It all began with a move to the birthplace of Salvador Dalí; to Figueres, a city in the Northeastern-most province of Spain, and home, in 1991, to a second-division soccer club. It’s there that you’ll find the roots of one of the more unlikely MLS pipelines: from Barcelona to Kansas City.

It began with a captain who would go on to work at FC Barcelona; but who, just as importantly, doubled as de facto club social director; who ran a high-end clothing store on the side; and who wanted to practice his English.

Peter Vermes, at the time, was trying to learn Spanish. So the U.S. national team regular, living in his fourth country in four years, struck up a convenient relationship with that captain. His name was Pere Gratacos.

Gratacos was a former Barcelona B defender who had moved to UE Figueres for the final chapter of his playing career. During the two years he and Vermes overlapped, Gratacos and his wife would take Vermes and his wife on sightseeing tours of the region.

“Pere and I were good friends,” Vermes says now.

And it’s a good thing they were. Because 20 years later, Gratacos was one of several links that helped Vermes, now the ninth-year manager of Sporting Kansas City, craft this unique connection. A relationship with the world’s most famous academy that has yielded an MLS Cup-winning defensive midfielder, and now a second No. 6 who has started all but one game en route to the 2017 playoffs.

In all, four La Masia products have arrived in Kansas City in five years. Two are on the current roster that will face the Houston Dynamo in a Knockout Round match Thursday night. One of the two, Ilié Sanchez, has played every minute of every MLS match, save for an August game at Seattle three days after a 120-minute U.S. Open Cup semifinal.

But the pipeline’s foundation was built last century in Catalonia, where Vermes played with at least six future Barca employees. And its pioneer arrived in 2012, as a scrawny 20-year-old. That pioneer was Oriol Rosell.

View photos Oriol Rosell was a hit in Kansas City after taking six months to add physical strength. (Getty) More

Rosell was originally one name on a list that Peter Smith, a former teammate of Vermes, had passed on to the Kansas City coach and technical director that summer. Vermes perused the list of available players, which featured “a slew of Barcelona kids,” then handed it off to assistant Kerry Zavagnin. Pretty soon, Vermes was on the phone with Gratacos, at the time a director at Barcelona’s training facility.

“I had called Pere and asked him about [Rosell],” Vermes recalls. “And he said, ‘Look, he’s a young player, he’s probably never going to play at Barcelona, but he’s got some good talent.’” That conversation, coupled with what Vermes and Zavagnin had seen on film, led them to arrange a trial for Rosell in Kansas City. And three days were all the Catalan midfielder needed to convince Vermes to sign him.

Two years, 43 MLS appearances and one championship later, SKC sold Rosell to Sporting Clube de Portugal for $1.5 million. But his departure didn’t terminate the Barcelona connection; rather, he had become another link.

Fast forward to this past winter, and one day after Sanchez got off the phone with Vermes for the first time, he grabbed his phone again and called Rosell. The two had played together for one year on Barcelona’s B-team, with Sanchez often starting ahead of Rosell. Sanchez also rung up Jordi Quintilla, who signed with Sporting KC in 2015 and spent 10 months at the club. All three players had come up through Barca’s academy, and overlapped in the Barcelona B setup.

“We still have a very good connection and relationship with Rosell,” Vermes says. “So it’s easy when a guy like Ilié can pick up the phone and say, ‘Can you tell me about the club, and how things are there?’ And when you have a former player who gives a raving review, it obviously helps you.”

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