Could ‘Baby Barça’ be the club’s salvation in 2024/25?

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Is Flick brave enough?

Yes it was ‘only’ pre-season, but beating a Manchester City side in any game has to be seen as a positive for Barcelona.

More so given just how many youngsters Hansi Flick decided to try out.

The German’s brief is likely to be similar to Xavi’s in the sense that he needs to be giving youngsters a genuine pathway into the first team

Continuing to ensure that La Masia is getting back to somewhere approaching its former glories has to also be one of the key tenets of Joan Laporta’s presidency moving forwards.

He, along with culers in the stadium and watching on worldwide, will surely have been delighted with the way that Marc Bernal and Marc Casadó performed in Orlando on Tuesday night.

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The club have long pined for a suitable successor to Sergio Busquets, and given that they don’t have the funds to buy a ‘Busi-lite’ at this point, the emergence of Casadó and particularly Bernal will really have given Flick food for thought.

The German coach could certainly do worse than blood a few youngsters in the opening games of the new campaign, and given that the focus has consistently been on bringing in a holding midfielder, Casadó and Bernal might well have just saved their club a few million euros in the transfer market if they can hit the ground running just like club colleagues Fermin López and Pau Cubarsí did in 2023/24.

If the core of the first team again comes from the club’s academy, there’ll be a real sense of pride from the locals in the stands. There’s nothing quite like seeing ‘one of your own’ get right to the very top after all.

Of course, there’s a long way to go for the pair in terms of imposing themselves on the first team, ditto the likes of Pau Víctor, Toni Fernández and Guillermo ‘Guille’ Fernández.

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However, the green shoots appear to be there, and that is really encouraging from Barça’s point of view.

If Hansi Flick is brave enough too, we might even be able to doff our collective caps, should things work out in the way that everyone hopes.

It will be a delicate balancing act to get right, and there might well be some abject failures before the successes that every culer will desire, but there’s a very real sense of nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Source: barcablaugranes.com