For Barcelona, imitation is the sincerest form of football flattery

Everything the Primera Liga champions touch turns to gold as teams from all across Europe are trying to mimic the world's most successful club, writes Ian Hawkey.

Barcelona are the only European club to have played continental football every season since 1955 and are one of three clubs to have never been relegated from the Spanish Primera Liga. Josep Lago / AFP

It is hard to look at the new European football season and avoid the pattern of cherry-and-blue stripes. There are so many clubs who want to be like Barcelona, even if the most repeatedly successful team of the past eight years are showing signs of apprehension, uncertainty and transition.

In sport, copycat tendencies are inevitable. Among the fascinations are the elusiveness of the winning formula.

Barcelona have long seemed close to it, and appeal to the principal strands of the football industry: beautiful to watch, good for business, creative on the pitch, great at nurturing talent in their development structures. Homegrown players who are the best at what they do, like Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, Carles Puyol, Sergio Busquets and Gerard Pique, are as attractive to shareholders as to supporters.

Those names are on so many rolls of honour now, both as European club champions, and – most of them – as international medallists with Spain, there is a natural urge for others to borrow whatever seed made Barca flourish.

Hence the scramble, from which scarcely any club president who aspires to seize the Uefa Champions League was exempt, over the six months between June 2012 and January 2013, for the services of Pep Guardiola, the coach who guided Barcelona through a gilded four seasons.

Bayern Munich made the most attractive offer to Guardiola and, between his agreeing to move to Germany and his beginning in a new post, that club won a treble, including the biggest prize, the European Cup. Which means Guardiola embarked on his first Bundesliga campaign, last night, the focus of curiosity and well aware that a whispered question for many months will be: how much Barcelona sheen do the behemoths of Bavaria really need?

Guardiola, who grew up in Barcelona's La Masia academy and played most of his career there, seemed to suggest Bayern needed to be a little more like Barca than they were in 2012/13, with his major foray in the summer transfer market.

Though Bayern have also added the gifted Mario Gotze, the Germany international, to their squad, Guardiola's guiding hand has been far more apparent in the signing of Thiago Alcantara, the Spain Under 21 captain. Guardiola gave Thiago his Barcelona debut as a teenager, and had followed his progress through La Masia from Thiago's childhood.

The capture was a coup for the Germans, given the competition for Thiago. Barcelona were reluctant to let him leave, but he had grounds to doubt how many opportunities he would be given in the first team. His concerns alerted Manchester United, the Premier League champions, whose sustained interest in Thiago, a midfielder with the vision associated with "The Barca Way" and considerable panache, was welcomed by the player until Bayern tempted him with a reunion with Guardiola.

United's response? To go back again to the Barca brand. They bid for Cesc Fabregas, a footballer whose place in the celebrated generational line of La Masia's creative midfielders is almost his birthright. Cesc was the child to whom Guardiola the player handed his jersey as a motivating gift; Cesc was The Next Xavi by the time he was 15 and, as he would tell the story, idolising Andres Iniesta. But Fabregas has so much Barca in his DNA, he is unlikely to join United from there.

If United's transfer targets suggest a fixation with adding a dash of Barca to their make-up, they are not alone for that. The big-spenders at Paris Saint Germain would like their midfield more regularly governed by the injury-prone Thiago Motta, once a contemporary of Xavi at La Masia.

Italy's ambitious Inter Milan have handed their status-laden No 9 jersey for the new campaign to the former Barcelona youth prospect Mauro Icardi. Ajax, chasing the Dutch league title, have signed the Barcelona born-and-bred Bojan Krkic to spearhead their attack.

United's neighbours, Manchester City, have meanwhile studied keenly Barcelona blueprints in forming their strategy. The direction in which their Abu Dhabi investors want to take the aspiring, big-budget City is evidently guided by approval of the Barcelona model. When City appointed Txiki Begiristain, a former teammate of Guardiola's at Barcelona, as their director of football, and Ferran Soriano, who was part of the junta who appointed Guardiola as Barca's young coach in 2008, as their chief executive, they did so on the basis of their work at the Spanish club.

A desire to build a club to La Masia specifications spreads even to English football's second-tier. At Brighton and Hove Albion, who last May came within a play-off semi-final of reaching the Premier League, the former Barcelona striker Oscar Garcia, 42, has been tasked, as their new coach, with taking the club that extra stride towards promotion - but also with bringing some Barca thinking to the south coast of England. Oscar, like his former teammate Guardiola, grew up through Barcelona's academy and cut his teeth, like Guardiola, as coach of the B team.

He knows his CV makes him the height of fashion, but says the copycat instinct among institutions wanting to replicate Barcelona's home-grown excellence should not misguide them into thinking La Masia is a magician factory.

"Barcelona have more than 30 years doing things their way," he said, "which means six-year-olds playing in the same way as the first team, so they grow up with that mentality and way of understanding the game. It's not easy to make that happen. You need a certain type of player, and a lot of time. Besides, football changes, the models evolve."

And nowhere do they feel that as keenly as at Barcelona right now. The post-Guardiola superstar club, remember, lost 7-0 on aggregate to the pre-Guardiola Bayern in the semi-final of the last Champions League.

They have just appointed a new coach who comes not from Catalonia nor their own youth development system, but from Argentina – Gerardo Martino – and there are hints that an approach that prioritises the La Masia graduates in the squad is becoming less dogmatic.

"The youth system here is not everything," said Javier Mascherano, the Barcelona and Argentina midfielder-defender, and one of several "outsiders" – like Dani Alves, Samuel Eto'o and perhaps now the new recruit Neymar – without whom the most imitated club of the century would not have become so fashionable.

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