Barca's academy talents Guiu & Yamal show La Masia DNA key to the club's success

Thirty-three seconds. That is all that 17-year-old Marc Guiu needed to score on his debut for Barcelona last month. His mother was in tears. Xavi was vindicated. Just the latest example of the club’s trust in La Masia, their famed academy, being rewarded.

There is Gavi and there is Pedri, there is Lamine Yamal and there is Fermin Lopez. Now, there is Guiu. His Instagram account had 44,000 followers before that kick of the football. Within hours, it had topped one million. Another overnight success story, or so it seems.

The truth is a little different.

"Now, everybody is talking about Marc Guiu," Albert Capellas tells Sky Sports. "But he arrived at the club 10 years ago when he was seven years old. That means that the club has had to wait 10 years before he could play for the first team. It is a long time."

Capellas spent more than a decade working in Barcelona's academy himself. He was there when Xavi, Andre Iniesta, Sergio Busquets and, of course, Lionel Messi, transformed the game and showed that could be done with a team built around academy graduates.

He does not talk of coaching those greats but learning from them. "I trained Iniesta for several years and I always say that Iniesta came into this world to show us how to play football. It is the same with Busquets. You do not correct them. They show you the way."

And yet, he knows how difficult it is to go on that journey through Barcelona's academy. Especially when it is so tempting for clubs to opt for a quicker fix. "In football, you do not get time, and that makes these long-term projects more difficult to achieve," says Capellas.

"This is why it makes sense for clubs to start with a different strategic model to Barcelona. Because when they sign players at 16, if they