Peter the Great
- football's quiet revolutionary
Chapter Eighteen
In 1971 a team from Spain had approached Michels to become its manager. It was Barcelona, a club, which in truth Barcelona had been for a decade not a particularly successful. In part Franco, Spain's leader, El Generalissimo, had seen to that with the Spanish regime's support, financial and otherwise, of Real Madrid the Catalan club would permanently play second fiddle. And Franco was alive, if not exactly kicking. He would die in 1975. However, for almost a decade the club had also had a stream of mainly Hispanic managers, some lasting just months, who had not cut the mustard. The last La Liga win had been in 1960 under Hellenio Herrera, an Argentinean who had then moved to Italy. In the interim the only trophies were a Fairs Cup and two Copas del Rey, the last of which was won in 1968 by Salvador Artigas, who in October 1969 left to become what turned out to be a not very successful manager of the Spanish national team. His seat was filled by the Barcelona Amateur team coach for two months before the club finally brought itself to look abroad to its first Englishman for thirty-seven years. He was Vic Buckingham.
Buckingham would stay at the Camp Nou for the rest of the season and the whole of the next, at the end of which he would win the Copa del Rey and then be poached, presumably for better money, by Sevilla. It was to be the first of a litany, albeit a small litany, of mistakes that would blight the remainder of the Buckingham career in the game but in the meantime on arrival in Catalonia he had clearly not liked what he had found, particularly in attack. In his first part season at Barca eight new players came in, four of them forwards, then in 1970 it was five more and, whilst defence and midfield were left more or less intact, all the forwards of two years earlier were gone,. And in 1970 too there was one more event that often goes under the radar. It was under Buckingham's watch, on 12th June that Barcelona B, the internal rather than external feeder team playing the same system as the senior one, was founded as Barcelona Atletic.
In fact the Barcelona mid-field would remain more or less intact, with two important additions, for not just the year and bit of Buckingham's tenure but the full six years of his and that of his successor. That successor was Rinus Michels, who worked with what he had been bequeathed for a season, began to make adjustments throughout the team in 1972-73, making more the following season and bringing in one of the club's, indeed, the World's greatest players. That player was, of course, one he knew very well, Ajax and Holland's Johan Cruyff. Together in 1974 they took La Liga, the first for fourteen years, with amidst more changes in preparation for the 1974-75 campaign Michels then returning to the same well to bring in Johan Neeskens.
As it happens Barcelona's winning of La Liga in 1974 was to be the only time under Michels. Having been Holland's manager at the 1974 World Cup, in 1975 he returned to Ajax. It was a move with the agreement of Camp Nou that in reality had been made with an eye on Holland and the 1976 European Championship. Michels would return to the Catalan club in 1976 but only after the Dutch team had not only qualified for the first time for the European competition's final stages but also almost won the competition. Barcelona had in effect lent their manager to oversee qualification even though the national team would officially be managed by George Knobel, who had spent the 1973-74 season as Ajax boss, then Ajax itself finished, or perhaps was allowed to finish, at the end of the 1975-6 season third in the Eredivisie, just as it had the year before and Holland only lost in the semi-finals after extra time to the eventual winners, Czechoslovakia, finishing third with a team that was largely the same as two years earlier but with a slightly reduced Ajax presence. Van Kraay had replaced Arie Haan, Willy van de Kerkhof van Hannegem and both the replacements played for PSV.
In Michels absence the Barcelona coach had been the German, Hennes Weisweiler. He clearly believed that he had been chosen on merit. That might have been the case but Cruyff never accepted him and the suspicion remains that, although he arrived with a plan to revamp the team, he was merely a stop-gap. He brought in six players, three of whom Michels retained on his return and to which he added a further five in the first season back and and five more in the second. That second season Barcelona won Copa del Rey once again but still more important than that were plans clearly Cruyff, and possibly Michels, must have had in mind for some time. They might have left the club, both to the expanding American league, to Los Angeles Aztecs, Michels at the end of the 1977-78 season, Cruyff in 1979, but in 1978 Jose Luiz Nunez had been elected, in a Catalonia finally free from Francoist shackles, as Barcelona president and by early 1979 the old farm-house close to Camp Nou that had been the social club was opened as a residence for the youth academies, or rather the different levels of club's youth structure with Cruyff directly credited with convincing the new appointment of the necessity of the new facility. The old farm-house is, of course, officially called La Masia, literally “The Farmhouse”, but it is not per se a training school but there to house, to board, young players brought in from outwith the Barcelona area and not able to travel in daily.
