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January 6, 2013 6:46 PM

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Soccer academy "La Masia:" A model for the U.S.?

By: 60 Minutes Overtime Staff
Topics: Correspondent Candids

It's hard to imagine any American kids playing at the level that you'll see in this week's Overtime feature on "La Masia," the youth academy that feeds pro players to what's arguably the best soccer team in the world, FC Barcelona.

But until recently, the US had nothing like La Masia to nurture its most talented young soccer players. Major League Soccer (MLS) has recently launched nineteen of its own soccer academies, two of them residential academies, in cities across North America-- and they're modeled on European soccer academies like La Masia.

To learn more about the La Masia system and hear from the 60 Minutes team who reported on "Barca," watch the video above and tell us what you think. Could a youth training system like La Masia work for America?

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by ecani100 January 27, 2013 11:24 PM EST: It's NOT hard to imagine American kids playing at the level that you'll see in "La Masia." You know why?
1) For starters, there is one player from the U.S. already playing at the Masia
2) There are at least 3 more players playing at the highest levels in youth academy division in Catalonia and living in Barcelona.
3) while Barca is probably the best thing in the world, and probably in history, The Masia kids are only as good as the other teams they play against. Most top teams in Catalonia play the same style.

So YES, I can imagine -I actually, I don't need to; I've seen it.-
I wished you would have covered the huge network La Masia has with the rest of the top teams in Catalonia; they recruit players from many teams from all over the region (Santes Creus, Reus, Sant Gabriel, Nastic, Cornella, Damm, Terrassa, L'Hospitalet, etc.) One of the reasons they are so good; their access to a giant pool of youth talent.
It would be great if 60mnbts would cover AMERICAN YOUTH players currently competing in the Catalonia Football Federation. LEt me know, I'll give you their names :)
P.S.: I'm glad you showed DC United Soccer academy in your video. It's a very good academy doing a lot of the right things for youth development.; Reply to this comment

by Aubrey99 January 9, 2013 7:40 AM EST

Back again! It gives me great pleasure to see so many Americans genuinely seduced by the game. If football (let's adopt the universal term) manages to become mainstream in the US one day, there will be no limit to what can be achieved by American players. I hope to see it. I'd like to share some personal observations, made up close and personal (Valdes and Alves shop at the same supermarket than we do!) about the intangibles that make FC Barcelona so successful.
- For starters, whereas football is not congenital to most American children, kids around the rest of the world start kicking a ball as soon as they can walk. Poor or affluent, most boys and many girls are potential footballers by the time they set foot in kindergarden. It's played with equal joy at an elitist "public" school in the UK or a dirt poor slum in Brazil or Nigeria. That's a head-start.
- La Masia is not unique. Many other European teams have youth academies of varying sophistication and ambition. What sets La Masia apart is that (a) it actively searches for and accepts talent from all over the world, (b) it places as much emphasis on academic education as on the sport, especially in the middle school period, (3) it strongly instills values.
- Chief among these is of course teamwork (a well ingrained concept in American sport), but it balanced with a degree of self assured humility that truly is uncommon in the majority of top sportspersons. Lionel Messi is the paramount example of this trait. Still 25, he will probably in due time claim a place in history as the greatest footballer of all times, surpassing myths like Pele, Maradona, Di Stefano or Cruyff. Yet you'll never hear or see a self aggrandizing gesture from him, his mantra is that he's nothing without the team, he serves as many goal-scoring passes to his mates than goals scored himself.
- Technique and football philosophy is obviously key. In that respect, FCB owes an eternal debt to Johan Cruyff, the culture of grooming your own players he learned as a youth at Holland's Ajax and the Dutch concept of Total Football of the 70s and 80s, which he fine tuned in the 90s creating the first FCB Dream Team. Pep Guardiola took that idea many steps forward by emphasizing the collective use of individual skills to own the ball, control movement on the pitch and negate the opponent's options. And now, Tito Vilanova has introduced an element of greater speed and verticality to Pep's dynamic geometry.
- But values trump technique. FC Barcelona has become the world's preeminent team because its belief system is equally accepted and assumed by those who have been bred in it (Messi, Fabregas, Pique, Puyol, Busquets, Xavi or Iniesta) and those who have been brought in from elsewhere. Stars in their own right like Ronhaldinho, Henri, Eto'o shone in FCB because they adopted the values and truly became individually humble in the collective pride. Today, players like Villa, Alexis or Alves -al of them multi-million earners- subscribe to that same attitude. Others, like Slatan Ibraimovich -a huge player with an even bigger ego- could simply not bear to sit on the bench. Fabregas can; Xavi can; Villa can... And none of them will ***** about it on Twitter. That's the winning difference.
Given certain important physical and technical parameters, football is a game of the mind and of the heart. If American families, school coaches, academy coaches, and so forth manage to nurture values like effort, sacrifice, discipline, perseverance, fair-play, respect for the game, the ball, the opponent, tenacity, joy, "we" instead of "me", a will to overcome instead of a simple will to win... football (and many other things) will be in good shape.

