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La Liga Thread

2Smokeyy

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Country: England
Barca got rid of Suarez for Luuk De Jong and Aguero ffs.
 

Notorious Big

Drunka In Friend Zone
"When these b u m s gonna sack me ? "

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Yousif Arsenal

On Vinai's payroll & misses 4th place trophy 🏆
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Barca is not in disaster yet and think they'll finish top 4 but man they depressing to watch not single real quality
 

Toby

No longer a Stuttgart Fan
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This La Masia bullshit....all fair and well to have a well run academy producing players every now and then for either your own team or to sell on, but their whole reputation relies on that freak group of Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Messi et al. As if you just rely on La Masia and every 10 years it'll churn out 5 of the best players of their generation. Return to bet on La Masia? They haven't ignored La Masia, they just produced nothing of note until Pedri - and that guy isn't even a serious Barca boy, but only came aged 16/17 from Las Palmas.

Remember Marc Muniesa, Carles Planas, Oriol Romeu, Cristian Tello, Grimaldo, Sergi Samper, Pol Calvet, Sandro Ramirez, El Haddadi, etc etc? All hyped up generational talents from La Masia whose career either went to absolute ****s or they became average players. Simple truth is La Masia just hasn't produced anything since their Golden Gen, hasn't produced an unsually high number of exceptional players before that and is just a bit of a hype job. There's nothing to return to if there ain't good players coming through.
 
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AbouCuéllar

Author of A-M essays 📚
This La Masia bullshit....all fair and well to have a well run academy producing players every now and then for either your own team or to sell on, but their whole reputation relies on that freak group of Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Busquets, Messi et al. As if you just rely on La Masia and every 10 years it'll churn out 5 of the best players of their generation. Return to bet on La Masia? They haven't ignored La Masia, they just produced nothing of note until Pedri - and that guy isn't even a serious Barca boy, but only came aged 16/17 from Las Palmas.

Remember Marc Muniesa, Carles Planas, Oriol Romeu, Cristian Tello, Grimaldo, Sergi Samper, Pol Calvet, Sandro Ramirez, El Haddadi, etc etc? All hyped up generational talents from La Masia whose career either went to absolute ****s or they became average players. Simple truth is La Masia just hasn't produced anything since their Golden Gen, hasn't produced an unsually high number of exceptional players before that and is just a bit of a hype job. There's nothing to return to if there ain't good players coming through.
This is true, but a bit like Arsenal, while producing nothing of note from the early 2010s-late 2010s, they have now certainly produced something of note in Ansu Fati, Ilaix Moriba, and most likely Gavi and Nico. Xavi Simons and Khays Ruiz perhaps also...

Pedri as you say has nothing to do with La Masía, he hasn't spent a second of his formation there, he's a canarian who's come through Las Palmas academy and was signed by Barça because he was a massive talent.

But yeah, since that golden generation, the only product of note has been Sergi Roberto, and he's a very average player. Bellerín but he hasn't played for Barça and more or less same applies as for Sergi.

Tbf, that group of Puyol, Xavi, Iniesta, Piqué, Messi, Pedro, Busquets, and Cesc is enough for a deserved reputation for 30 years, tbh. If any academy produces that many world class players in a 30 year period--much less a 5 year period--it will earn, rightly, the reputation as the best academy in the sport.

You add Ansu Fati to that list and while it's early days for Ilaix, Gavi, and Nico they all look like very important talents, well, whether you like it or not the reputation is deserved, even if we get a bit tired of hearing about it.
 

Toby

No longer a Stuttgart Fan
Moderator
This is true, but a bit like Arsenal, while producing nothing of note from the early 2010s-late 2010s, they have now certainly produced something of note in Ansu Fati, Ilaix Moriba, and most likely Gavi and Nico. Xavi Simons and Khays Ruiz perhaps also...

Xavi Simons may have that name and an Insta account, but he's got everything to prove as a footballer. Ruiz-Atil is 19 and a PSG product - and while we're talking academies PSG might have the sickest one currently. The amount of talents they got and ship off is baffling, even in terms of the whole French talent landscape right now.

Gavi has played 8 games in a first team. Eight. Guy could come good but could also just drop off into nowhere. People were hyping Samper and Sergi Roberto into Xavi, Iniesta and Fabregas stratospheres after more first team games.

Forgot about Ansu Fati. And Moriba also has everything to prove. He looks decent, but currently can't even get a look into a struggling Leipzig team. Even if you take two of those and assume they make it big, it's two players in how many years? Absolutely nothing justifies that magical reputation La Masia has besides the cosmic luck they had with that Golden Gen. They produce maybe a star player and a few decent ones of which they don't even use all themselves regularly, but that's not unusual.
 

