Consultants for Strategic Futures.

The Future of Ethic and Profitable Youth Talent Management APRIL 2012

Heléne Olsson, KAIROS FUTURE

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THE FC BARCELONA LA MASIA CASE As most of us know, talent is one of the scarce resources of an organization, piggy-backing it’s future. According to a talent research produced by Kairos Future for Manpower, only 7% of the employees born in the 80’s or 90’s could be considered a talent, defining youth talent by:

- have considerably higher marks than the average

- have a high ambition to achieve an outstanding position in their worklife

- so far always have done their utmost to reach their dreams

- always want to be the best in worklife

- rapidly keep on moving to the next challenge once achieved a success

- often hear that “you are clever and enterprising”

- be active in the thought economy, normally

So it’s natural that companies struggle with different models of how to “produce” the most successful youth talent at the most sustainable price, in order to be a game changer as a company or organization.

At Kairos Future, passionate of the future of youth and education for many years, we have taken a closer look at the collateral case of an apparent success model in the youth talent management at the talent school La Masia, at the football club F.C. Barcelona, which have created a whole generation of successful footballplayers like Messi, Guardiola, Xavi, Iniesta, etc. How did they do? Which were the key issues in education? Is this the most profitable? Let’s have a look.

THE BARÇA MODEL ABOUT BARÇA F.C. Barça is one of the biggest sports club in the world, with the highest track record ever in winning terms. 309 million € of turnover 2008/2009 and 112 years of history speaks for itself. It’s a high performance company driven by talent.

The Club has gone from being a small local football club to a club purchasing ta-lent, and then starting to produce it’s own talent, and now innovating by an ethic and profitable model.

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The Club propels 12 different sports, out of which 4 are core sports (football, bas-ket, futsal and handball). Football is the core brand sport, and the brand of Barça is of huge value.

During their more than 100 year history, FC Barça has never earned as many titles as during the last 4 years, with more than 50% of “home-produced talent”, and more than 50% of the national team, winning the World Championship in 2010, came from FC Barça.

How do they create these winners? And what happens to all of those who does not accomplish their dream?

LA MASIA La Masia is a fairly unknown and secret education center, not open for public visi-tors, located in the outskirts of Barcelona, in very modern installations.

FC Barça started this concept 42 years ago, but it is now the real results are there. Three players from the same generation (Messi, Iniesta and Xavi where nominated simultaneously for the World Gold Ball, which has never happened in history. All “made by La Masia”.

At La Masia, we find 130 interned young sports talents between 7 and 15 years old from 23 countries, where they all are dreaming of becoming the new football star Messi of the future. They know they are special. 80% of them have been hunted at the age of 12-15 by some of the 28 full-time employed “talent hunters” who travel around the world and film 8.000 talent videos per year, to chose 120 prospects. These are then invited to participate for free for a test week at the center, and they choose 50% of these, according to talent, and attitude. To just be there is a success.

“Talent for us in the first run means technical talent, velocity and high ability to take intelligent decisions. The second criteria is extraordinary physical conditions, like strength and height, which in difference to other sports club are not the most important ones. And the third, important, is attitude. We search for talents with a very high will power and determination, not children sent by an ambitious family. The willpower is a very strong muscle, crucial for success.” Says Carles Fol-guerola, Head teacher at La Masia.

HOLISTIC EDUCATION AND VALUE-BUILDING FOR THE YOUTH “Of course HOW we search and screen the talent is an important ingredient, but it is not THE success factor”, Folguerola continues.

“Our purpose is of course to feed FC Barça with intelligent home produced and value oriented talent, instead of buying very expensive and many times complica-ted fits into the premium team”.

“Our main emphasize is value building, not only sports training. The football trai-ning only means around 7 hours a week. The important training is in education. We provide the best teachers to the students, small classes, high demands in results, especially in mathematics, mental training and feedback. Students from abroad

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receive language immersion in Spanish, and we train them all to public speaking and media handling”, adds Carles Folguerola.

THE “PLAN B-FACTOR” Then they have the “Plan B”. Only 10% of the selected arrive to the premium lea-gue. So we constantly work with the must of having a mind map of a personal Plan B. What happens if I don’t get selected? I still can have a brilliant future albeit I’m not selected, since I have an outstanding education, and have a cv having been among the talent of Barça.

