When you enter Real Madrid’s Valdebebas academy complex, the first door you face is the dressing room for the club’s youngest age group, the under-fives.
This is the first step towards Madrid’s first team — and that’s what they wanted to reflect in the architecture of their training ground. There are 11 football pitches — as well as the Alfredo Di Stefano stadium — and numerous buildings through which a player must progress, until they hopefully, one day, reach the Santiago Bernabeu.
The road is long and a little winding because, as Madrid’s coaches try to explain to their pupils, it gets tougher and tougher. This is especially true when young hopefuls go from the so-called “low cantera”, where they play up to the age of 13 and where yellow covers the dressing room walls, to the “high cantera” painted in blue.
Across each age group and across the male and female sections, there are 364 players enrolled here, 12.7km from the centre of the Spanish capital, and there are plans for expansion. Real Madrid’s accounts for 2021-22 show a yearly outlay of almost €25million (£22m; $27m) to keep it all going. Those same accounts show the sum of €36m (£39m) under another heading: “income from academy activities”.
This place does good business for Madrid….
