SOCCER: World’s team
The Hogwarts of sports is a sparkling steel-and-glass building in Sant Joan Despí, a sleepy suburb not far from the Gaudí-bejewelled centre of Barcelona. On a starlit night with breezes blowing in off the Mediterranean, the teams of FC Barcelona’s youth academy descend in waves of yellow onto a manicured practice pitch. They march down from La Masia (the Farmhouse), the name given to the 300-year-old residence that housed Barça’s first academy and transferred to the decidedly less bucolic school at the club’s new €50 million training headquarters.
It’s a special evening, a chance for Barça to shoot team photographs under the floodlights and present its best and brightest to a gathering of proud parents in the stands. A phalanx of taxis waits in the parking lot, meters running, ready to ferry teen and pre-teen prospects from Catalonian towns back to their homes, as they do every night at the club’s expense. Most of the remaining two thirds of the academy’s players — boarders from other Spanish regions and a dozen countries — live on site in an educational and sporting laboratory that is both nurturing and fiercely competitive.
