Team building: Galácticos or La Masia?
What can Real Madrid and Barcelona teach us about recruiting strategies?

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This post will require a bit of a preamble, especially for readers unfamiliar with soccer, more specifically with Real Madrid and Barcelona: two of the most successful clubs in world soccer. These two clubs have a lot in common. They are both Spanish. Both immensely successful with huge global followers and can boast some of the most successful players of the game amongst their ranks. One of their main differences is in their recruiting strategy. Barcelona tends to cultivate players from within while Real Madrid tends to buy superstars. The period between 2000-2006 is a good illustration of these different approaches.
In the early 2000s, Madrid adopted a galácticos policy, whereby the club would recruit some of the most successful players in world soccer. Below is a list of some of the players the club recruited during that period.
Claude Makélélé – signed in 2000 for €14 million from Celta.
Zinedine Zidane – signed in 2001 for €73.5 million from Juventus.
David Beckham – signed in 2003 for €37.5 million from Manchester United.
Michael Owen – signed in 2004 for €9 million from Liverpool.
Sergio Ramos – signed in 2005 for €27 million from Sevilla.
Three of those players, Zidane, Makélélé and Ronaldo, were World Cup winners in 1998 and 1994/2002 respectively. They also boasted 4 Ballon d’Or winners in Luis Figo, Zidane, Ronaldo and Michael Owen. This was the most dominant squad ever assembled.

During that same period, Barcelona was building a squad of players that had matriculated through the club’s legendary La Masia academy. Between that same period of ~2000-2006, the following players graduated from La Masia and became regular starters on Barcelona’s senior team.
All, with the exception of Messi who is Argentinian, would also become regulars with the Spanish national team and end up winning the World Cup in 2010. They would also be members of that same Spanish team that won two European Championships in 2008 and 2012. That Spanish team dominated world soccer from 2008-2012

You’re probably now at the point of wondering how any of this relates to startups & technology. The answer is: hiring strategy and my sheer joy of the sport! Joy of the beautiful game aside, there are lessons that could be applied to hiring and building a software engineering organization. Let’s examine each of these strategies and see how they can, or not, be applied to a software engineering organization.
The analogous way of applying the galácticos strategy in hiring software engineers is to try and build a team of highly experienced and talented software engineers. Perhaps you build your hiring strategy on targeting software engineers with 10+ years of experience, working at the largest (FANG) software companies and that studied at top engineering schools. On the other hand, the La Masia approach might simply rely on hiring junior, perhaps straight out of university, software engineers and then investing in developing them over time.
Let’s assume that we wanted to build our team using the galácticos approach only. There are numerous challenges with this approach. The first being the difficulty in identifying a galáctico software engineer, colloquially also referred to as the 10x engineer. Note, my reference is the 10x Twitter thread is done in jest. There’s nothing about the author’s characterization of a 10x engineer that I agree with. Nor do I agree with the term.
Digression aside, maybe you know a few exceptionally talented engineers, but ultimately you cannot identify those engineers through interviewing alone. Asking candidates to delete a key from a b-tree or how Twitter works won’t help you find and identify these galácticos. It’s far easier to identify prodigious sporting talent even at a very young age; consider this video clip of a very young Messi. Another reason is the scarcity of this talent.
Not only is it very hard to identify galáctico engineers, but the demand, and therefore competition (and cost), for them is intense. You will likely struggle to build an entire engineering team from this cadre of engineers alone.
Now, let’s go to the other extreme and rely on the La Masia approach alone to build a software engineering organization. It should be obvious that this approach is also not ideal. You need talented and experienced software engineers to develop and train the junior (and raw) talent. The Barcelona squad of that era is a good example of the need to balance raw prodigious talent with highly experienced soccer players: Messi played alongside Ronaldinho and Thierry Henry - both of whom were World Cup winners - early on in his Barcelona career. Even the greatest player to have ever kicked a ball needed mentoring from more experienced players.
Both of these two approaches seem unable to yield the desired results, namely building a well performing and scalable engineering organization. What, then is one to do? The answer, again, lies into observing these two teams.
The original Real Madrid galácticos of the 2000-2006 were by all measures a failure relative to their potential. The galácticos of Madrid won La Liga in 2000–01 and 2002–03, and also won the 2002-2003 Champions League. They failed to win any major trophy afterwards. It turns out that assembling superstar individuals, doesn’t necessarily result in a superstar team.
On the other hand, the Barcelona team of that period rose into the ascendency starting from 2005 onwards. They won two successive La Liga titles in 2005 and 2006 alongside the Champions League in 2006. That Barcelona team would go on to dominate European football for the next decade.
There are many reasons why this Barcelona team outperformed Real Madrid’s galácticos. One of them is team cohesion and balance. Yes, the team had one of the greatest players of all time - Messi - playing for them, but individual brilliance alone doesn’t guarantee team success. Witness Messi’s malaise now at PSG.
What this Barcelona team did exceptionally well was balancing superstars like Messi, with a group of players that grew up (Messi was one of them too) playing together and adhering to their own brand of soccer. They were also able to balance the young, raw prodigious talent of Messi with galácticos like Ronaldinho, Henry, Eto’o and Zlatan. What they were able to do exceptionally well is to build a well balanced and cohesive team. A team that also included superstars. Ironically that team’s dominance was eclipsed by another - critically more balanced - Real Madrid team.
In my experience, the most optimal hiring strategy for building software engineering organizations is to apply both of these strategies, with a heavy dose of La Masia. Neither alone is sufficient to build and scale a software engineering organization. You do need to find a few exceptional engineers - the galácticos. Those serve as the foundation of your team. They will also be the ones that develop the more junior and raw talent that you need to attract to help scale the team.
This in turn introduces a nice fly-wheel effect. The junior engineers that you develop, will over time become the future galácticos, who will then develop the next batch of junior engineers and so on. And that, I truly believe, is what makes an exceptional software engineering culture:
Great software teams are the ones that are able to develop and craft brilliant software engineers from within.