Later this year, Grande Sports Academy is losing a notably prestigious resident. And in nearly the same breath it’s about to gain a new one.

Since linking up with Grande to create the nation’s first MLS residency academy in 2009 in Casa Grande, Ariz., Real Salt Lake used Grande’s palatial facilities to construct one of the most robust first team academy pipelines in the country. Every Homegrown RSL has ever produced – and there are a lot of them – filtered through Casa Grande. But a newly built $60 million training facility in Herriman beckoned the club’s academy back to Utah. After eight years in the desert, it was time.

Grande didn’t wait long to find a new partner. And this one should cause some mountain-sized waves in the roiling seas of American youth development.

This fall, Grande will embark on a new partnership with legendary Spanish club FC Barcelona to create the first ever foreign residency academy on U.S. shores, titled simply Barça Academy. Barcelona will send over a technical director and a director of methodology, who will bring their Barcelona-infused curriculum and culture to impose on the academy setup. The academy itself will be run on a day-to-day basis by Grande’s current technical director Sean McCafferty and his fleet of coaches. Grande had already been granted its own space for three teams in the U.S. Soccer-run Development Academy for the 2017-18 season after RSL’s exit.

Barça Academy will occupy that spot from this season on at the U15, U17 and U19 levels.

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After a battery of talks between the two sides, the U.S. is about to get its first look at what happens when a major foreign club with all the resources in the world and an existing American residency academy collide.

“In an ideal situation, it’s like La Masia over here,” said Grande Sports Academy General Manager Tim Alai. “We want to be the best on the field. We want to be the best in the classroom. We want to be the best as citizens. It’s not just one component. It’s a lot of components that we want to bring together. You can’t just come here for soccer training. If they do, it’s just a camp. But if you’re going to be a residency player, you have to have the education, you have to have the methodology on the field, and you have to be a good citizen.”

Barcelona and Grande connected over a mutual acquaintance, and as Alai puts it, “it was sort of like we were set up on a date.” Once the two ends realized the broad principles of player development lined up almost exactly, the two sides got down to details. And it just so happened Grande already had three open Development Academy spots this newfound Barça Academy would be able to fill.

Barcelona first ventured into the American development market in August 2014 when their first U.S.-based FCB Escola went up in South Florida. Two years later, another one was planted in Charlotte, N.C. And then another in Austin, and Northern Virginia, and Chicago. After the most recent announcement of a Barcelona-run academy in San Diego, there are now six either already planted or planned to launch in American cities from coast to coast.

Nobody quite knew or understood the reach of these camps, or what they meant for Barcelona’s intentions in the American soccer development market. The Escolas operate like normal soccer camps, with players arriving for a few hours a couple days a week to train underneath the learned methodology of one of the most prestigious clubs on the planet. They’re geared toward younger age brackets, mostly between 6 and 12 years of age, and meant to give an undergirding of soccer education at the root level.

The San Diego branch, which will officially open later this year, made the U.S. the home of the highest concentration of FCB Escolas anywhere in the world. But they only stretched to the U12 age range, and while a recently announced Barcelona-operated academy in New York extended the scope to the U14 level, beyond that the players would simply disperse to other clubs in lieu of moving to Catalonia to train in the vaunted Barcelona home academy.

Now, with the introduction of the Arizona-based Barça Academy, the U.S. also has the only full-time residency academy run by Barcelona in the world. What this essentially means is a player can conceivably be trained entirely inside Barcelona’s unique methodology from the time they’re six to when they turn 18 without ever leaving the U.S.

“And as the director of the (FCB) Escolas told us, that’s the ideal story,” Alai said. “That’s the story they want to write.”

The training environments on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean are clearly different, and Barcelona’s American academy architects rightfully stop shy of making any grandiose like-for-like comparisons to La Masia, the club’s famed home academy in Catalonia, Spain. But this announcement does represent a startling commitment to development in the U.S., and it brings the club that much closer to producing a future pro in America.

Grande’s been around as a brand since 1986, and it’s been operating as a holistic soccer residency academy on grounds that used to be solely used for the hospitality and golfing for more than a half decade. That sort of commitment and experience was hugely enticing to Barcelona, which will lean on Grande’s organizational expertise and knowledge of the American market while importing its own brand of soccer development Stateside. And it didn’t hurt that Grande’s palatial facilities match up against anyone’s in the country in terms of sheer available resources. Grande also has a partnership with Arizona State Preparatory Academy to offer full-time schooling from grades 9-12 for players enrolled in its academy.

“We’re kind of out by ourselves out here,” Alai said. “We’re surrounded by a sea of desert, and you’re in soccer heaven. You step outside your room and there’s eight professional green fields that MLS and national teams use.”

For now, Barça Academy is still fleshing out its rosters for its Development Academy launch this fall. The club is holding official tryout dates from June 30-July 2 and July 12-14, with weekly camps running from June 4-Aug. 5. It’s a process, Grande officials are sure to caution, but one with which they have no small amount of experience. While RSL took its coaching staff with it back to Utah, plenty of Grande officials are still there who saw the club develop the roots of an academy that most recently put five players on a U20 World Cup team.

The impact Barça Academy ultimately makes on the American soccer development landscape is of course yet to be defined. But if the enthusiasm of club officials is any guide, it’s going to be a heck of a ride.

“U.S. Soccer is welcoming of it,” Alai said. “They want to have the best players, and this is a way to have the best players when you learn from the best. And that’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be bringing in the best.”