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by ecani100 January 27, 2013 11:27 PM EST: You'll be happy to know that there are several Amrican players competing in the youth divisions in Catalonia nowadays :)


by BiffJones January 9, 2013 2:59 AM EST: Here's the deal. I'm American and a huge Barca fan but only after I saw them playing a style that I have been coaching since 2002. When I saw them for the first time in 2008 Euro, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Finally, a team that played the way I had been coaching my children teams. Do you know how difficult it is to find anyone that plays simple soccer (little passes, move and pass, look and plan ahead, one touch, don't 2nd guess your teammate n+2 soccer)?? I have only been able to play it with my children.

I started wondering where I got my soccer philosophy and I just figured it out. About 14yrs back when I started coaching (I played my whole life, never coach well) I had to develop a philosophy. At the time my oldest was about 8 and we heard that FIFA 98 by EA sports was an awesome soccer game for the Nintendo. My son and I played endlessly. I realized that the best way to play was to make super quick passes as the players continually readjusted to sensible positions as the ball moved slowing up field. Eventually, you could always get into the box and shoot. Bingo, that was it, as long as one could pass with perfect precision, players moved to space with one step on the defender, had a one-touch pass lined up ... with this algorithm, your team cannot lose the ball. So, it developed a way of teaching how to pass accurately all the time and my kids always ended up as center mids. I know no other that teaches the way I do...but I suspect Barca does. Xavi is my hero.; Reply to this comment


by BiffJones January 9, 2013 2:56 AM EST: Here's the deal. I'm American and a huge Barca fan but only after I saw them playing a style that I have been coaching since 2002. When I saw them for the first time in 2008 Euro, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Finally, a team that played the way I had been coaching my children teams. Do you know how difficult it is to find anyone that plays simple soccer (little passes, move and pass, look and plan ahead, one touch, don't 2nd guess your teammate n+2 soccer)?? I have only been able to play it with my children.

I started wondering where I got my soccer philosophy and I just figured it out. About 14yrs back when I started coaching (I played my whole life, never coach well) I had to develop a philosophy. At the time my oldest was about 8 and we heard that FIFA 98 by EA sports was an awesome soccer game for the Nintendo. My son and I played endlessly. I realized that the best way to play was to make super quick passes as the players continually readjusted to sensible positions as the ball moved slowing up field. Eventually, you could always get into the box and shoot. Bingo, that was it, as long as one could pass with perfect precision, players moved to space with one step on the defender, had a one-touch pass lined up ... with this algorithm, your team cannot lose the ball. So, it developed a way of teaching how to pass accurately all the time and my kids always ended up as center mids. I know no other that teaches the way I do...but I suspect Barca does. Xavi is my hero.; Reply to this comment

by Maria-Erlinda January 8, 2013 5:14 PM EST

The main secret of Barcelona success resides in having embraced the exquisite, delicate but still enormously effective and overall-efficient filigree & embroidery finesse football of the 1950s in Argentina, the football played in that country during the times of the greats of the kind of Manuel Labruna, Omar Sivori, Jose Moreno, Adolfo Pedernera, Alfredo DiStefano, and others.

