with La Masia and our B team as it stands right now. I really hope that the appointments of Victor Valdes and Patrick Kluivert can lead to better progression of youth up to the first team. As we saw this summer in preseason, the batch of Barca B players right now can go on to be something special, provided that we take the correct steps forward. Visca Barca.

<em>This does not represent the views of Barca Blaugranes or SBNation</em>