Also breaking news: Barcelona have one of the best academies in the world.
exactly
and you also have to consider what happened to some barcelona wonderkids not called messi, i mean look at cuenca, alena, bojan or even ansu fati, they are dropping like flies and only the exceptional ones like pedri can have a proper career with them
but let's play 16 year olds so that we can call them shit in a month, shout "loan" or "sell" loud enough and never remember them again
just on a sidenote, i've got a friend who works for the goalie academy of király gábor as his part time job, and they receive some youth sector reports from the federation from time to time. he told me that it's reported that less than 2% (i remember 1.2%, not exactly sure about it) of the youth academy players become pro footballers, be it in hungary (3 pro divisions, inflated as fuck by corporate tax advances) or elsewhere. i've also read somewhere that the same rate is like 0.5% in england; of course the pl is pretty competitive, but we can safely say that becoming a pro footballer isn't an easy carreer path. the dropout rate in football is crazy and with some exceptions like marco motta, only the best make it. shitting on a 20-something year old local boy who fulfills his dream and finally plays for juventus as a homegrown player is simply pathetic