The whole idea is to keep possession of the ball, mainly, via --keeping one's cool, without panicking-- the whole team (defenders, midfielders, and forwards, along with the goalie distributing the ball with the hands whenever possible, rather than "huffing" it --i.e., big-kicking the ball to see whether any field-player traps it) continually making short, crispy, precise, timely, below-the-knee passes (aka "daisy-cutters, particularly avoiding lopping, as it is much easier to trap a pass below the knee); all that accompanied with individual skills mainly regarding continually positioning oneself at locations where one's teammate can make a pass to, always trapping the ball --like with a magnet-- from any kind of passing (even from "huffers") and, finally, devilish dribbling to overcome the opponent.

And the whole objective of keeping such particular kind of ball possession is to destabilize the opponent team, to drive the opponent team to create holes through which to pierce swiftly through the 18 meter area and usher the ball into the opponent's net.

Somehow , starting in the late 1960s, Argentina abandoned its filigree & embroidery football paradigm, straying toward the "roadrunner", muscular, European football, characterized by middle and long passes, usually, accompanied by sprinting along the sides of the pitch to invariably end in crosses to the center to, in most cases, be finished with a header or a foot strike.

There were Argentine players that went "lone-wolf" back to the filigree & embroidery football paradigm, such as the case of Maradona and, more recently and to some degree Javier Saviola and Andres D'Alessandro... although these two abandoned it and now play European style.

Let's thank whoever whispered at Barcelona's ear the hint of adopting the Argentine filigree & embroidery finesse football of the 1950s.

Barcelona's is football at is best...a comparative allegory of which would be like cerebral chess compared to the rest of European football, which looks more like muscular track and field

Unfortunately, here in the USA, coaches go with the flock, like lemmings, along the line of the "roadrunner", muscular, European football.

Notice that when Barcelona plays top opponents, almost half a billion viewers tune on to TV and about the same number tune in to radio to follow the match.

Notice also that the FIFA Football World Cup draws the largest attendance, TV-viewership and radio-audience in sports worldwide, overpassing all other sports and sports-events, including the Olympic Games. For example, the 1994 Football World-Cup (played in the USA) drew a total attendance of 3,587,538, and a whopping global cumulative TV-viewership and radio-audience of more than 30 billion.

What the MLS should do is to hire for its development program a development director that embraces the Barcelona's kind of football. To that effect, the MLS should consider Pep Guardiola, or one of Tito Vilanova's top assistants.

Just a note: The sport whereby the ball is handled mostly with the hands called "football" here in America was originally named "ball-own" when invented by college students in circa 1822 at the College of New Jersey ( which --in 1896-- changed name to Princeton University) as a derivation of rugby, which in turn is a variation of football, as played at Rugby School (a co-educational day and boarding school located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, England) since the early 1600s.

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by ecani100 January 27, 2013 11:31 PM EST: Just FYI, I know for a fact that DC United has invested in contracting qualified program coordinators that teach modern football. In fact one of them played in Ajax with one of Barcelona's former coaches; and was coached by Johan Cruyff, the man who taught the Catalans how to play tiki-taka :)


by samXXkiley January 8, 2013 3:49 PM EST: coucou,
I saw the cbs report on "Masia" of Barcelona. The football academy is an example and a model for the U.S. and all over the world.
"au revoir"; Reply to this comment


by SanDiego1222 January 8, 2013 3:49 PM EST: Until the US gets rid of its inefficient and expensive soccer youth travel club system, it will never achieve the level of play and talent needed to compete at that level. Example: I pay $1,600 a year for each of my kids to play club soccer, not counting tournament fees that run about $50 per player and there are six to nine tournaments a year. Most travel clubs have these super fancy websites that tell you what their coaching philosophy is and how amazing their system and coaching are. You get a pretty good sales pitch from coaches that tell you how much they can do for your kid and how much they will learn and improve under their guidance. True fact: Most of the time you end up dissapointed that 50% of the coaches in these organizations are bad coaches that dont know how to teach fundamentals and how to play the game, all they care about is winning and charging their coaching fees. Truly talented low income kids never get an opportunity because most parents cant afford it. Until that is fixed we will never be at that level.; Reply to this comment


by Aubrey99 January 8, 2013 12:33 PM EST: As an American living in Barcelona for many years, I thought you might be interested in some facts & factoids that remained unmentioned in the report.
- Cesc Fabregas played between 2004 and 2011 at London's Arsenal. He climbed the ranks to become the team's captain and undisputed star in 2008.
-Argentinian Barcelona defender Javier Mascherano is one of the captains of Argentina's national football team
- Gerard Pique also played (on loan from FC Barcelona) in the UK. No less that at Manchester United.
- As many as 9 FC Barcelona players have at a the same time been on the Spanish National Team between 2008 and 2012. In that period Spain has won two consecutive Eurocups and the 2010 World Cup. An unprecedented run.
- Since 2008 there has been one or more Barcelona candidates for the FIFA Golden Ball award that honors the world's best player. Messi won it again (yesterday) for the fourth year in a row. No one has done that before. Ever.
- The report does NOT mention other superlative Spanish players like Xavi (broadly considered the world's preeminent midfielder), Iniesta (second only to Messi) and Villa a deadly striker.
I realize it sounds like fanaticism, but if one appreciates the sport, one realizes that today's FC Barcelona will probably go down in history as the greatest convergence of individual talent and collective genius ever. They are best alone and better together.; Reply to this comment


by Soccer-Institute January 7, 2013 7:36 PM EST: Mainstream media finally GETS SOCCER !!!

The Soccer Institute is thrilled to see mainstream media picking up on international soccer....it's about time! Soccer in America has developed at warp speed in the past ten years with professional youth training programs all over the country. The Soccer Institute national training center headquarters in the Cleveland, Ohio area has a 75 acre campus with year round programs and a youth club directed by Mark Mallon, a US Soccer A licensed Coach, FA-Badge England, FA Badge - Scotland and former Division I collegiate coach at Yale and University of California - Berkeley. The Soccer Institute is in phase II for funding and development of an American La Masia with a full-time residential academy geared to high school students...not 8 year olds...which is a bit young to specialize kids and take away their youth life experiences.

For some...soccer is the way out of poverty...to fame and fortune...whereas most American children follow an educational plan and choose a variety of sport activities...as a young child.

Footnote: Players like Messi(actually from Argentina) are unique and he could be the best player in the world...ever. English clubs and Dutch clubs like Ajax have had similar academies for years...and yes Cruyff deserves a great deal of credit for his contribution as well as Louis Van Gaal and the 95/96 Ajax teams which championed "total Soccer" and played the beautiful game!

But to make an American comparison....Michael Jordan - the greatest basketball player did not develop in an Academy nor did most of the great players in the world like the inimitable Pele.; Reply to this comment

by joopkoopman January 7, 2013 1:57 PM EST

One factor in the success of Barcelona that deserves mention is the contribution of Johan Cruyff, the Dutch star, as both player and coach.Cruyff was briefly mentioned but his role, and that of a range of Dutch soccer stars that played for the team, has been crucial. Cruyff et al brought Ajax's brand of total football to Barcelona, which was a precursor of the precision passing system and the ability of all players to play both defensive and offensive roles. In some way, the Netherlands played a key role in creating the Spanish team that defeated them in the World Cup in 2010.

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by ecani100 January 27, 2013 11:37 PM EST: You are 10000% correct! Johan Cruyff is FC Barcelona style :) He is the before and after in Catalan football(not only FC Barcelona) and consequently the Spanish National team.


by ecani100 January 28, 2013 2:54 AM EST: I wish CBS and 60 minutes would also talk about the American Youth players currently living and playing in Barcelonaas well as in Holland.

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