FCBEscola Sydney opened five months ago and its year-long program includes weekly training sessions that teaches Australian kids aged 6 to 16 how to play the Barca way.

Jordi Fernandez has relocated here from the Catalan club to Sydney full time and brings his experience in coaching and education as well as a sports science degree and a masters in performance training.

While Barcelona’s style of play is known throughout the world Fernandez told FourFourTwo that the kids who train at FCBEscola will not lose their Australian way of playing.

“We are not here to change anything,” he said.

“I believe that if Australia plays with their own style it’s the culture, the people and everyone who is surrounding the football community has something to do with this style of play or this way of understanding football.

“What we are trying to do here is understanding what are these principals and how Australia understands football and find a way to give a piece of FCB Escola to try and be adapted to their own style. 

“What we believe is that by playing short you are creating more chances to go forward with more security in optimal conditions than long balls where you can have a bigger risk of losing the ball.

“That’s probably what I see in Australian football that they have to understand by playing short that it creates an advantage that by taking that risk it’s beneficial at the end.”

The coaching methodology that FCBEscola is teaching is more than just practise make perfect as Fernandez revealed.

“We believe that how we learn the game is by playing and what we propose is different to repetitive exercises, we call them preferential simulated situations,” he said.

 “Our star question is what is your best option? To provide the players during the game to self-reflect of what going on around them and what is their best option.”

So according to Fernandez it’s not about learning how to dribble and how to pass but when to execute those actions.

“The different consideration we take into this approach for this learning is how do you measure if a kid knows how to dribble or to pass?” he said.

“What is your criteria? When you see somebody doing a wrong pass or a bad dribble it’s because they took it in a bad position or they didn’t analyse the situation well.

“So, the tools we are giving to the kids is you will have a lot of practise with dribbling, striking, passing and controlling the ball.

"But all these skills and actions are completed in a variable environment where they players have to choose when and which is the right moment and what kind of control or pass or dribble they use in that moment.”

Over the years Barcelona's famed youth academy, La Masia has helped produce the likes of Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Lionel Messi and Fernandez said that FCBEscola follows the same methodology.

“Part of the identity of Barcelona and what the Escola is doing is we want to spread how do this philosophy and style of play because not everyone can go to La Masia," he said.

 “This is what makes us different and why we are bringing people from Barcelona who have been there for years and who understand the methodology.

"So we can share it with new players and make them better players in this context and this is what it’s all about.”

Pictures by Steve Dimitriadis