Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu has told ESPN FC that the club are still committed to investing in the future, despite spending €122.4 million on new players this summer.
Barca brought in six new faces -- Denis Suarez, Lucas Digne, Samuel Umtiti, Andre Gomes, Jasper Cillessen and Paco Alcacer -- but the club's president insists that the La Masia academy is still important.
"This has been a very active summer for us, with the transfer window," he said. "We have been doing a lot of deals. Robert Fernandez, our technical director, and Luis Enrique, our manager, have worked quite a lot to bring to the club new players.
"Young players. Young, talented players that we hope are going to be very important in the future, maybe also this season.
"The idea is to invest for the future, invest in young people that will allow our players -- which are very successful -- to see that the club is thinking of the future, investing in the future to have (and to have always) competitive teams."
The decision to spend on players from others clubs has seen criticism about Barcelona's lack of graduates from La Masia, but Bartomeu claims that bringing through youth players was still a cornerstone of the club's philosophy.
"La Masia is very important for us. It is the key of our club," he said. "Investing on young talent, teaching them how to play football, teaching them the education we bring them, and then, of course, if they are talented, coming up to our first professional team. So this, we didn't change. The idea is the same.
"Actually, from our 22 players of our first-team, 10 of them come from La Masia. This is something we like to have as much as possible. This year, not everything happened, and some of our players we brought from other teams."
Barcelona loaned out a number of young stars, including Sergi Samper and Munir, but Bartomeu insists that the long-term plan is to bring them back again.
"It is difficult today for our youth teams to come directly to the first team," he added. "That's why we have a new philosophy in the last two years that some of the young players, first of all, go to other clubs.
"They play as many minutes as possible on that team. They get some experience and come back to our team. That is the example of Denis Suarez, that he has been two years out of the club, now coming back to us. Or players like Sergi Samper, or like Munir have this year left the club, going to other clubs where they will play, with the objective that in the future they come back to us.
"The idea is the same: we believe in La Masia. We believe in our youth academy. We will continue investing. We invest a lot of money in the academy. It will continue, because the future is to bring the talent to the first team, but, of course, mainly from our youth academy."