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Centre-backs: Marc Bartra and Andreu Fontas
It was a dilemma whether to include Gerard Pique in this list or not because he too left La Masia midway to join Manchester United. He made his professional debut for Man Utd but only made 23 appearances for the club between 2004 and 2008. His rise to prominence was at Barcelona, so we have left Pique out of the list and picked Marc Bartra and Andreu Fontas instead.
Bartra played for the Barcelona senior team between 2009 and 2016 making 103 appearances, but he spent his entire time at the club as an understudy to the likes of Gerard Pique, Carles Puyol, Javier Mascherano and Jeremy Mathieu.
He left Barcelona to join Borussia Dortmund in 2016 and helped the club win its first major honour since 2012 by starting and playing 76 minutes in the final of the 2017 DFB-Pokal. However, his time at the club was affected by an injury he sustained in the team bus when it was hit by three explosions ahead of a Champions League quarter-final tie against AS Monaco on 11 April 2017.
Admirably, Bartra played the DFB-Pokal final only a couple of weeks after he returned from surgery for the injuries he sustained in the blast.
He returned to La Liga in January 2018 with Real Betis and helped the club finish 6th and qualify for next season’s Europa League.
The other central defender in this list, Andreu Fontas, played with Bartra during his formative years but his stint with the senior team was short lived as he played just 16 games across all competitions between 2009 and 2013.
Fontas was sold to Celta Vigo in 2013 and he has been at the club since. When he arrived at Celta, it was a club that finished 17th in the previous season and avoided relegation by a single point. In his first two seasons, he played a crucial role in helping them finish a respectable 9th and 8th respectively.
