La Masia

Grimaldo is being introduced slowly by Eusebio and mostly played as LW recently...

http://gfycat.com/BlaringWelllitGraysquirrel

B team 3rd on the league table and only 6 points off the top!!  

Unless he becomes the 2nd choice goalie, he probably wont get his own thread.

So untill then, here will have to do

Clearly has a trend for these spectacular goals, starting to really see the talent.

The boy will become a massive problem for teams who like to defend deep.

Barcelona youth teams have this season won 15 of the 16 leagues in which they took part, an all-time club record.

hope we pump out some new puyol or something soon, because we're going to be stuck with mascherano for a while apparently.

Barca B will have some insane talent next season. After losing Rafinha, Deulofeu, Luis Alberto who were responsibe for roughly 80 % of the goals in the previous season it took them a while to get going with the new young promoted players. Still managed to finish strong (3th). Next season I expect Grimaldo, Ie, Samper, Adama, Munir, Halilovic to kick some real ass. Denis Suarez will get loaned to a La Liga team IIRC.

Have to admit I appreciate our talents even more now after watching Real Madrid Castilla yesterday. They were spectacularly awful. Didn't muster any meaningful attack together in a do-or-die game apart from set pieces (which Murcia were defending awfully).

Fußball wrote:Have to admit I appreciate our talents even more now after watching Real Madrid Castilla yesterday. They were spectacularly awful. Didn't muster any meaningful attack together in a do-or-die game apart from set pieces (which Murcia were defending awfully).

Most of Castilla's talents were gone though. Jesé, Morata, Carvajal and Casemiro all promoted to the first team and guys like Cheryshev were loaned/sold to other teams. Of course you could say the same for Barça B.

Goo d piece on Samper

http://www.espnfc.com/club/barcelona/83/blog/post/1986619/sergi-samper-barcelonas-modern-day-pep-guardiola

4-1 win against Zaragoza puts Barca B in 3th place after 3 games. The team is looking very strong despite being the youngest B team ever (or so I've read). Talent everywhere. Grimaldo is interestingly playing in midfield now. Eusebio the tactical mastermind.

Samper stylin' all over the pitch:

http://vine.co/v/OzaDE73160L

This Samper kid looks like he could be the real deal.

Meanwhile Castilla with zero points after three matches at the bottom of their group in Segunda B. I remember someone claiming a while back Madrid's talents were on par with Barcelona's. Well, suck on that troll...

Zidane

PS: Zaragoza

...weren't you the one saying that castilla = la masia?

Yeah

Jokes aside I think youth development should be about youth development and not results. I think winning mentality should be there but to make everything revolve around winning alone makes your players quite one dimensional. Fielding your strongest team every week and not allowing your bench players to get experience, not experimenting with players in different positions...these are the type of traits that has come quite evident in modern youth football.

Bergkamp wrote:In England, you have to win [youth level] games, so the coach is going to manage to win the game instead of developing the player. In my opinion it should be totally the opposite. Sometimes you you put a right-footed player who can't do anything with his left on the left side and force him to use his left foot. Of course in that game you will probably lose because you don't use your strongest players in their strongest position, but in the end you have a player who used his left foot when he was 12 and 13 and 14, and he can use both feet when he comes into the first team. That's what we have at Ajax and I really stand behind that.

Cruyff has said similar things in the past, I think. Losing is more instructive to a player than winning. Which was always the argument against you using the ridiculous castilla better on the table therefore better than la masia argument

To be fair my argument was to say Castilla have also produced top talent in the past, the different with Barcelona's youth academy being that they never made it in the white shirt. Borja Valero, Mata and Negredo come to mind from recent memory.

Of course nowhere near Barcelona's or Ajax's golden generation but they are still fantastic players. And I'll be surprised if Barça or Ajax ever come close to repeating that.

I agree, as a youth coach I sure understand the theory...it really isnt about results. But at the same time, if you have talents and they learn well and progress, they will naturally get results.

The young players (and most players generally) are naturally incentivised by winning games and its only normal for them to truly feel the depth of their achievement (progress in ability) in wins and losses.

So, its a hard balance either way. You want to play your best players and do aswell as you can, but you also want there to be real progression.

In the end, we are talking Barca B here and I feel like yes the players have to learn and be complete players. But on a basic level you need results because you are playing against teams with players who should be of a lower technical standard than even the boys (thus them doing well should lead into results generally speaking). Plus just realistically speaking they need to stay in Segunda because thats where the biggest challenges they can face are and thats where they will learn the most, the toughest challenges.

Doesn't apply to Barca B anyway. Barca B's average age is 19.8. The second youngest team is 25.2 (Sporting Gijon). Basically the Barca players shouldn't even be in that division, their opponents are on average 5+ years older. Barca B is also playing the usual Barca system (high line, possession, controlling the game, which is a risk and often exposes them defensively at such a young age, when they lose games they lose it despite dominating usually but making comical defensive blunders). There isn't much "result-orientation" (older players playing over younger ones, playing defensive to get a result etc.). They are just that good.

Yep, which is slightly different to some years past when guys like Lomban were in the team for "experience" despite being totally useless.

So what do you guys make of Adama? The general consensus among Barca fans is that he's gonna be a world beater and he sure looks like it so far in the lower ranks. Personally I'm not so sure. So far he's profiting a lot from his unreal speed and strength. Guy looks even faster than Tello. Not sure this is going to work for him as well in first division football. He seems a classical winger who runs the flank up and down and sends in crosses primarily. Not convinced he'll be Barca first team material.

I would say he is faster than Tello.

I think he will be better than Tello, because he can actually dribble left or right and isnt so predictable. I think with Tello you know he is going down the line every single time and he uses the same fake Henry inside right finish.

Once you get tight to Tello and make him play with his back to goal, he is finished. Once you get close to him, before he gets the ball out from his feet, he is finished.

Adama is better than that, he can hold people off and he can twist and turn into different areas.

I am not convinced he is a world beater, I had this debate with Free_Cat a while ago. I think he will be a good player, a useful player..he might be able to stay with Barcelona for a long period of time even, but im not sure.

He has a lot of quality but also lots of competition
munir, deulofeu and maybe rafinha if we start using him as a forward now.
he can certainly stay with the squad but most likely will be a bench player.. or sold if he is patient he'll certainly see more game time, in 2016 i can see us selling Pedro so long as Suarez doesn't bite anyone else...

also saw a story that samper has a 9m release clause and arsenal triggered it but he wanted to stay with us, if true good kid like his loyalty.

I really hope we dont use Rafinha as a forward, he isnt one.

I dont know about the 9m release clause but when Arsenal stole Jon Toral they wanted Samper too (was playing alongside each other and may even have some kind of close friendship I think) but he declined.

Wenger is trying to snatch Samper for years now. First time I heard about those kind of rumours must have been 3 years ago if not further back. Here is an article from 2010: http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/arsene-wenger-tracking-barcelonas-new-1693565

Samper is legit. Won't be surprised if he does a Busquets and already ascends to the first team in the middle of the season, at worst next season. He looked near-ready in preseason.

Regarding Adama that's pretty much how I feel as well. He has more to his game than Tello for sure but there is still something 1-dimensional about him, if that's the correct description. Certainly for a Barca player.