2021 is coming to an end, and it's time to sum up the year. For a variety of reasons, this year's teams in Europe's top five leagues will give the young people in the team a lot of opportunities to play, in the past the youth storm is the middle and lower reaches of the team will do, but this year teams like Barcelona have been (forced) to join. Recently, OPTA counted the appearance time of U21 players in the five major league teams, and the first team was very surprising.
A year ago, absolutely no one would have thought that the team with the most U21 players playing time in Europe this year was Barcelona, due to financial reasons, Barca, which could not complete the reinforcement work and clean up many people, could only be forced to dig up potential internally, in addition to Pedri and Fati, who were already the main players of the team last season, Barca this season also promoted U21 newcomers such as 17-year-old Garvey, 17-year-old Ilias, 18-year-old Vald, 19-year-old Nico Gonzalez and 20-year-old Abd. Coupled with the signings of Eric Garcia and Demir this season, Barca's U21 playing time this season has reached 4975 minutes, which is 941 more minutes than second-place Bayer Leverkusen, making it the first youth team of the season. Although Barca have performed badly, if these young people can develop smoothly, then they will not be a failure this season.
Among the 10 teams on the list, Barca are the only seedlings in La Liga, Bayer Leverkusen in second place and Borussia Monchengladbach in sixth place are representatives of the Bundesliga, and the remaining 7 teams are all from Ligue 1, which is why ligue 1 has been a surge of young talents in recent years. In 3-5 place were Reims (3637 minutes), Montpellier (3235 minutes) and Saint-Etiennes (2980 minutes), while 7-10 were Nice (2822 minutes), Marseille (2683 minutes), Rennes (2497 minutes) and Monaco (2417 minutes). It is worth mentioning that in addition to the slightly worse records of Reims and Saint-Etiennes, the other five teams nice, Marseille, Rennes, Montpellier and Monaco happen to be in 2-6th place in the league, only behind Greater Paris. It can be seen that the Ligue 1 team has found a good balance between the trade-off between training new talents and the team's record, or that they have a very good U21 that is, combat strength.
Maybe none of these 10 teams can win any titles this year, but maybe the future is really theirs?