GOAL Convo: The Spanish football coach, with 20 years of experience in the sport, discusses his aim to make an impact in Los Angeles
Toni Hernandez does not want to develop a new Lamine Yamal in Los Angeles.
That would be nice, of course – especially given his background. Hernandez was director of La Masia, Barcelona’s famed youth academy, for four years. He helped Lamine, Gavi, Fermin Lopez, and Pau Cubarsi become regulars for the current La Liga champions. Those guys will play for Barca for years. Lamine’s future knows very few boundaries.
But those are the unicorns. What Hernandez wants, in his words, is a million Marc Casados.
“He had six years in the academy, and one day, Marc Casado is in the first team, in the Spanish national team. You will have a million kids who would like to be like Marc Casado,” he tells GOAL.
Sound limiting? Quite the opposite. Casado is the model La Masia player. Technically gifted, smart on the ball, but also Catalonian through and through, he is the archetype of what an academy can produce by the thousands. That’s Hernandez’s goal. It won’t be easy in Los Angeles, where expectations are high.
The area is rife with talent, but the club, to date, hasn’t been at the cutting edge of bringing players into the first team. In Hernandez, Los Angeles has pretty much the best guy in football available to do just that. A Valencia native, he has 20 years of top-flight footballing experience on both sides of the Atlantic, and a knowledge of the landscape like few others. Stints at Valencia introduced him to the game, before a year in Orlando City plus three more in an elite athletic boarding school in Florida gave him an ideal American soccer education.
Piece it together, and he could have had his pick of clubs. But Hernandez picked Los Angeles, which, he says, is the perfect place for him to give back to the sport that has offered him so much.
“I am 45 years old, with 20 years working in soccer, 17 years with the development of players. Somehow during this time, soccer gave me a good life, and I think I’m in debt to soccer. Being in Barcelona, I was doing my job, and we had quite a success developing players for the first team. And I felt that the time was right now to come to a place where I can give back to soccer,” he says.
Hernandez discussed developing Lamine Yamal, his departure from La Masia, and his vision for shaping a new style of footballer in Los Angeles in the latest GOAL Convo, a recurring Q&A with central figures in the American soccer scene.
NOTE: This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity