La Liga Gets Younger, Spain Gets Stronger: Spanish Football’s Homegrown Youth Revolution Explained

Spain’s triumph at Euro 2024 was more than just a trophy. Arriving 12 years after the nation’s golden period of 2008-2012 – one of the defining eras by any team – it was confirmation that La Roja were back at the top table of international football.

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Twelve years may be a long time by its basic definition, but in international football? Try telling England fans that constitutes a long wait.

For Spain, there would be no prolonged drought, no pining for an unrepeatable generation, and no arduous, decades-long reinvention of both style and type of footballers.

Though the likes of Sergio Busquets, Xavi, and Andrés Iniesta might never come along again, nobody was spending much time looking to the sky with their palms out.

Few would argue that Luis de la Fuente’s team were anything but Euro 2024’s best side. They were not merely winners who outlasted the rest. The eye test told us they were great, and the numbers confirmed it: seven games, seven wins, 15 goals scored, four goals conceded. Of the 715 minutes of football they played across the tournament, very few of which were against lower-ranked nations, they were behind for just over 33 of them.

Spain were rarely hit, never mind knocked down.

La Roja played a typically technical game in Germany, but it was their young, fleet-footed wide players – Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams – who were the difference makers. Perhaps in the future, it will be precisely those two figures who stand as the reference points of Euro 2024 and that Spain team, the differentiators who hang on to tell the story of the tournament and what it was that made Spain great, as well as different.

Yamal was selected as UEFA’s Young Player of the Tournament, while both players would later be immortalised in the Best XI.

Aged 17 and 21 at the start of the Euros, Yamal and Williams were a rare duo given their context. They were young, they played a lot, they produced a lot, and they did so in an international side who had not only won a major tournament, but dominated it in the process. Indeed, it was they who opened the door in the final against England, with Williams finishing off a jinking run and pass from Yamal to set Spain on their way.

It was a symbolic scene, especially with a nod to the nation’s future. The Spanish national team had worked their way back to major tournament success, but this time with two youngsters as their catalysts. To compare that to previous World Cup and Euros success, Yamal and Williams alone (911) almost accounted for the total minutes played by Spaniards aged 21 or younger across Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012 combined (984).

The bad news for the rest is that Spain are back on top. The worse news is that their resources, and capacity for staying power, are looking as plentiful as ever, courtesy of a youthful wave sweeping across the country’s top flight.

Fresh off seeing the national team lift the European Championship, the 2024-25 La Liga season has served to confirm that Spanish football’s age of opportunity has arrived.

Spanish Football’s Player Pathways Are Surging

When Valencia and Barcelona opened up their league campaigns at Mestalla in August, half of the outfield players to start the match were Spanish players aged 23 or under. It was the first time in 12 years that as many as 10 such players (including goalkeepers) had started in the same game in La Liga, and both sides had, conveniently, contributed five players each.

After more than a decade passing by without the situation being repeated, it would take just two months for the phenomenon of Mestalla to occur again. Espanyol’s trip to face Barcelona in November saw another 10 Spaniards aged no older than 23 across the two starting XIs. That meant that for something that had only happened five times in a La Liga game this century, 40% of those instances had come in the first half of 2024-25.

Those two games may represent momentary peaks, but the idea of La Liga getting younger and more Spanish is very much a trend. Since the start of 2020-21, the share of playing time for those players has been climbing season upon season – all up until the current one, where the situation has become as pronounced as ever.

Here in 2024-25, we’re now seeing a very notable peak for the prominence of young Spanish footballers in the country’s top flight.

Just over 17% of all minutes played in La Liga this term have been done so by Spaniards aged 23 or under – the biggest share in a single season this century. In terms of appearances, we’re now closer than ever before in that timeframe to a fifth of all La Liga appearances being made by a Spanish national aged 23 or younger (18.9%).

Those are the percentages, and the totals tell a story too. If we compare the half-season numbers for 2024-25 up against all other La Liga seasons since 2000-01, the trend is equally strong.

Accounting for all minutes played before January in each campaign, the current one saw season-high totals across the board for appearances, starts and minutes for Spanish players aged 23 or under.

Any of the three measures evidence the current boom, but it’s neat that for the first time this century, 1,000 such appearances were surpassed before the turn of the year (1,070). That’s an almost 100% increase on where things stood as recently as 2016-17 (564).