AbouCuéllar

Author of A-M essays 📚
Xavi Simons may have that name and an Insta account, but he's got everything to prove as a footballer. Ruiz-Atil is 19 and a PSG product - and while we're talking academies PSG might have the sickest one currently. The amount of talents they got and ship off is baffling, even in terms of the whole French talent landscape right now.
Ruiz was in the Barça academy since age 7 if I'm not mistaken. He went to PSG after the youth ruling when Barça couldn't give him a pro contract. Now he's back.

Gavi has played 8 games in a first team. Eight. Guy could come good but could also just drop off into nowhere. People were hyping Samper and Sergi Roberto into Xavi, Iniesta and Fabregas stratospheres after more first team games.
Tbf Samper and Sergi Roberto don't have much point of comparison to Gavi. They never had any instant success as a Barça player, nor were they called up to the Spanish national team to start...

But yeah, that's why I said, it's still early days for Gavi, Ilaix, and Nico, and didn't put them in the category of Ansu. But certainly especially the first two have done things that the big hype jobs of past (Deulofeu is perhaps the one who was most hyped who you're forgetting) never did for Barça or at any meaningful level.

Absolutely nothing justifies that magical reputation La Masia has besides the cosmic luck they had with that Golden Gen. They produce maybe a star player and a few decent ones of which they don't even use all themselves regularly, but that's not unusual.
Like I say, whether you like it or not, that output in the 2000s objectively justifies pretty much anything they want to say. You can cross it off as a cosmic luck but the fact is it happens, and in objective terms it justifies an academy's claim to being the best for decades and decades.
 

Toby

No longer a Stuttgart Fan
Moderator
Ruiz was in the Barça academy since age 7 if I'm not mistaken. He went to PSG after the youth ruling when Barça couldn't give him a pro contract. Now he's back.

He left around 13 and now came back aged 19. Barca can take absolutely no credit here.

Like I say, whether you like it or not, that output in the 2000s objectively justifies pretty much anything they want to say. You can cross it off as a cosmic luck but the fact is it happens, and in objective terms it justifies an academy's claim to being the best for decades and decades.

That doesn't make sense. You're saying a one off thing like them putting out one single exceptional group of players in a short time span justifies them being regarded as one of the best academies for decades, when in fact in truth they've been pretty average in terms of producing talent except for that one off instance. La Masia lives off that Cruyff mythos that became fulfilled once with the Messi gen, but bar that they haven't produced more and/or better talents than myriads of academies around the world.
 

AbouCuéllar

Author of A-M essays 📚
but bar that they haven't produced more and/or better talents than myriads of academies around the world.
Going back to 2000, in a 20 year period, what academy has produced more talent?

That's what I mean that when we're talking about objective facts, they can say that. Now, if they don't continue to produce and the time frame grows greater and greater, we can perhaps find an academy by 2030-35 that has produced more since 2000. But of course if you add Ansu, and a few of Gavi, Nico, Ilaix and whoever else comes through in that period, it will become more difficult to say even that.

I mean, pick whatever time frame you want and that includes relatively modern / recent history, and it's just not going to win...let's say Ajax since 1990, to take a sample that predates by a 10-15 year period that group, and to use the example of the academy we usually talk about being the best or about the best. If you add together all the talents produced by the Ajax academy since 1990, and compare them to that group, who wins?

Anyways, I think putting it down to cosmic luck is also a bit glib. Of course coincidence and the coming together or freak circumstances has to do with something like that, because it's a simply historical event so many world class and legendary players coming together and coming through at once, but it's also certainly very dismissive / glib to discard all method / causality to it, and put it down 100% to coincidence.
 

Toby

No longer a Stuttgart Fan
Moderator
Going back to 2000, in a 20 year period, what academy has produced more talent?

That's what I mean that when we're talking about objective facts, they can say that. Now, if they don't continue to produce and the time frame grows greater and greater, we can perhaps find an academy by 2030-35 that has produced more since 2000. But of course if you add Ansu, and a few of Gavi, Nico, Ilaix and whoever else comes through in that period, it will become more difficult to say even that.

Think there's a tool on transfermarkt to look for how many academy products have made it into professional leagues, and I think using that you will find a hell of a lot of clubs having produced more or similar numbers to Barca in the last 20 years - obviously excluding the Messi group because La Masia producing that group in that time frame is the base of my argument of them being not as good as they are made out to be but massively lucked out that one time and besides this specific group don't produce more and/or better talent than say Ajax, Bayern, Stuttgart, Lyon, etc.

To make it more clear: La Masia producing that massive team with Top 5 in the world players coming through in every position between roughly 2000 and 2010 doesn't make them the greatest academy of all time, but one that massively lucked out during that time to have so many talented players among their ranks. And that argument is corroborated by the fact that if you look at e.g. roughly 1990 to 2000 and 2010 to 2020, they overall haven't educated more or better players than other clubs around the world. It's a bit like Man Utd's class of 92: Just because they at one time had the luck of having an accumulation of outstanding talent at the same time doesn't mean that overall they're an outstanding academy.
 

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