It’s already a reality: the only survivor of the best Barça in history is Sergio Busquets. The games pass and there he continues, immovable thanks to Xavi, while he notices how his qualities are fading. An eerie ticking sounds in the background as the heroes fade away. Years ago they began to deform because the passage of time is inexorable, no matter how much you call yourself Gerard Piqué and think you are irreducible. It’s hard to accept that your time has come, that what defined you is over and that you will have to transform into a new version of yourself. As at the end of Blade Runner, the footballer shuts down just like the replicant, and thinks that everything he has experienced will be lost like tears in the rain. “It’s time to die”, pronounced devastated the character played by Rutger Hauer when he realized that eternity was impossible. There was no need to fight anymore.
“Culers, I have to tell you something”. The days have piled up along with the phrases, the cadence of the voice and the look of Pique in the video of the farewell announcement: his own monologue assuming the irremediable end. The adult’s eyes were chained with his dream-laden child self, in an almost therapeutic visual dialogue with himself. A whole life summed up in just over two minutes. Piqué has thus taken it upon himself to recover a story that was slipping away from him and that reached its lowest point when he was booed at the Camp Nou after the fateful performance against Inter. He was flirting with the pain of seeing his narrative clouded. If he had left in the summer he would have been spared these months of substitutions inflicted by Xavi, yawns, various humiliating discomforts and, above all, presidential reproaches related to the pocket. It was getting late.
Instead of ending his career by playing 10 emergency minutes in an unpleasant pitch like El Sadar, Pique played his final service as a Barça player by exploding his anger in the noses of the film’s villain, Gil Manzano. Populism in vein, yes. Debatable, too. But at this point we’re not going to lick our lips with hypocritical rolls about setting an example when a World Cup is about to start in Qatar, are we? Since when is football an example of anything? Piqué decided to be authentic until his last breath: he played his last match in the Barça shirt where he played, with his people, and took a wonderful red to become the perfect cherry on top of history that he wants to continue writing. Without anyone telling him anything.
