Visca Barça: Building your own Barcelona

I just love how, with the success of FC Barcelona and the Spanish National team playing essentially the same model of football, it seems everyone now wants to copy that sort of expansive style. Buy a Xavi, partner him with an Iniesta and cover them with a Busquets type. Buy some interchangeably pacy, waterbug-style strikers and teach them that tiki-taka, one-touch style that everyone´s raving about. Florentino Perez wants it. Roman Abramovich fired José Mourinho because he wouldn´t adapt to it, and practically every sound tactician in today´s game has to suffer the indignity of a quick comparison to the brand of football played at the Camp Nou. Even Arsene Wenger, who has modeled his Arsenal squad along similar principles, suffers from the comparisons. The Gunners control possession in a similar manner, they press you in a similar manner, and they attack into space along similarly designed principles. They even have a youth-team set-up that models their play, from the youngest trainee to the captain of the first-team, on one standard approach.

Then why is it that this group at FC Barcelona are so successful and how do other clubs replicate that? It seems like they have discovered some developmental process that creates similar players with interchangeable parts, capturing essentially lightning and bottling it. They haven´t.

While most clubs are developing stronger, taller, and more athletic players, and competing with each other for that distinct talent base I might add, Barcelona have stocked up on players that in any other system might have languished on the bench. They compete with far fewer clubs for the services of players like Messi who was deemed too small, Iniesta too slight, and Xavi too slow, but whose footballing intelligences are extremely high. They play well together and they cover for each other. Clubs may say they want to build their own Messi but how many really follow through on it? They might look at a Bojan but they still prefer a Droga.

FC Barcelona is also one of the last places to find the Dutch system of Total Football in the modern age. Now, you won´t see David Villa playing center-back, like Cruyff did at times, or Gerard Pique bombing it down the left wing for that matter, but Barcelona do owe alot to the Clockwork Oranje of the 1970´s. They pressure you and they create mismatches, but most importantly they attack in areas of space that you have vacated. They also expose themselves, some say unnecessarily or naively, but it is just a different approach, one from a different era. How many clubs would allow themselves the luxury of developing a system that might take years to perfect and tinker with? Arsenal are a perfect example. Arsene Wenger is now on year seven of what seems like a Soviet-era five year plan to rebuild the club after his Untouchables and the club´s supporters have about had it with him.

Now don´t take this as a slight on any one club, Real Madrid or any other, the modern game is a very different animal from the one that Johan Cruyff played in or even coached in. His system works in Barcelona because of very specific historical precedence. It fits the culture of the club and it works for Spain, right now, because the backbone of the Spanish set-up from the World Champions to the U-17´s and below is riddled with youngsters being trained at La Masia. That can just as easily change in one generation if the pipeline stops at Barcelona and another cantera starts providing players using another model. 

Rather than hiring Txiki Begiristain to recreate the Nou Camp at Stamford Bridge and then pluck Pep Guardiola to run the show for him, Roman Abramovich should look to the template that already brought him success.