Barcelona's training system is still essentially that of Ajax with its teams of children from the age of six upwards playing the same system 4.3.3. but with the inauguration of La Masia with one essential augmentation. As Ajax had extended one part the original McWilliam idea of taking players immediately on leaving school to coaching children of a much younger age, it had confined its catchment to Amsterdam and even its part of Amsterdam, ignoring the other McWilliam innovation, the taking in of potential from throughout the country. Remember Arthur Rowe might have been a very boy local to Spurs but Vic Buckingham was from Greenwich, Charlton country, Ron Burgess was Welsh and Bill Nicholson was born and raised in North Yorkshire, coincidently or not just forty miles from the McWilliam's Redcar home. Now at Barcelona both were possible. It not only coached players from the city starting from that same younger age but with La Masia was able to bring in talent from the rest of Catalonia, from the rest of Spain and eventually beyond and, as they all progressed, they were channelled and sifted through the 'C' team, into the 'B' team, that were not just reserve squads but themselves clubs playing League football in their own right, albeit at lower levels. Recently the 'C' team was done away with but the 'B' remains and players are recruited to it from many sources, external and internal, and moved, essentially 'transferred, from it to the First team at a notional cost. It is the 'B' team that is, if you like, an internal Northfleet or even Margate. It rests now on an Ajax-like structure but in part by chance or design pre-dates that structure's arrival and has a more directly McWilliamesque source.
Barcelona 'B' began life as a separate club, UE Espanya Industrial. It was the works team of a business owned by a man, who in 1943, was briefly Barcelona president. It was he who decided that his firm's team should be a feeder to Barcelona and so it remained, playing in lower leagues until 1956. However, it became successful in its own right, became FC Condal, and even in 1956 played in La Liga for a season but was promptly relegated. It then languished for a decade but in 1965 was brought back under the Barcelona wing, once more as a feeder club. This was under president Enric Llaudet. Then in 1968 it was by Barcelona merged with another club, which itself was a merger of two more. One of them was FC Sabra I Coats, the “Coats” being the Scottish cotton-thread maker,J & P Coats of Paisley, which had a share in original factory from which the football club emerged. In addition Coats and a Scottish lace-maker, Johnston Shields, had had an important part to play in the formation of FC Barcelona itself. Several of the Scots brought in to start the cotton and lace mills had played in early Barcelona teams. Thus Barcelona's First team and now its feeder team had taken different routes but shared origins.
The newly merged team was called Barcelona Atletic and, whilst it was integrated into Barcelona F.C. in a way neither Northfleet or Margate had been at Spurs and Arsenal, it still might have remained peripheral. But this is where Barcelona got lucky. By chance Atletic's emergence preceded the arrival in 1969 of Vic Buckingham by literally months. He had seen, indeed, been through the Tottenham system, through external Northfleet. He understood at first hand the basic philosophy and objectives, as first expounded by Peter McWilliam. Remember what McWilliam had said,
“I am a great believer in bringing in young players straight from school and indoctrinating them with the Spurs way of playing football. That way you get continuity running through every team from youth, through the “A” side and reserves and up to the first-team. We train the players to have only good habits.”
He had also from outside observed at Tottenham internal coaching in combination with outside sourcing of players, first under Arthur Rowe and then Bill Nicholson. But he knew more. He had in addition directly seen essentially the same philosophy extended, expanded albeit in a form particular to Ajax in that club's system of purely internal coaching, And, moreover, whilst he believed in not just it but all of it he also could see, given the right circumstances, as it happened Barcelona circumstances, how it could be taken further still.
Thus it was under his, Buckingham's watch at Barcelona that the creation of a different but still McWilliam-based hybrid was begun. It was not a Tottenham clone but a Spanish adaption, made both possible and also shaped by that country's league regulations and it consisted not just of Atletic, which was not "The Reserves" but separately-run as effectively the 'B' team. To it Buckingham on arrival added also what was to become known as the 'C' team, evolved from Barcelona Amateurs, both 'B' and 'C' as not simple business relationships but part of the Barcelona nuclear family yet of necessity due to Spanish league rules playing, it has again to be stressed, neither in specially contrived reserve leagues as in Britain but in their own right in the tough, lower divisions of the Spanish football league.