Nico Gonzalez, the Barcelona years: Why they were happy to let ‘next Busquets’ go
Pol Ballús
Nico Gonzalez joining
Manchester City from Porto was a bittersweet moment for Barcelona fans.
On the one hand, it meant Barca received an unexpected fee of around €21million ($22m; £18m at current exchange rates) for their former academy player at a difficult time for the club’s finances — that included a sell-on fee Barca had negotiated, another clause triggered by Porto and the €8.5m fee the Portuguese side paid for the midfielder in 2023.
On the other, Nico’s €60m move means seeing a player made at Barca’s
famed La Masia academy potentially thriving at a City side managed by their beloved former player and coach Pep Guardiola. Nico was considered to be one of the brightest talents produced by the youth system over the past decade and was seen as a potential successor to Sergio Busquets. He broke into the first team at 19 and made an encouraging start but left when he saw his opportunities limited.
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So why did Barcelona allow Nico, now 23, to leave? And does the money made from his City signing reflect a new direction the club are taking with La Masia players who do not make the cut with the first team?
Nico joined Barcelona in 2013 from Montaneros, his local club in Galicia, northwestern Spain. Aged 11, he became part of one of the most promising recent generations of La Masia players.
The squad of players born in 2001 featured current Barca players Ansu Fati and Eric Garcia along with Real Sociedad winger Takefusa Kubo and Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper Arnau Tenas. Nico was a year younger than those players but the club decided he was ready to play a year above his age group.
His arrival at Barca was met with expectation and plenty of publicity, mainly thanks to his father.
Fran Gonzalez — better known by his first name — is a legendary former Spanish midfielder and arguably the most important player in the history of Deportivo La Coruna. He played 550 times for his boyhood side, winning La Liga, two Copas del Rey and two Supercopas de Espana.
Fran captained the club’s most successful side, nicknamed Super Depor, who reached the Champions League semi-finals in 2004 by overturning a 4-1 first-leg defeat against Carlo Ancelotti’s Milan in the quarter-finals to go through 5-4 on aggregate.
He spent 14 seasons at Deportivo from his debut in 1987 and rejected multiple approaches from Barcelona and Real Madrid throughout his career. He also featured 16 times for Spain and played at the European Championships in 2000.
Fran, left, playing for Deportivo against Bilbao’s Athletic Club in 2003 (Rafa Rivas/AFP via Getty Images)
It was some legacy to live up to — but Nico quickly proved he was not at La Masia because of his dad.
He shone as both a holding and an attacking midfielder, standing out for his technique and his intelligence on and off the pitch. In high school, his teachers decided to bring him forward a year to accelerate his learning.
His name regularly featured on the list of Barca talents monitored by clubs around Europe who could offer better financial packages and promise a faster route to first-team football. There was interest from Manchester City then and
reports of an offer made by the English side.
But Nico stayed put and did not have to wait long for opportunities. He was 17 when he was promoted to Barca Atletic, the club’s second team who play lower down the Spanish system, in 2020. Coaches at La Masia started to wonder what
role he would be best suited to.
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Franc Artiga managed Nico in four consecutive seasons from under-15 to under-19 level and spent 11 years as a coach in Barca’s youth ranks. He is now the manager of Russian Premier League club FC Khimki.
Artiga says Nico mainly played as defensive midfielder in La Masia but also featured as an attacking midfielder between ages 16 and 18. Nico played in 26 of Barca Atletic’s 29 games in 2020-21, helping them to the play-off semi-finals for promotion to the second division, where they lost on penalties to UCAM Murcia.
“He was always seen as a potential heir to Busquets in the academy,” Artiga tells
The Athletic. “This has good and bad things. Nico’s always been a standout player in every generation he’s been in, but at the end of the day you can’t clone players.
“Every footballer has his own skillset and, while Nico had everything to play as a sole holding midfielder at Barca, he is a different player to Busquets.”
In the 2021-22 season, with Ronald Koeman’s Barcelona experiencing an injury crisis, the Dutchman promoted Gavi and Nico to the first team after academy coaches recommended he take a look at the pair. But while Gavi went on to
become a first-team mainstay, things did not pan out in the same way for Nico.
Nico made his La Liga debut in August 2021 aged 19 under Koeman, but the coach lasted just 11 games of the season after a troubled start. Following a defeat to Rayo Vallecano, president Joan Laporta sacked Koeman and replace him with Xavi — with the expectation he would give more chances to midfielders who had come through La Masia like him.
Despite being involved at first — he started eight of Xavi’s first 10 La Liga games in charge — Nico’s game time was reduced in the second half of the season. He started one of the last 17 league matches and suffered a foot injury at the end of the campaign which sidelined him for a month.
The reason for his reduced involvement was tactical. A source on Xavi’s backroom staff at the time — who, like all those cited in this article, asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships — said they did not see Nico as the holding midfielder the team needed. Busquets, the man Nico had been tipped to succeed, was still at the club, so the youngster had to fight for playing time in an advanced role, where competition was fierce. Xavi preferred Pedri, Gavi and Frenkie de Jong to him in that position.
