One Saturday lunchtime in July 2009 we caught up with Joan Oliver in his office at the Nou Camp. Barcelona’s then CEO had escaped there for a rare bit of peace and quiet, away from the madness of the summer transfer market. Barça’s aim, Oliver told us, was “to have one of the best, perhaps the best, team in the world, without having to spend X million on players. The image of that is the final in Rome this year [against Manchester United], with a team of seven players from our academy. The total acquisition cost of our team has been—I don’t remember, but something below 70 million euros.” (In 2011 Barça again won the Champions League final, having started the game with seven homegrown players.)

It may seem odd that a big-city club like Barcelona can mostly abstain from the market—buying one great player for a large fee every year or so rather than constantly overhauling its team. After all, we have seen that other big clubs with a frenzied local fan base and media are practically forced to keep buying “stars.” Barcelona for decades did the same thing. But then, under President Joan Laporta from 2003, the club began to make greater use of its peculiar profile. Barça presents itself as “the unarmed army of Catalonia.” That image means a lot to the club’s fans. It means they are as happy to see local boys like Sergio Busquets (son of a Barça goalkeeper) or Gerard Piqué (grandson of a Barça director) break into the team as they are to see a foreign star brandishing his new shirt at the flashbulbs of the local newspapers. And so Barcelona discovered that it could please its fans by avoiding transfers and bringing in kids instead. The club’s most successful coach, Josep Guardiola, was praised for his willingness to throw teenagers into the first team, but he could do it because the crowd supported the policy. Oliver said of the reliance on the club’s academy, the Masia, “It’s not only an economic strategy. It’s part of the identity of the club.” Growing its own players boosts Barcelona’s brand, and the brand makes the club money.

There’s another advantage to shunning the transfer market, Oliver added. He called it the “one-second rule.” The success of a move on the pitch is decided in less than a second. If a player needs a few extra fractions of a second to work out where his teammate is going, because he doesn’t know the other guy’s game well, the move will usually break down. You can therefore lose a match in under a second. A corollary of that, thought Oliver, is that a new signing is likely to underperform in his first season. The new man is still working out what his role in the team is, and what everyone else is trying to do. That means that if you do buy a player, it’s only worth it if you keep him around for the longer term.

All this sounds worthy, and easy to say when things are going well. However, Barcelona in recent years has largely stuck to these principles even in bad times. After the failed 2007–2008 season, when another club might have loaded up on stars, Barcelona did buy Dani Alves for $50 million, but it also sold two of its biggest names, Ronaldinho and Deco. When the club does buy, it rightly tends to focus on “top ten” players: men who are arguably among the ten best footballers on earth, such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, David Villa, Fabregas, or Neymar. Those players cost a lot, but the risk of their failing is small (unless you buy them when they are getting old, like Thierry Henry). Part of being one of the ten best players on earth is that you perform almost whatever the circumstances.

Oliver and Laporta have since been ousted, but Barcelona still tries to field an unchanging homegrown core supplemented only by rare (and usually expensive) transfers. Abstinence works for Barça. Other big clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea have also recently tried to keep the cores of their teams together for years at a time. This may be a new trend in soccer. Nonetheless, many other clubs are still with Saint Augustine: “Give me chastity and continence, Lord, but not yet.”

“The problem with the football business,” said Oliver, “is that usually it is managed with very, very short-term goals. After a bad year, it’s very difficult not to fall in the temptation of buying a lot of people. Clubs spend irrationally and compulsively on players. And that’s very difficult to restrain. You have always the temptation of thinking that if you buy two or three players, perhaps you will reverse the situation. That was perhaps the case of Chelsea in the past, and the case of Manchester City or, I think, of Real Madrid now.”