When Qatar established its ambitious Aspire Football Dreams project

When Qatar established its ambitious Aspire Football Dreams project — designed to capture and train the best young talent in Africa, Asia and Central America — it seemed natural to appoint two men with connections to La Masia, Josep Colomer and Juanjo Rovira, to its senior ranks. Likewise, when Liverpool wanted to modernize its youth development, it looked to Pep Segura, now restored to a position of prominence at Barcelona.

Even away from the intense, high-pressure world of elite soccer, though, the Barcelona brand carries weight, as Puig’s story demonstrates.

He left Catalonia in 2014, stepping down after a disagreement with the board, and took on a post with the national federation in Gabon. He was struck, there, by Barcelona’s reach. “We would go to villages in the countryside,” he said. “Some did not have power or running water. But you always saw kids in Barcelona jerseys.”

After a year, he moved to Aruba, before agreeing to a three-year contract at De Anza Force, a club in Cupertino, Calif. “I wanted to experience the United States, and I wanted a job with less pressure,” he said. “It is very calm here. It is like a paradise.”

Real Madrid, by contrast, has no comparable flotilla of ambassadors preaching the glory of the most successful club in Europe.

There is a formal connection with China — Real has sent 24 coaches and committed $185 million to building an academy in conjunction with Guangzhou Evergrande. Real also has an informal relationship with Aspire: Ivan Bravo, the Aspire Academy’s director general, worked as director of strategy in Madrid between 2003 and 2010. He also currently holds a seat on the board of Leeds United.

Beyond that, though, Real’s influence is limited: No team supplies more players to Europe’s top five leagues than the reigning Spanish champion — Madrid overtook Barcelona this year — but it sends few executives or coaches as emissaries.

In part, that may be because of the management model that has brought Real such success: The club’s president, Florentino Perez, has worked with his two closest associates, Jose Angel Sanchez and Ramon Martinez, for so long that friends say they cannot imagine leaving.

The stability of Perez’s reign is significant, too. He has been in charge of Real for much of the last two decades. Barcelona has seen coaches and executives leave in purges following regime change. There has been no such upheaval in the Spanish capital. The only people who come and go at Real are managers. That may be to Real’s advantage. There is some concern in Catalonia that the brain drain is hampering La Masia’s success.

But there may also be a cultural element to it. In Steven G. Mandis’ book “The Real Madrid Way,” he concludes that “winning cultures cannot be imposed or invented.” They are, instead, unique, indigenous. The peculiar alchemy that makes Real Madrid special and successful cannot be packaged up and introduced elsewhere. The history, the context, is incomparable.

That is not how Barcelona sees it. It does not want to impose its culture on other teams, to create an army of clones. Its evangelical zeal comes from elsewhere, from a belief that the language it speaks can be learned by others, too, no matter how grand or insignificant, how rich or poor. It can leave its trace anywhere, and everywhere.