I hammered in the bench of the Barça. /
“This Saturday will be my last game at the Camp Nou,” he said on social media
Gerard Pique leaves. This Saturday he will play the last game as a Barça player against Almería, as he announced in an emotional video posted on his social networks: «This Saturday will be my last game at the Camp Nou. The time has come to close a cycle », he said. He does it right in the last game that the team will play at home before the break that will occur due to the World Cup in Qatar. He leaves at the age of 35, at a time when he was on the ropes due to the doubts caused by his moment in a way that had taken him from being an undisputed starter to substitution, and from being admired to receiving whistles in his own home . Also because the board had publicly pressured him to reduce his record and salary. And surely the decision has also been influenced by all the commotion caused by his divorce from the singer Shakira.
Piqué will surely be applauded this Saturday. He deserves it. He has been a central defender of remarkable quality and one of the best in the world. He was part of a team that wowed fans. He was in all the happy photos that this team lived. He danced, sang and kissed success. In the later seasons, however, happiness turned to sadness. He was portrayed in the most painful defeats suffered by the team in Europe: Rome, Liverpool and Lisbon, where Barça received a humiliating thrashing by Bayern Munich (2-8).
It is not the dream exit for a player, currently with the captain’s armband, who grew up in La Masía, who has a Barça heart, who has lived twenty-five years thinking like a culé by birth and who has won everything. But if Leo Messi, the most outstanding figure of Barcelona in its recent history, left the same way he left Barça, Piqué did not wait for the door to be opened directly. He leaves. He has chosen a time when nothing important is at stake for the team, once eliminated from the Champions League and forced to play the Europa League for the second consecutive season.
In the video, which begins with a background sound in which a voice is heard asking if Piqué should leave Barça, the footballer recalls that in recent weeks many people were talking about him and that now it was his turn. And he spoke. He was accompanied by images of his childhood, and commented that he did not want to be a footballer but a Barça player. “Football has given me everything. Barça has given me everything. I always said that after Barça there would be no other team. I will become one more culé and I will transmit my love for Barça to my children as my family did. He played more than 600 games with the Barça shirt and won thirty titles. He was champion of the Champions League, won Leagues, Copa del Rey, Spanish and European Super Cups and the Club World Cup. And he was also world and continental champion with the Spanish team.
The news of his retirement became the most important of the afternoon on social networks. On Instagram, where the footballer has more than 20.3 million followers, messages of support poured in, from teammates, former Barça and other team players and from many fans. “Always in my team” says Ivan Rakitic. «The greatest, regardless of who he weighs. Congratulations on everything you have achieved and transmitted, “wrote Andrés Palop. And Carles Puyol, who was his captain on the team, said: «Thank you for everything, Geri. I am in shock. It has been very unfair to you, few have defended the Barça shirt as you have. I can always tell that I played by your side, a privilege. I love you friend”.
The news took the world of football by surprise. And also to the club. A team player, Piqué has been distinguished by his personal manifestations, and in recent times almost all of his performances had raised blisters. The most recent: the agreement with the president of the Spanish Federation, Luis Rubiales, to distribute the money from the Spanish Super Cup if it was played in Saudi Arabia. For the memory will remain that photo in which after a 5-0 win over Madrid he greeted showing “a little hand”. His tears before the media will also be remembered after playing the match behind closed doors on October 1, 2017, and in which Catalonia held a referendum. Piqué never declared himself independentist, but he was a nationalist. He did not want to play the match against Las Palmas, but the board and the coach, then Ernesto Valverde, agreed to play it.
Your role as an entrepreneur
Little by little, in recent seasons, Piqué left important details that indicated that football was no longer everything to him. He became an entrepreneur, founded the Kosmos company and became the organizer of the Davis Cup tennis tournament, which will be held in Malaga at the end of November. And he also became the owner of FC Andorra. Football interested him less. Although yes, in the video in which he announces his withdrawal, Piqué makes it clear that he will continue to be one more culé and warns the culés that they already know him and that sooner or later he will return. For a time, the figure of Piqué was so highly regarded by the Barcelona fans that many have even come to believe that in the future he will be the president of the club. The phrase “sooner or later I’ll be back” looking at the Camp Nou authorities’ box is totally in line with a new dream for Gerard Piqué.
