FC Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué on Tuesday afternoon took part via videoconference in a Harvard University master class entitled the “The entertainment, media, and sports industry,” in which the 30-year-old star presented the Club as having successfully managed its local roots while achieving global expansion.
Piqué participated in the class from the team’s hotel in Lisbon, Portugal—Barça is in town to play a Champions League match on Wednesday night—and gave a talk to the 180 students enrolled in the course, the same course which Piqué attended in Boston just this past summer.
The Barça case study, which deals with the success of the Club’s academy soccer model and its unique identity, was once again included in the course after FC Barcelona President Josep Maria Bartomeu took part the previous two years.
The Barça Academy, known as La Masia, was one of the main topics of Piqué’s talk, in which he referred to the academy as “one of the main pillars supporting our Club.” The defender said it was thanks to this model that the Club had succeeded in getting across the message that “the most important thing is not the sports performance of today’s youth, but rather the added value of letting them get to know the Club and what it is they represent.”
Piqué also spoke about the Club’s role as a local and global club, emphasizing the need to “balance both, by recognizing our obligation to embrace our global reach while, at the same time, maintaining a strong base of local supporters, which is, and always will be, with us, even when times are tough.”
