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On Soccer

The Barca Way Spreads Far From Catalonia

The luminaries of Camp Nou, FC Barcelona’s longtime home, are much in demand throughout the world of soccer, from England to the Dominican Republic to Silicon Valley.Credit...Michael Regan/Getty Images

Everywhere you look, the fingerprints are visible. They are there in those places where the lights shine brightest, and they are there where the lights don’t shine at all.

At the summit of the Premier League; among the rich and famous of the Champions League; at suburban schools in the United States; at provincial, second-tier clubs in China; at village teams in Africa: In every corner of the world and at every level of soccer, there are indelible traces of Barcelona.

Wherever they are found, they are present for the same reason. Across the planet, the word Barcelona — the idea of Barcelona — has over the last decade come to connote not just success but beauty, too. That has inspired countless clubs, large and small, to try to distill and import the magic, to find someone to sprinkle a little of that stardust on them.

Pep Guardiola, a pioneer and product of Barcelona’s philosophy, once compared the club he graced as a player and manager to a church. “Johan Cruyff painted the chapel,” he said. “The coaches who follow merely restore or improve it.”

Others who have worshiped at its altar, or formed part of its congregation, though, have taken a different path: They have spread out into the world, to act as apostles of its philosophy.

Albert Benaiges, for example, has built a career as a roving ambassador for Barcelona, working in Dubai and Mexico before landing at Cibao in the Dominican Republic. “We are the reigning Caribbean club champions,” he said, proudly.

Everywhere he has traveled, the demand has been the same.

“People want to play beautiful football and win,” he said. “That is the Barcelona brand.”

Some of his teams have come closer than others — “it was easier in Mexico, with Chivas, where the quality was higher, than at Al Wasl, in Dubai,” he said — but then he is not employed to create identikit teams, pale imitations of the real thing. Rather, he is there to ensure players learn the game the same way they do in Catalonia.

“A style is something a team has, related to its ability, its climate, lots of things,” said Albert Puig, a former director of La Masia, the famed youth academy that nurtured the likes of Andres Iniesta, Gerard Pique and Lionel Messi.

He, too, has crossed the globe, spreading the word.

“The Barcelona model is a form of education. Football is a language. You have to learn and understand it before you can speak and write it.” Then, Puig said, “you can go and play whatever style you like. ”

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Clockwise from top left: Andoni Zubizarreta, Olympique de Marseilles sportive manager; Jose Ramon Alexanco, former Valencia CF sport director; Almerias Coach Sergi Barjuan; Manchester City Manager Pep Guardiola; LOSCs General Manager Marc Ingla; Manchester City’s Spanish Chief Executive Officer Ferran SorianoCredit...Photos by Agence France-Presse — Getty Images and Reuters

Barcelona meets Real Madrid this weekend in the first clasico of the season. Barcelona is ahead of its great foe in La Liga, as things stand, by 11 points. For two teams increasingly separated by the most slender of margins in almost every regard, it is a chasm.

On the field, though Real has the historic edge, the two have enjoyed similar success this century. Each has won the Champions League four times since 2001. Barcelona has eight Spanish championships to Real’s six in that time period. Both believe they boast the world’s best player.

Financially, Real Madrid is the more successful. The auditor Deloitte had rated Real the richest club in the world for more than a decade, until this year, when Manchester United took the title. Socially, Barcelona has the edge, claiming around 190 million worldwide followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, compared to Real Madrid’s 182 million.

And yet, in one measure, the gap between the two is clear. “In terms of influence, you can say that Barcelona is clearly the most important club in the world,” Puig said.

That is thanks, in no small part, to Puig, and those like him.

Manchester City, the Premier League leader, is by some distance the clearest symbol of Barcelona’s proselytizing power. A cluster of alumni has coalesced around Guardiola, the Premier League leader’s coach, both on the training field — many of his staff trace their roots to Catalonia — and in the executive suites.

City’s hierarchy is stuffed with Barcelona alumni, largely appointed by Ferran Soriano, who served as a vice president at Barcelona until 2012 when he took up the role as chief executive of City Football Group — the umbrella organization that runs the team and its affiliates in Australia, Major League Soccer and Uruguay.

He has since been joined by Txiki Begiristain, City’s director of football; Omar Berrada, its chief operating officer; Francisco Lopez, business director of one of CFG’s subsidiaries; and Esteve Calzada, another Barcelona veteran, who now works as a consultant to CFG.

