In April 2026, students on the UEFA Pro Master spent two days in Santander, at Racing’s home. Mario Beretta, president of the FIGC Technical Sector, had singled out the club as one of the most interesting football models in Europe, far from the usual templates. The visit was meant primarily to study José Alberto López’s first team, but the programme was expanded to include a detailed presentation of the academy. That is where, over the past two years, the Cantabrian club has built something that goes beyond tactics.
Racing arrived in Santander as leaders of Segunda División, with direct promotion still to be secured. They sealed it a month later, on 16 May, beating Valladolid 4-1 at El Sardinero and benefiting from Almería’s defeat. It sent them back to Primera División after 14 years away. A month later, on 1 June, they added the Segunda title, beating Cádiz 4-1. The first team was winning. The academy was changing too. On 3 June 2026, during half-time of that same match against Cádiz, something happened that rarely happens on a football pitch: a quality certification was presented. David de Pastors, general director of AENOR Confía, the Spanish standards body equivalent to Italy’s UNI, presented Gonzalo Colsa, Racing’s director of Fútbol Educativo, with the “Excellence in the Comprehensive Training Model for Football Academies” certification.
Racing became the first Spanish professional club to receive the certificate in its consolidated form, developed by AENOR together with LaLiga. Its roots go back to 2024, when AENOR worked with Osasuna on a bespoke certification that became the basis for a model later extended to all clubs under LaLiga’s National Plan for the Improvement and Optimisation of Academies. The protocol assesses more than 50 indicators across the academy’s strategic and operational processes, with particular attention to communication, monitoring systems and child protection. It looks at how a club builds its development system, how it monitors it, and how it changes course when necessary. Two projects sit alongside it: Racing INN360, on the technological side, and Proyecto Victoria, focused on child protection.
Racing presented INN360 on 12 June 2026, a few days after the season ended. The platform grew out of Racing InnovAI, the club’s internal technology division led by Ceria, and is designed exclusively for the academy, from the youngest benjamín age group through to the categories immediately before professional football. Five modules sit inside it: methodology, physical preparation, medicine, nutrition and psychology. They bring together physical, technical, nutritional, medical and psychological data to give coaches a fuller picture of each player’s development, reducing the role of subjectivity in assessing talent. The methodology module contains more than 1,000 structured exercises and a generative AI assistant, INN360 Copilot, which suggests targeted sessions from the objectives set by the coach. The medical module tracks injuries and recovery. The nutritional side monitors calorie intake. The psychological component uses tools such as the CPRD test to assess mental state and motivation.
INN360 was built separately from the first team’s data analysis, and remains separate from it. The numbers produced by the senior side can easily become a measure of everything beneath it, even when nobody intends them to. Racing has drawn a line there. If INN360 is about performance, Proyecto Victoria begins with the person. Its aim is to make youth sport a safe environment against violence, abuse and neglect involving minors. Inside the club, it has a simple name: el fútbol que protege y educa, football that protects and educates.
Racing created the role of Delegado de Protección, now held by Gonzalo Silió, a professional whom players, staff and families can approach confidentially with any concern, whether it originates inside or outside the club. There is also Reflejarte, an emotional-management programme developed with the Centro Botín. Using dedicated tablets, young players learn to recognise and record their own emotional states — sadness, anxiety, drops in energy — and the effects of sporting pressure. The club also shares its prevention and monitoring protocols, free of charge, with amateur clubs across Cantabria. What begins inside the academy does not stay there. On 20 April 2026, the project reached Brussels. Higuera, Ceria, Colsa and Silió were welcomed at the headquarters of the European Committee of the Regions for “Deporte, Infancia e Inclusión: el Proyecto Victoria del Racing y el poder Transformador del Fútbol en la Comunidad”, in front of representatives of EU institutions and regional governments. Georg Haeusler, director for Culture, Creativity and Sport at the European Commission, publicly recognised the initiative’s preventive and educational value.
Then there is the football itself, and the way the boys are taught to play. It was the part that first caught the FIGC’s eye. Much of European football still teaches players to occupy space geometrically, following the principles of juego de posición associated with Cruyff and Guardiola. Racing have chosen another route: relationism, or functional football. The starting point is almost the opposite of a familiar rule. In positional football, players stay wide to provide width when a teammate has the ball. In the relational model, they move towards the ball carrier, creating density and spontaneous numerical superiority around the ball. Short, quick exchanges follow. Zonal marking is built to protect space; suddenly there are several players in the same space.
This is the football with which Racing earned their return to La Liga after 15 years. The project has been led, almost from the moment the club returned to Segunda División, by José Alberto López, a coach with extensive experience in Spain’s lower divisions. Under López, Racing improved their league position every season: 11th in his first campaign, seventh the next, fifth two years ago, then the title last season, with 90 goals in 42 matches — comfortably the division’s best attack. “We want our players to understand the relationships to create at any given moment,” López explained in an interview with Sky Sports. “It gives us more flexibility. We don’t abandon structure because we want balance, but we want to be a team that adapts and creates advantages through connections.” López puts it more directly: “Modern football requires quick thinking and strong interactions. We want to be a team that is difficult to read, brave and attacking, while remaining balanced.”
The Racing side entering La Liga reflects those ideas. Gustavo Puerta is a dynamic, aggressive Colombian midfielder. Asier Villalibre, El Bufalo, is a hard-working centre-forward who, after some unsuccessful spells in La Liga, chose to drop a division and scored 16 goals on the way to promotion. Sergio Canales returned to European football after three years at Monterrey and was already everywhere in the opening game. Then there are the players coming through the Cantera Verdiblanca. Jorge Salinas, a left-back born in 2007, is being followed by Manchester United and Barcelona. He supplied seven league assists last season and became a European champion with Spain Under-19s this summer. Sergio Martínez, also born in 2007, is a holding midfielder who scored Racing’s second, temporarily putting them 2-0 up against Villarreal on his La Liga debut, with a half-volley from distance.
The relational idea also changes what a role means. In the academy run by Colsa, a centre-back can step forward and become a No 10 if he senses that a teammate needs support. The reference point is not simply where a player is standing. It is who is around him. Training does not revolve around rehearsed sequences. The players work instead on loose concepts: “scales”, progressive vertical arrangements for moving up the pitch; supporting diagonals; small patterns that are not really patterns until the players assemble them themselves. The decision comes in the moment, through instinct and trust. INN360 sits alongside that rather than trying to contain it. It attempts to measure the cognitive and decision-making load of players who, on the pitch, are still allowed to improvise.
The certification, Proyecto Victoria and the football itself belong to the same academy. Young players are developed inside a system that is designed, observed and adjusted, rather than left to the instincts of whoever happens to be coaching them. That is what interested the FIGC in Santander. Not simply the Segunda title, or the return to Primera after 14 years, but the decision to give the academy its own environment. The development of young players is kept institutionally apart from the immediate demands of the first team. The psychological protection of minors is treated as part of the sporting infrastructure, not as an ethical footnote.