Competition and the club

La cantera is a quarry: a hole in the ground where stone is cut out. In sport it is the club's own youth set-up, and un canterano is a player the club dug out of its own ground instead of buying him. De la cantera is said with pride, and the metaphor is the reason: what comes out of a quarry is raw material that belongs to the place. English needs a different word for each part of that — the academy, the youth system, a homegrown player — and none of them carries the ground. The word travels outside sport too: la cantera del partido is where a party finds the people who will run it in twenty years.