If that is the most glaring example, it is far from the only one. Marc Ingla, an erstwhile colleague of Soriano’s both before and during his time at Camp Nou, is now chief executive at the French team Lille O.S.C. “Professionals always want to develop their own projects, and people always like to ape successful stories,” Ingla said. “That tends to lead to opportunities for the people involved.”

Last month, Arsenal confirmed the appointment of Raul Sanllehi, a former director of football at Barcelona, as head of football relations. Carles Romagosa, a one-time director of La Masia, occupies the same role at Paris Saint-Germain. Andoni Zubizarreta, another former technical director at Barcelona, now works for Marseille; until recently, Jose Ramon Alexanco did the same job at Valencia.

Those are just the administrators and executives. There are many more managers and coaches, ranging from Oscar Garcia — most recently of St. Etienne in France, and most successfully of Red Bull Salzburg — and Eusebio Sacristan at Real Sociedad to two emissaries in China’s second division: Jordi Vinyals at Qingdao Huanghai and Sergi Barjuan at Hangzhou Greentown. Sergi Lobera, meanwhile, is working at FC Goa, in India.

The greatest demand is for youth specialists: La Masia, after all, formed the bedrock of Barcelona’s success over the last decade, leading organizations from across the world to do all they can to either learn or acquire its secrets. It is something Barcelona itself has attempted to control, establishing a network of academies across the planet, trawling for a new generation of stars.

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Barcelona supporters, waving flags before the UEFA Champions League match earlier this year, are known to believe in the club’s culture as much as its success.Credit...Pau Barrena/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When Qatar established its ambitious Aspire Football Dreams project — designed to capture and train the best young talent in Africa, Asia and Central America — it seemed natural to appoint two men with connections to La Masia, Josep Colomer and Juanjo Rovira, to its senior ranks. Likewise, when Liverpool wanted to modernize its youth development, it looked to Pep Segura, now restored to a position of prominence at Barcelona.

Even away from the intense, high-pressure world of elite soccer, though, the Barcelona brand carries weight, as Puig’s story demonstrates.

He left Catalonia in 2014, stepping down after a disagreement with the board, and took on a post with the national federation in Gabon. He was struck, there, by Barcelona’s reach. “We would go to villages in the countryside,” he said. “Some did not have power or running water. But you always saw kids in Barcelona jerseys.”

After a year, he moved to Aruba, before agreeing to a three-year contract at De Anza Force, a club in Cupertino, Calif. “I wanted to experience the United States, and I wanted a job with less pressure,” he said. “It is very calm here. It is like a paradise.”

Real Madrid, by contrast, has no comparable flotilla of ambassadors preaching the glory of the most successful club in Europe.

There is a formal connection with China — Real has sent 24 coaches and committed $185 million to building an academy in conjunction with Guangzhou Evergrande. Real also has an informal relationship with Aspire: Ivan Bravo, the Aspire Academy’s director general, worked as director of strategy in Madrid between 2003 and 2010. He also currently holds a seat on the board of Leeds United.

Beyond that, though, Real’s influence is limited: No team supplies more players to Europe’s top five leagues than the reigning Spanish champion — Madrid overtook Barcelona this year — but it sends few executives or coaches as emissaries.

In part, that may be because of the management model that has brought Real such success: The club’s president, Florentino Perez, has worked with his two closest associates, Jose Angel Sanchez and Ramon Martinez, for so long that friends say they cannot imagine leaving.

The stability of Perez’s reign is significant, too. He has been in charge of Real for much of the last two decades. Barcelona has seen coaches and executives leave in purges following regime change. There has been no such upheaval in the Spanish capital. The only people who come and go at Real are managers. That may be to Real’s advantage. There is some concern in Catalonia that the brain drain is hampering La Masia’s success.

But there may also be a cultural element to it. In Steven G. Mandis’ book “The Real Madrid Way,” he concludes that “winning cultures cannot be imposed or invented.” They are, instead, unique, indigenous. The peculiar alchemy that makes Real Madrid special and successful cannot be packaged up and introduced elsewhere. The history, the context, is incomparable.

That is not how Barcelona sees it. It does not want to impose its culture on other teams, to create an army of clones. Its evangelical zeal comes from elsewhere, from a belief that the language it speaks can be learned by others, too, no matter how grand or insignificant, how rich or poor. It can leave its trace anywhere, and everywhere.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Barcelona’s Brand: Skill, Success and Stardust. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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