TV3 and 3Cat premiered on Monday (and screened by Prime Video on the second Tuesday) L'Academia, a deeply moving sports drama about the 100-year-old training center of a fictitious football team, Apolo FC; Or in other words about Masia del Barcelona. This environment of overcoming and sacrifice is a pressure cooker in which issues of gender, race, and sexual identity simmer. The men's team captain, Adrian (Marc Soler), the son of former team star Tomas (Diego Martin), hides his homosexuality while flirting with the women's team captain, Lara (Rita Gonzalez), who also piques the interest of newcomer Jairo (Ton Vieira), a striking but… “Disruptive, violent and sexist,” according to psychologist Toni (Barbara Guenaga). Try watching just one episode and not wanting to know more about these players, their teammates, or their supervisors – it's impossible.
A place to dream (and suffer)
The Academy is the largest project that Paola Esboni has been responsible for as Artistic Director. When he thought, as he admitted to us, of moving to the conceptual design of the sets “to try to maintain a calmer rhythm”, he decided to accept this challenge of “creating an elite team from scratch”.
After making a conscious decision, it was decided to locate the honorary base at Campus La Mola in Terrassa and, according to its official website, “an inspiring place for creative business meetings”, with 185 rooms and 22 seminar rooms. According to Esboni, “it took the necessary intervention to make it credible for ambitious young elite players to leave their skins to enter”; It was to be an “ambitious place”, but also with an oppressive military character.
The process required “building bed frames for some of the players; installing a large fake concrete surface at the entrance to cover a colorful mural; or creating the graphic image of the entire company, and studying the application in each room.” The spaces were redistributed and decorated so that they “appeared to be designed as a high-performance academy.”
On the other hand, the gym scenes and Jairo's medical tests were filmed at the Mataro Technocampus; This was at the Badalona Stadium, where the Apollo Club's youth stadium and training pitches were recreated. In the series, we also see the stadiums of Espanyol (as well as Ciutat Esportiva Dani Jarque) and Europa FC, the latter of which “has so much depth and character that it requires little intervention”.
Class (and house) struggle
Home environments serve to recall paradoxical social excerpts. Adrian's family home, located in San Andreu de Lavaneras, is a house popular in depictions of people who have died; At the opposite end will be Jairo's Carmel house. His high school, in the same neighbourhood, is actually the Verolai School, which also had the asphalt track where coach Willy (the excellent Marc Martinez) discovered this diamond in the rough: “It offered a wonderful panoramic view of Barcelona and, moreover, it had direct visual contact with… Willie's house, even if it's imperceptible on screen.”
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