John McGinn described Aston Villa's 3-0 Champions League defeat at Barcelona as a "huge learning curve".
Unai Emery's side were beaten in Europe for the first time this season as LaLiga's champions ran out comfortable winners at Camp Nou on Tuesday.
Lamine Yamal became the teenager with the most goals in Champions League history (14) by capitalising on risky Villa play inside just seven minutes.
Barca captain Raphinha then scored twice in the second half, as Villa had little retort to Hansi Flick's side.
Consequently, Villa suffered their joint-heaviest defeat in major European competition, having also lost by three goals to Royal Antwerp in September 1975 (4-1) and Inter in November 1990 (3-0), both in the UEFA Cup.
Moreover, no Premier League side has committed more errors leading to goals in all competitions this season than Aston Villa (seven, level with Sunderland).
Speaking to TNT Sports, Villa captain McGinn is sure they will learn from the loss moving forward.
He said: "Barcelona made the right decisions at the right times and scored really good goals.
"The manager spoke about being clinical at important moments in the game. When you come here 50-50s sometimes don't go your way. They also leave players up the pitch so if you lose the ball they can be away.
"I think we are competitive against teams at this level, we have shown that whether it is Bayern Munich or PSG.
"This was a huge learning curve for us and I'm sure it will stand us in good stead for the future."
Villa managed nine shots, but only one of those was on target, while Barca had 16 with eight on target.
Emery felt his team paid the price for not being clinical enough.
"The result is not good, a lot of things [were] positive, but it was not enough to get a good result," Emery said.
"How we are building the team is clear in 90 minutes but we have young players, talented players and experienced players. We made some mistakes.
"More or less after the mistake we made, we were creating chances. If we could score one goal with the chances we had in the first half, maybe it would have been different, but we were not clinical.
"I can feel on one side we are comfortable going our way because we have nine points because of the good work before. We should be realistic but at the same time feeling good how we are doing it.
"I have my opinion on how we can get better, but the experience today was very important.
"This is the level we want to achieve again. Today was a good experience, bad result, but good things as well. At this level you must be more ruthless."
Jehbcelotz
0
Hmmm I think what you suffered from is that Barca shook up the coconut tree of self satisfied players recently…they were all out trying to prove to their coach they deserved to play.