Manchester United have come up short against the best in Europe in the key midfield battleground, an area where Barcelona's home-grown talent is concentrated
Ravel Morrison, a member of United's successful youth team, has been tipped to graduate to the senior side. Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images
Gracious in severely hurtful defeat at the hands of a team he described as the best Manchester United have faced during his time at the club, Sir Alex Ferguson searched for a sliver of light in the darkness. "Great teams do go in cycles," he said of Barcelona, "and they're at the peak of the cycle they're in at the moment."
Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Busquets, Puyol, Piqué, Valdés: all products of La Masía, Barcelona's academy, where the teachers might adapt the celebrated Jesuit maxim to read: give me a child at the age of 12 and I will give you the man. Some cycle, anyway, if that is what it is. Compare and contrast the generation on whose youthful talents United surfed to their present eminence, the one that produced Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Nicky Butt and the Neville brothers on the old training ground at the Cliff, and whose last remaining survivors made somewhat forlorn appearances at Wembley on Saturday.
A cycle, Ferguson said, but he knows better than anyone that the successors to his own Class of '92 – named for their success in that year's FA Youth Cup – have yet to make their appearance. That sudden blossoming of gifted youngsters provided an echo of the group nurtured in the early 1950s, the generation of Duncan Edwards and Bobby Charlton, who won the youth trophy five years in a row and formed the basis of Matt Busby's Babes. That's a long, long cycle for a club that demands success.
Ferguson was among the crowd last Monday night when United's latest crop won this season's Youth Cup with a very convincing 4-1 victory against Sheffield United at Old Trafford, repeating the 6-3 aggregate beating they had handed out to Chelsea's gilded youngsters in the semi‑final. Plenty of cause for optimism there, you might think, except that when United last won the trophy, in 2003, it was with a side containing no players destined to make substantial careers in the first team (the closest candidates were Phil Bardsley, Chris Eagles and Kieran Richardson). And of the team with which they last reached the final, in 2007, only Danny Welbeck, who has just spent the season on loan at Sunderland, still looks to have a chance of establishing himself.
So will any of the Class of '11 make it all the way through the unforgiving process of natural selection? Ravel Morrison, 18 years old, is prodigiously gifted and could be said to have something of Wayne Rooney about him, not just in his instinct for damaging the opposition but also in a personal indiscipline which saw him in court again last week. Paul Pogba, a Vieira-like influence in the central areas, and Ryan Tunnicliffe, a more muscular midfielder, could also make the transition to line up alongside Javier Hernández, Chris Smalling and the Da Silva brothers, young acquisitions from elsewhere, in a future United first team. Most of the rest will simply disperse.
United's supporters have always made a fetish of home-grown products, but like most big clubs their best sides have included top players imported from elsewhere: Albert Quixall from Sheffield Wednesday, Denis Law from Torino, Bryan Robson from West Bromwich Albion, and so on, all the way to Rooney, the team's only real success on Saturday night, and Dimitar Berbatov, the principal casualty. If the balance has been swinging in that direction at Old Trafford in recent seasons, it must be because the academy output is not of sufficient quality.
The products of La Masía are at the very heart of Barcelona's line-up. The imports – David Villa, Eric Abidal, Dani Alves – are placed around the fringes of the team structure. The heart of the formation is what counts, and it is there that Ferguson can be said to have failed when it comes to competition against the very best.
You can win England's domestic trophies with a midfield permed from Scholes, Giggs, Anderson, Michael Carrick, Darren Fletcher and Darron Gibson, and you can even get to the final of the European Cup, but only in a lucky year, when your opponents in the final have somehow slipped through quality control (or when, as in 2008, they are another Premier League team), will you win the competition by which the continent's elite clubs define themselves. Ferguson was unlucky with Fletcher's fitness last week, but Giggs and Carrick were unable to make a greater impression on the game than they had managed in Rome two years ago, even in a formation rejigged from 4-3-3 to 4-4-2.
During the buildup last week Ferguson spoke of United's 4-0 defeat at the hands of Johan Cruyff's Barcelona in 1994 as something of a turning point for his side, the moment at which they began to shed their naivety and take the steps that led to the treble of 1998-99. The 69-year-old's time is necessarily more limited now, but he may hope to use the disappointment of Saturday as another launching pad.
Since the arrival of the widely detested Glazers six years ago, United have been saddled with £478m of debt while paying out £369m in fees and interest. Thanks to the miracle of capitalism, however, their current account contains £170m, an unknown proportion of which will be available for Ferguson to spend. Now, having won the Premier League at a canter but finished the season on a note of anticlimax, he could do with a big, bold capture.
Some of the game's hot young properties, such as Ganso and Neymar of Santos, Edinson Cavani of Napoli and Anderlecht's Romelu Lukaku, are earmarked for other top Champions League clubs, while rumoured midfield targets such as Wesley Sneijder and Luka Modric, excellent players though they are, do not quite fire the imagination. Most of all, however, as he approaches the 25th anniversary of his arrival at the club, Ferguson could do with another turn of the cycle, sharpish.
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