With the implications that stem from nationality, those in charge of guiding Spain’s next generations and working towards international football targets will be heartened to know that 2024-25 in La Liga is not only a peak within Spain.

Going back across the last 10 seasons in Europe’s big five leagues, La Liga’s current percentage of U23 minutes by Spaniards is the highest share of any of the five leagues and respective nationalities. In fact, before this season, the five season-highs in that period had all come from French youngsters playing in Ligue 1.

Why Are Young Spanish Players Playing So Much?

While the likes of Barcelona and Valencia are leading the way, it’s not the case that only a handful of clubs are doing the heavy lifting in La Liga and thus distorting the league-wide numbers.

Precisely half of the 20 La Liga teams have given 3,000 minutes to Spanish players aged 23 or under this term. To compare that up until January in previous seasons, that’s the highest number of teams to have done that since the 2004-05 campaign – before most of us had even heard the name of the competition’s greatest ever player, Lionel Messi.

Of course, there’s no uniform explanation for the sudden boon in La Liga. The explanations differ by club, and each have their own unique beliefs and motivations behind them. In that sense, perhaps urgency is the main differentiator we’re currently seeing.

Take Valencia, for example. Their academy has long been a reference point in Spanish football, but their economic situation has sped up those pathways more than would typically occur. For the east coast club, it has almost been a case of their production lines needing to be ready, rather than them serving as a luxury to top up a first team squad that was otherwise in good health. Fortunately for them Paterna has been ready to meet the demand, with a raft of Spain U21 internationals leading their fight against the drop.

The same can be levelled to Barcelona. Financial reasons have forced their hand when it comes to promoting youth players. In an ideal world, the balance of their squad wouldn’t be quite so young, and Hansi Flick would have greater seniority to complement those at the other end of the age scale.

At the same time, Yamal and Pau Cubarsí have already proven themselves as elite-level footballers. Yamal, for his part, has a decent claim to being among the 10 best players in the world in 2024, and is most certainly one of the best in Spain.

Then there are examples like Marc Casadó – oft-talked about, oft-touted as someone who might be useful if no signing took his place – now looking like a staple in Barcelona’s XI and expecting more national team involvement.

Further down on the urgency scale, but with ultimate priority for their academies, we find the likes of Athletic Club and Real Sociedad – both of whom have experienced upward trajectories in recent years.

While the former rely on their production lines given their policy of Basque-only players, La Real are much closer to their neighbours in mentality than they are to the average top-flight club. They currently operate with a 60/40 objective, which dictates that 60% of their first team squad will be made up of academy graduates and the remaining 40% by signings.

Meanwhile, president Jokin Aperribay recently stated his and Real Sociedad’s ambition to increase the share to as high as 80/20.

Another pertinent example from the north can be found in Vigo. After bringing in Rafa Benítez in the summer of 2023 – a decision Celta described as “the start of a new era full of expectations and ambition for the club” – the veteran coach wouldn’t even last the season.

Benítez had been a compromise on style and a change of tack. They had opted for his experience and hoped he would improve their chances of winning now in a more pragmatic way, rather than setting a course of long-term development.

Eighteen months on, Celta are currently thriving in a contrasting context, with former B-team coach Claudio Giráldez reigniting their optimism with a squad heavy on academy promotions and players he helped develop. What we see now is a total culture reversal to that of the Benítez era, where Celta snapped a 15-year streak of fielding at least one academy player in a league starting XI.

Throughout the division, examples of burgeoning Spanish talent are growing. Villarreal’s Álex Baena was La Liga’s most creative player in 2024, Girona’s Miguel Gutiérrez is its positionless star, Pablo Barrios has become an exception to the experienced rule in Simeone’s Atlético, Espanyol’s Joan García is already one of its best goalkeepers as a relative rookie, and Las Palmas’ Alberto Moleiro is a breakout star of 2024-25..

Beyond the sliding scale of urgency, though, exist a number of other factors. Ones that unite La Liga clubs from top to bottom.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had lasting effects on finances. However, it’s not only a shortage of excess cash that does for most. The salary limits enforced by La Liga mean that outward investment is – and often has to be – measured in its application.

“To the extent that we form more and better [players], the less need we’ll have to sign,” says Real Sociedad’s sporting director Roberto Olabe. “It’s evident that if you form a player, you don’t need that transfer cost,” adds Betis’ academy director Miguel Calzado.