“This is very key, because we preach humility, patience and to give it all. Dare to be passionate. Therefore we try to help them to not only be football freaks, but to have a holistic way of life, discovering classical music live, studying arts in action, participating in voluntary works, meeting the Catalan culture, being able to have girl friends and a social life. They are all prepared for both Plan A and Plan B”, comments Carles Folguerola.

This means an ethic model, significantly different from most other sports clubs around the world, but also profitable.

The fact is there when we see new young unknown talents from La Masia being put into the playground by the coach Guardiola in the middle of important games, immediately adapting to the play and giving results.

Now, this model is expensive and long-term. Barça invests 40.000€ per talent per year, creating the new stars of the future and the results are there to approve the model. Who can afford to wait 7 years in average to ensure the payback? You need big money pockets.

However, this also gives cash in, since you have a high value asset of talents to sell off to other sports clubs. Being Barça, made by La Masia, is also profitable for the talents.

THE MONEY BALL MODEL

The popular film ”Money Ball” from 2011 tells the story of another successful model. It’s related to a real case of baseball, advocating for sophisticated econo-mic forecasts, “sabermetrics”, to forecast future performance of players, based upon past performance.

In the film a rather mediocre team succeeded to win the league during one year, only by changing the coach. With the same team.

In practice it means that intelligent analysis of data, statistics, can pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your players, and therefore, only focus on the strengths. Forget about the weaknesses. Look for the DNA and willpower and coach for the technique, based upon continuous analysis of data.

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This model is fine for middle size clubs, but requires a supercoach and most im-portantly, a superanalyst of data.

THE UK MODEL

THE TRADITIONAL TALENT BURNING MODEL The La Masia Model is very different to other Youth Sports Talent Management, where as long as you put 10.000 hours of training in your body, most people can achieve an elite level.

This means a rather quick talent hunting and then you squeeze the utmost out of the talent, until you can throw it away.

This model is today a classic mature model, particularly known in sports like bas-ketball.

For the sports clubs this is a risky business, if the sport talent does not turn out as expected, and requires a high financial capacity to purchase talent, and a strong coach to integrate different cultures rapidly into a successful team.

This is perfect for short term talent hunting.

SO WHICH IS THE FUTURE OF TALENT MANAGEMENT, RELATED TO SPORTS? In a world of higher and higher unemployment, we could imagine four different scenarios:

• “Milan Model”: Purchase the trustful ready-made talent, and blend it in intelligently in the rest of the ream. Expensive, quick, risky if not well fitted into the team.

• “Barça Model”: Put resources on the talent hunting and ethic value-creation. With an assured talent, you need to put less effort on the te-chnical training and more on the value creation and team work capa-bility in order to get results. High-cost, education based, slow and so-lid.

• “UK Model”: Headhunting of local talent with extraordinary physical talent, where you focus on physical training. Cheap, quick-win and fragile (difficult to integrate in different environments).

• “Money Ball”: Non Talent based, education based: You work with what you have, but create an excellent team feeling, through an extra-

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ordinary coach, getting the best out of each individual. Very cheap, medium term, highly depending upon the coach, limited in talent.

CHOOSE YOUR YOUTH TALENT MODEL FOR THE FUTURE Using these different models as examples from the sports world, and with particu-lar focus of the Barça model as a case, at Kairos Future we recommend you to ac-tively decide and plan your own Youth Talent Model for the future. It’s not only a question of having a youth talent model, it’s also a question of how it could be profitable and ethic.

We see an increasing global competition in a very turbulent world, with rapid tech-nological changes. There is a growing commoditization of products, and people will make the difference.

It is high time to choose and build your competitive advantage through young ta-lents for the future.

MORE INFORMATION For more information about this article, please contact Heléne Olsson, helene.olsson@kairosfuture.com

Heléne Olsson is our MD for Kairos Future Spain, with office in Barcelona. Heléne has a wide Spanish and international management experience in international in-dustry- and service companies in Spain.

ABOUT KAIROS FUTURE

Kairos Future is an international consulting and research company that helps com-panies and business leaders to understand and shape their futures. We work as con-sultants for strategic futures, providing our clients with trend analysis and scenario planning, strategy and innovation, strategic change and capability development. Our aim is to make complexity actionable. The company was founded in 1993, has its head office in Stockholm and representatives in Beijing, New York, Barcelona and Copenhagen as well as partners around the globe.For more information, visit our website at www.kairosfuture.com or contact us at:

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