Barcelona have lost their style of football, says Joan Laporta

The former president says things have changed at the Camp Nou

Former Barcelona president Joan Laporta came out in a bit of frustration against the Spanish champions. Laporta talked about the style of football that Barcelona currently deploy and how much it’s changed since he was president.

“Mes que un Club is not a slogan, it’s a declaration of principles. We have a reference which was the genuine style of football which Johan Cruyff taught us (...) we bet on the academy and now the club’s moved away from that.

“We did it because it was a way of being consistent with what we are, for the genuine style of playing football. Time has proved us right, they (the players and the coaches) were the real architects of that success.”

Joan Laporta | Source

The main takeaways from this seem to be that Laporta is disappointed with Barcelona’s style of play and also having moved away from seeing the academy as its main pipeline of talent. The way that things have seemed to work at Barcelona as of late is loaning academy talent away and bringing in high-priced talent from other clubs.

The debate will be whether or not the strategy has changed all that much, or if the talent just sometimes changes over one decade versus another. Scouting is difficult, and sometimes the player pipelines can be different depending on who is scouting them and when the team is able to asses the talent.

Source: barcablaugranes.com