Approximately 90 promising young players stay at the centre in the Miralcamp Training ground each season

Villarreal CF is a club characterised by the good work it does with the young talents that arrive each year at its youth academy. Promising youngsters who arrive in Vila-real with the dream of becoming future professional footballers to defend the colours of the Yellow Submarine.

The residence at the training ground is the main place in which each season new future footballers enter and grow both personally and athletically with different tutors and coordinators who are involved to the maximum to help these boys to achieve their goals.

Among these professionals we find the case of José Ramón Villalba, director of the residence. A lifetime of yellow. This is a phrase that could perfectly define José Ramón Villalba, who is in his 22^nd year at the helm of the residence in 2022.

In 2019, he received a gold badge from the club to honour his 20 years at Villarreal. A club with which, as he says, he shares a very strong emotional bond: “My work here is a lifelong bond and it means a lot to me on an emotional level. In the end you create strong relationships with the boys, coaches and the human group that surrounds the club”.

The residence is divided into two floors where up to 90 youngsters live with coordinators and tutors each season. “We try to ensure that the atmosphere inside the residence is calm, that it is not a climate of many egos and, above all, to make them understand what it means to be away from home, but also that this adventure helps them to improve in any area of life,” explains Villalba about the atmosphere in the centre.

Being away from home and their parents for such a long time makes the workers’ work even more important in the training and implementation of the values they transmit to the youngsters. “Our responsibility is very high. We try to find a parallelism between the sporting part and the values part, because we consider the human aspects of their training to be important,” says the director of the residence.

“Those who work in the residence are basically educators. We have workers with an educational profile, but also with basic knowledge of sport and health habits,” describes José Ramón about the profile of the people who work at the centre.

However, as has happened in many areas of society, the pandemic has hit the residence hard. “It is true that it has caused big changes, because we used to have a very close relationship with the young people, but we have adapted well as much as possible,” says Villalba.

Although passing through the residence is not synonymous with success for all those who live at the centre, there are several examples of players who have passed through the residence and who today are key players in the main Cantera Grogueta teams and even in the first team. Íker Álvarez, Filip Jörgensen, Juan Carlos Arana and Sergio Lozano of Villarreal B and Moi Gómez, Mario Gaspar and Yeremy Pino of the first team are the most recent examples. José Ramón Villalba is sincere about these players: “It gives us enormous pride to see them grow by leaps and bounds, knowing that they have grown up here”.

The professionals at the Ciudad Deportiva residence work on a daily basis to continue training young talents both personally and athletically. As they explain, “the time you spend here is very important because it shapes you at all levels” in a centre, the residence, which continues to train young ‘groguets’ who are pursuing their dreams.