Nico was tipped to be the next Busquets when he was younger (Alex Caparros/Getty Images)
Before the 2022-23 season, Nico and the club found a solution which they hoped would give the player regular gametime: a season-long loan to Valencia. But it did not turn out as expected.
Nico joined a club going through a tough time, with manager Gennaro Gattuso replaced by Ruben Baraja midway through the season and the threat of relegation looming. He suffered another foot injury that kept him out of action for two months and struggled to hold down a regular spot in the team that had other, more pressing needs than adjusting to the technical style the Barca graduate was used to.
When Nico returned to the Catalan capital a year later in 2023, Busquets had
decided to leave the club at the end of his contract to join Inter Miami. Barca’s sporting directors and Xavi’s coaching staff made signing a new player in that deep-lying position a priority — but, to Nico’s despair, they did not turn to him.
Xavi’s opinion of the young midfielder was the same as before: he saw potential for Nico to perform in an advanced role but he did not see him as the next Busquets. Barca signed another of their former academy graduates, Oriol Romeu, from Girona instead for €3.15m. Nico, who did not want to go on loan again after his bad experience at Valencia, was permanently sold to Porto in a bid to help his long-term career — with Barca reserving a sell-on clause in case he went on to greater things.
Nico’s early days in Portugal were not easy. He needed time to adapt to coach Sergio Conceicao’s methods, suffered another foot injury and struggled to find his place in the starting XI, which led to both player and club considering an exit in January last year.
Girona, owned by the City Football Group, were interested. Their sporting director Quique Carcel was a big admirer of Nico’s and all parties held talks with a view to a deal. But a series of injuries to Porto’s midfielders gave Nico a way back to Conceicao’s XI at the end of January. His performances improved and Conceicao personally requested a stop to negotiations with Girona.
So Nico stayed and made himself a key player, making 68 appearances for the Portuguese side and earning his reward with a move to the Premier League with City this month.
There is an extra quirk to Nico’s City move. Not only were the club interested in him when he was an academy player, but there is also another link to his father.
Fran worked for two years as part of City’s setup after playing with the club’s sporting director Txiki Begiristain for two years at Deportivo and with Guardiola for Spain. In 2016 he joined City as an academy coach with a view to using his knowledge of the game to help the next generation of players.
Fran has since worked at Deportivo, where he was academy director from 2020-23. Nico’s move has finally happened, nearly six years after his father arrived and reports about City’s interest first surfaced.
“I am thrilled for Nico,” his former manager Artiga says. “I know his dream was to play at Barca, but given it can’t be there I think it’s good to join a club with a similar playing philosophy such as Guardiola’s City.
“It is a shame to see a player that all managers in La Masia knew would make it into Barca’s first team leaving and finding his place elsewhere. In the end I guess there’s not been enough patience around Nico.
“But in the end the important thing is that Nico can fulfill his potential and he is going to a club where he’ll be able to do that. Maybe in two years we, Barcelona, will want Nico but won’t have the money to pay him… but it is true the position is well covered now with talents such as (young midfielders) Marc Bernal or Marc Casado.”
Barca received a chunk of the fee City paid Porto for Nico (Jose Manuel Alvarez Rey/JAR Sport Images/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Barcelona executives were surprised when they learned negotiations between City and Porto were accelerating in the final days of the transfer window, but were attentive to developments, as they knew the club would receive a significant cut.
Barca ended up with less money than they might have expected. The Catalans negotiated a 40 per cent share of future profit and a €30m buy-back clause when they sold Nico to Porto. In theory, they could have executed the clause before selling the player to City for €60m, making a €30m profit, but Porto anticipated that. They triggered another clause in Nico’s contract, paying Barca €3m in exchange for a 20 per cent share of future profit made on the player and removed his buy-back clause with Barca.
That meant Barca cashed in €10.3m of the profit Porto made on Nico compared to the €20.6m that 40 per cent would have represented. Added to the €3m clause triggered by Porto and the initial €8.5m fee the Portuguese side paid, it means Barca have made €21m from Nico. That still makes him the second most lucrative La Masia graduate to have been sold by the club behind Thiago, who Bayern Munich signed for €25m in 2013.
Senior figures are satisfied with the money made from Nico’s move to City. The club does not tend to make profit on La Masia players and it is a department where Barca sources have regularly said there is room for improvement.
This is not what fans expect of La Masia But there is not space in the first team for every talented player in their youth ranks and Barca are aware they must make the most of this too.
Since arriving as sporting director in 2023, Deco has been keen to allow La Masia talents to leave if they do not find the playing time they are looking for at the club — but always with sell-on and buy-back clauses included in their deals.
Former academy centre-back Chadi Riad, signed by Crystal Palace last summer, is an example. Barca inserted a 50 per cent sell-on clause when he left for Real Betis, meaning they were given a chunk of the €15m deal that took him to the Premier League.
Other La Masia-made talents in La Liga such as Celta Vigo right-back Oscar Mingueza and Las Palmas defender Mika Marmol have significant sell-on clauses in their deals.
It is not the Barcelona future Nico seemed destined for, but his City move appears to have been the best possible outcome for all parties.
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