The limits, which are intended to protect clubs from overspending and promote more balance across the division, set a number on what each organisation can spend in a given season based on their financial reality. And with budgets tightened, more clubs are beginning to follow the likes of Real Sociedad in looking inwards more often than they do outwards.

“Nowadays it’s important to have players of a lower cost in the first team, [either] to generate money or performance,” said Celta Vigo boss Giráldez in a recent interview with MARCA. “It’s an intelligent way to survive, building teams that are rooted in their fanbase and their cities.”

In the current circumstances, it’s as important as ever for clubs to have strong links to their academy. Ensuring that players are capable of arriving has big implications not only for rounding out squads and producing performance, but for looking after their economic state.

In fact, even in the case of Real Madrid – the team who have the least need to push academy players into their first team in La Liga – the money they often generate through selling those players is consequential. (Not to mention, many of those go on to contribute elsewhere in Spanish football.)

From top to bottom in La Liga, it’s clear that young Spaniards are now serving a range of functions for teams. Like most things, however, the sticking power of the trend will no doubt be tied to its success.

If the clubs at the right end of the top flight can sustain that ‘success’ and its varying measurements while leaning on their academy to a greater extent, the homogeneity will grow across Spanish football.

Just as La Liga were intending.

Development of Academies

Despite the varying motivations by team – all of whom operate in different contexts – the attention to detail at academy level in Spanish football runs throughout the country. Indeed, the boom of youth players currently playing in La Liga is far from a random event. Academy success has been a strength of the country long before 2025.

Nevertheless, furthering its progress has rarely been off the agenda. Between the relevant entities and the clubs themselves, driving the production of academy players is a long-term objective that Spanish football treats with short-term attention.

Back in 2022, La Liga presented its initiative El Plan Nacional de Optimización y Mejora de Canteras (The National Plan of Optimisation and Improvement of Academies). The project was created to help the collective strength of club academies, create collaboration and homogenisation between them, and reinforce the country’s existing position when it came to development success with updated processes and infrastructure. In turn, they expected it to promote sustainability for clubs, while strengthening the medium- to long-term prospects of La Liga itself.

“They share models of working, and clubs even invite others to their complexes to see how they work with the academy players,” explains Juan Florit, the head of La Liga’s Football Department. “They’re still rivals, but they see that this shared knowledge is good for everyone. The collective sentiment that we wanted has been achieved.”

In the first two years of the project – which is programmed over 10-12 years – La Liga announced a 30% growth in academy performance. Further to that, more than half of the 42 clubs involved – across the country’s top two tiers – had fulfilled 60-70% of their objectives in the plan’s first phase. 

While the project has been embraced by many clubs, those with less of a natural incentive to get behind it are part of the thinking too. In the second phase of La Liga’s plan, which will begin next season, one of the most popular options put forward has been for the promotion of academy players to be tied to a club’s salary limit. In short: the greater the link between academy and first team, the looser the economic controls will be.

“The academy can and should be one of the main pillars of growth for any club. Some already have an important part of the path laid out, and are showing with solid projects and a bit of patience that you can achieve great results, both in sporting terms and economic and institutional ones.”

Juan Florit, head of La Liga’s Football Department

For now, the clearest benefit of Spain’s youth resurgence has been the most basic one of all: providing real-time performance. More so than at any point this century, La Liga clubs are leaning on young Spanish players and seeing reinforced cases not only in their own clubs, but throughout the country.

Where other countries have enforced changes in the wake of difficult moments, Spanish football has done so from a position of strength. In 2022 – the same year that La Liga unveiled its new national plan – the CIES Football Observatory already highlighted Spanish clubs at the forefront of Europe when it came to minutes played by academy players. 

“We mustn’t forget that there are constantly more countries, leagues and federations that are looking to improve and strengthen their youth development, for which we can’t get left behind,” says Florit.

In the foreword to Iker Muniain’s autobiography – the player who made 560 appearances for Athletic Club, and who stands as one of the great homegrown examples in Spanish football this century – his former manager Joaquín Caparrós wrote:

“To survive in this dizzying and uncontrolled football, of much noise, of little pause, with the memory of a fish, we need good news; stories of attachment to the land and to the colours.”

Spanish football is in the midst of a changing dynamic; one that interweaves through organisation in some places and disorganisation in others, and where design has been supplemented by circumstance.

Whether it’ll one day be changed rather than changing, only time will tell.

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