⚽️ Are Barcelona building their next great team — or jeopardising it?
My Week in Sport(s): Barça relying on La Masia, the Panthers and Chloe Primerano
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
⚽️ Barcelona leaning heavily on their future stars
🏉 The Penrith Panthers winning another Grand Final
🏒 Chloe Primerano’s college hockey debut
⚽️ Are Barcelona building their next great team — or jeopardising it?
I write often in this newsletter about ‘minutes played’ being the most underused statistic in sports analysis.
The rough thinking? Not all players who play lots of minutes are great — but all great players play lots of minutes.
As a measure, though, it can also be a warning sign.
This was apparent recently in the world of men’s football. Rodri — who has played almost three quarters of the available minutes for Man City in all competitions since he joined the club in 2019 — warned in September that players are “close to” going on strike over the ever-increasing volume of matches on their schedules.
10 days later, he was sidelined for the remainder of the 2024-25 season with a ruptured cruciate ligament.
The midfielder won’t be appearing for Spain during the current international break, then.
Two players who will, though, are kids from a Spanish club who have come in for particular criticism over their workload management in recent seasons: Barcelona’s 17-year-olds Pau Cubarsí and Lamine Yamal.
Both are already crucial contributors at club level — and Yamal established himself during this summer’s European Championship as a key player for Spain.
As most of you will know, it’s far from unusual for Barcelona to blood their future stars so young. Their youth academy, La Masia, is a key pillar of their identity — to an extent that is unusual among the wealthiest and most successful clubs in world football.
We can quantify this by comparing how they’ve allocated their minutes to the approach of their great rivals Real Madrid, who have an extremely productive academy of their own1 — but don’t rely on it to the same degree.
Joan Laporta’s election as president of FC Barcelona for the first time in 2003 is something of a turning point in the club’s recent history, so for this analysis we’ll consider data from the 2003-04 season onwards.
Since then, players in their age-192 seasons or younger have played 5.5% of Barça’s La Liga minutes in total — while players in that age category have contributed only 2.7% of Madrid’s.
The gap is particularly stark at 16 and 17: the Catalan club have given 1.1% of their league minutes to players of each age, while their rivals have allocated practically none to players in either category.
The chart below plots the difference in minute share for players of each age between the two clubs in percentage-point terms.
The 1.1-point differences at both 16 and 17 are by far the largest observed in Barcelona’s favour at any age — and indicate a clear bias towards playing young players, compared to Real Madrid.
There is an equally marked swing back to Madrid when considering minutes allocated to players in their early peak: there are 1.0-, 2.0- and 0.7-point differences in their favour at ages 21, 22 and 23 respectively.
Despite this, they’ve clearly been outperformed by Barça in La Liga over this 22-season stretch.
The Catalans have won 11 of the 21 titles to have been awarded since Laporta’s first election, taking 2.3 standings points per game to Madrid’s 2.2; their average scoring margin of +1.5 goals per game is also about 15% better than Madrid’s mark of +1.3.
It’s maybe not surprising, then, that they’ve seen no reason to change their approach to backing youth with their latest golden generation.
And new manager Hansi Flick has brushed off concerns over the workload he’s given Yamal, in particular:
I’m generally in favour of starting from the position that people inside professional sports teams have access to much better information than we do on the outside, and use it more effectively to make better decisions.
Even if Barça’s internal data on Yamal’s condition shows no reason to be concerned, though, recent history is another matter.
Yamal and Cubarsí are both on track to become the most heavily used teenagers of the club’s modern era. Partway through their age-17 seasons, they have already clocked up over 2,000 league minutes; only five teenagers in Barça’s recent history have played more in La Liga.
Three of those five played significant minutes at age 16, like Yamal and Cubarsí did — and this is where the alarms start blaring.
All three players — Ansu Fati, Bojan Krkić and current squad member Gavi — missed significant time with major injuries3 before they were out of their teens. Ansu tore his meniscus in his age-17 season, Gavi his cruciate ligament in his age-18 season and Bojan his cruciate ligament in his age-19 season.
And two of those listed higher in the table above who debuted at 17 also suffered major injuries in their teenage years: Alejandro Balde lost a chunk of his age-19 season to a tendon rupture, and Pedri’s age-18 season was plagued by hamstring trouble.
Among teenagers who’ve played more for the club over this period, that leaves Lionel Messi — who was managed much more carefully, and without whom the club’s last two decades would have looked very different.
