BarcelonaA few hours after hanging up his boots for good, Gerard Piqué sat down in front of the microphone to explain how the frantic week of his farewell has been. “I didn’t expect it to be like this, my goodbye. I didn’t think about it, and you realize how much people love you. I hate goodbyes and I’ve always said I wanted to do it overnight.” said the ex-Blaugrana centre-back.
“There are many reasons, and you think about them as the season goes on. I had a meeting at the beginning of the year with the manager in which he told me that this year would be difficult, but I wanted to try because the previous year was very good – he explained -. I saw that the stop was an opportunity to make this decision. I have always said that when I did not feel important I would leave it, and the fact that there were injuries in my position made me take the decision later. I felt out of place at certain times. There have been days when I was training at the Camp Nou after games where I hadn’t played and I wanted to go into the dressing room and say it was over finished. I didn’t quite feel that it was my place,” he confessed.
The former Barça player has confessed that before the season started he met with Xavi and Laporta. “At the beginning of the year I met with President Laporta and I committed to several things such as disappearing from content of any kind. The first minutes were hard, but then fine. We have always said things to each other’s faces, we have a relationship that allows us to do that,” he said.
If Barça tell me at 28 that they don’t want me, I will retire from football. I only wanted to play for Barça”
“It’s been a while since I spoke, in general,” he said jokingly at the beginning of the conversation, when he related what happened in the match against Osasuna. “I at halftime, after the refereeing we got, which I think we all know hurt us, I went to talk to him [Gil Manzano]. I went into the tunnel and told him that he always hurts us, and he immediately kicked me out. He pointed at me and said: “You are expelled”. Then I, already sent off, enter our dressing room and inside there is a teammate insulting him. «I shit on your mother“, and the referee puts those words in my mouth,” he explained live. “Now I’m free, I no longer have to be boxed in or having to answer what he always plays,” he said calmly, after repeating in several occasions that he is already a “retired player”.
In addition to the present and the immediate past, Piqué also spoke about his future. “At some point I will certainly like to be president of Barça. Right now it’s not in my head, I admit it. I want to do other things. I have really enjoyed my career as a footballer and having the freedom to not be every training during the day or playing on the weekends will allow me to devote myself to other things. But in the future I would like to be able to help the club in my life to do great things.” Piqué also took the opportunity to announce that this Thursday will see the light of one of his “biggest projects”, related to “a sport known to all”. Piqué, while laughing, has commented on his role in this new stage: “[En el nou projecte] I will have a role that I have always dreamed of: being Javier Tebas. I won’t vote for Vox, but I will play his part.”
The announcement of Gerard Piqué’s farewell via Twitter took Joan Laporta and the board of directors by surprise. The relationship has been strained since the president returned to the Camp Nou box office following negotiations to lower the captains’ wages and other circumstances that have led to a significant estrangement between Piqué and Laporta. The umpteenth example has been the central’s refusal to hold a joint press conference with the president to detail the reasons for his resignation and to answer journalists’ questions. Avoiding the photo with the president, he finally gave the explanations live from the hand of Ibai Llanos.
That Piqué decided to speak out for the first time after his retirement on Ibai Llanos’ Twitch channel is no coincidence. Apart from the public relationship of friendship between thestreamer and the ex-footballer, the two have a number of businesses together. The first, and most ambitious, is KOI: a team ofe-sports which they founded last year and which competes in the highest category. This, however, is not the only project they have in common. Last year they created a sporting event that broke the mould: the World Ballooning. In this competition, obviously broadcast via Twitch worldwide, representatives from each country compete in a decorated room to try to keep an inflated balloon from touching the ground. Stunts and showmanship are guaranteed, just the way Piqué likes it.
