The quarry of Europe

The French newspaper L'Equipe pointed out on Tuesday, in an information related to the second leg of the second round of the Champions League between PSG and Barcelona, the special status of both clubs as talent-building teams in Europe. In the statistics provided by the French newspaper, obtained with information compiled by the CIES Football Observatory, the Culé club appears as the second with the most players from its quarry in the five major leagues, with 32; PSG is fourth, with 29, with Lyon in between (31). And at the top of the list appears Real Madrid, with a notable distance from the second: 44 footballers, 12 more than Barcelona. The Madrid team is the quarry of Europe.

To prepare the list, CIES has been based on the qualification that FIFA gives of what a youth squad is: You must have played for at least three years between 15 and 21 to be considered formed by that club; players like Casemiro and Valverde, who played a year with Castilla after being signed from other clubs, they do not meet this condition and therefore they do not enter the list, for example. With this established limit, CIES has compiled the players who have officially participated this season and Madrid appears as the club of the five major tournaments (Spain, England, Italy, France and Germany) with the most youth players present in them.

They are, specifically: Nacho, Carvajal, Lucas, Mariano, Altube, Arribas, Marvin and Chust (Real Madrid), Torró (Osasuna), Álex and Quezada (Cádiz), Pacheco, Edgar and Burgui (Alavés), Marcos Llorente and Hermoso (Athletic), Soria and Yáñez (Getafe), Soldado (Granada), Melero and Dani Gómez (Levante), Baeza (Celta), Plano and Javi Sánchez (Valladolid), Mosquera, Valera and Seoane (Huesca), Óscar (Seville), Cherysev and Sobrino (Valencia), Parejo (Villarreal), Marcos Alonso (Chelsea), Kiko Casilla and Diego Llorente (Leeds), Mata (Manchester United), Reguilón (Tottenham), Sarabia and Jesé (PSG), Mascarell (Schalke 04), Borja Valero and Callejón (Fiorentina), Mayoral (Roma), Achraf (Inter) and Morata (Juventus).

Of the 44, 31 play in Spain, five in England, another five in Italy, two in France and one in Germany. The weight of Real Madrid within the training clubs of the Old Continent is also notable on a global level, beyond the five main championships: it is the sixth team with the most homegrown players in Europe, with 64, in a list led by Partizan Serbian, with 85, and in which the next Spanish club is Barcelona, ​​with 50.

The youngest signings in Europe

The players of the Madrid quarry outside the five most important leagues are: Benavente (Antwerp), Álvaro Martín (Sibenik), Rafa Páez (NK Istra), Héctor Martínez (AEK Lárnaca), Reguero (HJK Helsinki), Juankar (Panathinaikos), Medina (Panetolikos), José Rodríguez (Maccabi Haifa), Craninx (Molde), Ramírez (Lech Poznan), Mario Rodríguez (Warta Poznan), Jean Carlos (Wisla Cracovia), Ángel García (Wisla Plock), Javi García and Alberto Bueno (Boavista), Grau (Tondela), Martín Calderón (Paços Ferreira), Abner (Farense), Adam (Sporting de Portugal) and Mejías (Dinamo Bucharest).

Also according to information obtained by CIES, Real Madrid is the club of the five major leagues that bets most decisively on young talent: its current members of the first team were recruited with an average age of 22.2 years, the lowest average, followed by Leipzig (22.3) and Nice (22.5). This is confirmed by the theory that Florentino Pérez has been raising in recent times, as a formula to combat the economic power of the state clubs: sign young talent at a moderate price (or not so moderate) in the hope that he will prosper in Madrid and end up giving performance, whether sports, economic or both.