The club really needs to take more care of its top prospects, then, if it hopes to keep its long run of success going.
One of Barça’s former academy directors, Jordi Roura, happens to agree. He told The Athletic last month:
It’s worth saying that this may be as much to do with the quality of physical training and care provided by the club to all of its players, irrespective of their age — and Flick does seem to have changed things up a bit on that front4.
So I would love to be wrong to be concerned — and to spend the next decade or more watching Yamal and Cubarsí dominate European football5.
Certainly, as Flick says: “At the moment, everything is fine.”
But, as the example of Rodri shows, we shouldn’t pretend we aren’t aware of the risks that come with players being forced to play so much football6 — especially those who haven’t even reached adulthood yet.
I’ll give the last word on that to Roura:
🏉 Run the Numbers
Back in February, I suggested in this newsletter that the Penrith Panthers’ run of domination in men’s rugby league might be coming to an end — given the significant squad turnover the league’s salary cap forced upon them, and the degree to which their success was down to their on-field cohesion.
Then, last Sunday, they went and won their fourth straight NRL Grand Final.
Was I wrong to be worried about their defence?
The Panthers did take a step backward on both sides of the ball in 2024. Their average points margin was only +7.8 per game in the regular season, compared to +13.9 a year earlier.
Not far off half of that regression was on the defensive side of the ball: they conceded 7 points per game fewer than league average this year, compared to almost 10 per game fewer in 2023.
In that piece earlier this year, we looked at each NRL club’s 13 most frequently used players over the five seasons to 2023. 10 of Penrith’s 13 started the 2024 Grand Final — but two more are set to leave the team this offseason7.
The club’s list of incoming transfers is much shorter than their outgoings, though. Unsurprisingly, the Panthers are doubling down on promoting from within.
🏒 Watch the Games
Like Yamal and Cubarsí, Chloe Primerano is another 17-year-old athlete who has stepped up to adult competition sooner than expected.
In her case, though, the jump isn’t quite as big: she elected to graduate from high school in Canada a year ahead of schedule, so that she could play college ice hockey in the United States earlier than planned8.
Playing at the University of Minnesota, which has a strong track record in women’s hockey, she has a goal and two assists in four games so far.
Primerano plays as a defender9, but you often see her around the net in the offensive zone in her highlight reels — and her first goal for the Gophers saw her drifting up the rink into these areas.
With just over a minute to go on the power play in the first period, Minnesota has the puck behind the net in the offensive zone. More importantly — as Primerano quickly spots — all four UConn skaters have their heads turned towards the player in possession.
This allows her to sneak from the left point down below the face-off dots, arriving in a prime scoring position before her opponents even realise she’s a threat.
Primerano taps the ice to alert her teammate to the space; the puck is delivered right into her shooting pocket; and she sends a one-timer past the blocker of the UConn goalie with ease.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday October 26th.
I’m using FBref’s ‘Age at season start’ for this analysis; for winter leagues like Spain’s top division, this is calculated as at August 1 in a given year. (It’s worth noting that, when using current-season data, you always have to recalculate this manually.)
All injury information is per Transfermarkt.
Managed well, there is also a clear benefit to blooding a group of young players early and keeping them together in the name of developing cohesion.
Although I do agree with that fans shouldn’t necessarily feel complicit; you can read her recent piece on the topic here.
Jarome Luai — whose departure was flagged in February — and James Fisher-Harris; another starter, Sunia Turuva, will also play elsewhere next year.
This piece in The Athletic — by Hailey Silvian and Thomas Drance — is a good recap of her junior career, and preview of her time in college hockey.
I do also quite like ’ approach to positional terminology in hockey — referring to defenders as ‘backs’: “defensemen aren’t just defensive players the same way forwards aren’t just attacking players. The term back more accurately reflects their position, especially in the modern NHL where backs are more involved in offensive tasks such as rush offense”.
Ben, I heard somewhere that Wayne Rooney had faced the same circumstances, with him getting burnt out in his early 30s, when he re-joined Everton, right. Currently, Bukayo Saka can face the same consequence and is currently injured as well, with heavy workload put on by Arsenal on him with PL, UCL, FA and Carabao cups & England matches.
Really fascinating stuff about Barcelona. I’d be curious to know if there’s a tipping point for injuries by age. Do they drop off substantially (or even at all) after, say, 19?
Like you said, Barcelona’s probably got a tighter grasp on the data than the public ever will, but that’s something I feel like could definitely inform their approach to create more sustainability.