Barcelona thrive via La Masia resurgence in most thrilling era since THAT great team

Most of the world's "biggest" clubs, including all of England's "Big 6", have a minority of home-reared players. Barca now have a majority, echoing their greatest ever squad

Barcelona will win La Liga this season and do so with a squad that has been majority reared at the club’s hallowed youth academy, La Masia.

That is how it seems to be shaping up as Barça have made a rip-roaring start to the season under new manager Hansi Flick.

They are nine points clear in La Liga after just 12 games having recently thrashed their greatest rivals Real Madrid 4-0 on Madrid’s own turf.

They have scored 40 (FORTY) goals in those 12 league games, or 19 more than next-best Real Madrid. And this success is being driven by home-growns.

As the club’s president, Joan Laporta, said earlier this season when his team had won four out of four league games: “Flick understood perfectly what our value is, our jewel: La Masia.”

The statistics bear out that the former Bayern Munich and Germany manager Flick, 59, has faith in the club’s academy products, several of them still literally kids in the eyes of the law.

A majority of the 25 players who have played minutes in La Liga this season (13 of 25) have been developed at La Masia, including Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsi and Marc Bernal, all 17, and fellow teenagers Hector Fort and Sergi Dominguez. Another six of those 13 home-growns are aged 23 or under.

Barcelona play their fourth Champions League match of the season this evening, away at Red Star. In their last European game a fortnight ago, they thrashed Bayern Munich 4-1.

No fewer than six of their starters that night were products of La Masia, with two more coming on as subs. They were Iñaki Peña, age 25 (GK), Pau Cubarsí, 17 (CD), Alejandro Balde, 21 (LB), Marc Casadó, 21 (DM), Fermín López, 21 (CM), and Lamine Yamal, 17 (AMR). On top of that their home-grown subs were  Ansu Fati, 21 (AML) and Gavi, 20 (CM).

Most of those were then involved in Barca’s 4-0 tonking of Real Madrid in the following Saturday’s El Clasico, and again in the 3-1 win over Espanyol last Saturday.

The most famous product of La Masia is the player widely regarded as the greatest of all time, Lionel Messi. When he first went there, aged 13 in 2000, it looked like this:

The new La Masia looks like this:

Today’s analysis considers whether the contemporary Barcelona, underpinned by brilliant home-grown talent, might yet develop into a team that can compare with arguably the greatest Barcelona side of all-time, the one that won La Liga and the Champions League in 2010-11.