Players going out on loan and then being promoted is nothing like players leaving for years then coming back. Lucho was the one who gave Rafinha and Denis their chance in first team squad and was really the one who promoted them to that level.
Denis
did leave for years and come back. As I said, he was playing for other La Liga teams longer than he was with the B team, and he never was La Masia in the first place, the guy was 20 when he signed for us.
Denis is a greyer area but Rafinha was promoted under Lucho to the first team squad.
Eh, I disagree. Rafinha was loaned out during Tata's rule and he was brought back from loan, not promoted. It was either loan/sell him again, or use him with the first team. With the season he had at Celta any incoming coach would have opted not to send him back out on loan. Lucho is putting a lot of faith in Rafinha but he wasn't a B team player when he arrived, so he couldn't have been promoted from the B team by him. There's a reason most B players are considered *either* for promotion or for loan. This is all semantics anyways though, we both know counting Rafinha is just padding Lucho's La Masia numbers for the sake of argument.
Include Rafinha and dont count Masip or Denis and it is three in three years against five in four. Not a massive difference as some would like to make out and Pep had the better players to promote.
But the manner in which players are promoted matters. Munir and Sandro count as promotions but they're also a huge stain on Lucho's handling of La Masia at the same time. Sandro was promoted as a backup for another player who was promoted as a backup. One was released on a free and the other was loaned in favor of spending 30m on a striker who is better in theory but much worse when actually on the pitch. That only leaves Rafinha and we could argue over whether he was promoted or not all day (Not one of the other players we can agree on left the club at all between the second and first teams). But then there's the omissions from Lucho that made little sense, the ones that give him his reputation of not giving a damn about La Masia. His decision to let us lose games constantly in favor of even giving Grimaldo a debut in a friendly. Loaning out Samper (Who admittedly wasn't completely ready) for spending 35m on Gomes (Who absolutely wasn't ready). Expelling Deulofeu for being lazy and not running and later signing Arda Turan who openly bragged about leaving Atletico so he wouldn't have to run, for 40m. Loaning Munir to sign Paco for 30m. Ignoring Palencia and Nilli when we don't even have a RB in the squad (You can say he's not good enough but he's played well with Barca B and could have proven himself to be good enough for the first team in plenty of situations that didn't harm the team, the same way Arda scored X amount of goals in Y amount of games that didn't help the team at all). Calling Gumbau from the B team as a means of trolling the fanbase. And all this is without even mentioning the way he constantly called up B team players and actually used them, many of which he never even promoted- oh, wait, that was Pep. Lucho himself very rarely calls up B team players, except for when Suarez was banned and a short string in 2015 where he trolled us with Gumbau.
Edit: If you think about it, looking at our current team and the players who replaced the La Masia players who aren't good enough, Lucho could very easily have more promotions in these three years than Pep had. Terrible transfer policy and an ignorance of La Masia has caused us to have the weak squad that we are currently stuck with, and now we don't necessarily have the money to fix it.
