BarcelonaGerard Pique folds. So, all of a sudden, without notifying his coach or his teammates, with whom he had dinner on Wednesday in a restaurant in Vallès. This Saturday’s Barça-Almeria match at Camp Nou will be the last official match for one of the most influential and decorated defenders in the history of the Barcelona club. From now on, the Barcelona native will be able to focus entirely on his business side after so many years combining it with professional football practice. Bold and extraordinary, he has said goodbye in the middle of the culers. As he has already let it fall, he aspires to preside over them one day from the box office of the stadium. Time will tell if he succeeds.
“Either he eats life or life eats him.” This is how a person who has lived in the Barça dressing room all these years talks about Piqué. The Barcelona native, who turned 35 in February, has been one rara avis in the world of football. Unlike other millionaire players, who delegate the management of their wealth to third parties, he has been able to combine his day-to-day life as an elite athlete with a frenetic business life, in constant redefinition and with a playful component associated with the fact knowing that the bank account will make up for their mistakes. On this financial cushion, he allowed himself the luxury of closing down Kerad Games, the video game company he founded in 2012, with losses of millions, or of assuming the failure of the hamburger restaurant Yours!, a project derived from a previous investment in meat of beef from the Vall d’en Bas.
“I don’t do all this for money. I’ve made a good living and I could be lying on the couch doing nothing,” he said a few years ago about this entrepreneurial attitude. Indeed, Piqué takes the business he does – now under the umbrella of the powerful Kosmos holding company – as a game of risk, with the same spirit that could lead him to lose thousands of euros and a few hours of sleep when betting on matches of the NBA or win poker games at Casino de Barcelona.
The Rubiales Super Cup
Charismatic of sorts, the one who will be a former Barça player from Saturday gets involved in his businesses so that they go well. In this context, the agreement to bring the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia is framed, for which Kosmos will pocket 24 million to be distributed over six years, but above all the subsequent talks with the president of the Spanish Federation, Luis Rubiales, first to ask him for help to participate in the Olympic Games in Tokyo and later so that Andorra, the club he owns, would have a simpler group in Segona B after buying a place in this category. Requests that raised a lot of dust when The confidential he posted them via audio messages.
“More than an entrepreneur, he is an achiever,” a source close to the Barça dressing room explains to ARA about Piqué, where until recently more discreet profiles than his were preferred to carry the captaincy, an honor that the central defender did not receive until ten years after his return to the club from Manchester United. However, wearing the armband since 2018 hasn’t deterred him from continuing to pull strings off the pitches. Thus, in 2019 he closed an agreement to exploit the Davis Cup for the next 25 years in exchange for 2.6 billion. And in 2020, by virtue of the good relationship he forged with Isabel Díaz Ayuso (PP) following the organization of the tennis tournament in Madrid, he intervened so that 32 million masks were transported from China to the Spanish capital in the peak of the pandemic. He did it in exchange for nothing tangible.
But Piqué has also played the role of achiever at his house To begin with, if Barça wore Rakuten on their shirt between 2016 and 2022 it was thanks to him. The central’s agenda made it easier for Josep Maria Bartomeu’s board to find an alternative to Qatar’s petrodollars to sponsor Barça. It was he who convinced Hiroshi Mikitani, owner of the Japanese digital commerce giant, to invest in the Catalan club. The player did not get paid for the mediation, but it was known strong to negotiate with Bartomeu a professional contract until 2022 at the rate of 28 million gross per year between fixed, plus and variable, not counting a bonus at the end of the stage. Of all the money agreed, Piqué will waive the last year of his contract (until 2024) and will forgive a good part of the 52 kilos he had agreed for this season, which will help the sports management to consider operations in the market winter
The controversy with Bartomeu for ‘The Decision’
From the alliance with Rakuten also obtained the co-production of the documentary Matchday with Kosmos, which he had produced months before The decision, the piece that Antoine Griezmann used to reject going to Barça. Despite his discomfort with the Barçagate case, Piqué also agreed with Bartomeu, in a pandemic, to space out the payments of his contract until 2024, turning his back on collective bargaining with the other heavyweights of the dressing room. On the other hand, he did not get the former manager to accept him as a buyer of a part of Barça Corporate, something that Laporta did not allow him in the summer with Barça Studios either. It was against the code of ethics. What he was able to do was recruit Dr. Ricard Pruna, who had suffered workplace harassment at Barça, for his Andorra. Months later, Quique Setién’s second, Eder Sarabia, would also sign for the Andorran entity. Pruna would return to Camp Nou with Xavi.
With Laporta in the presidency, the central has had a direct line with decision-making, although the relationship has been fluctuating. Before anyone else, he negotiated with the manager the salary reduction that was needed to, already with Lionel Messi out of the Camp Nou, enroll Memphis and Eric Garcia in the 20/21 League. His ascendancy in the offices has made his representative, Arturo Canales, well received when negotiating renewals of its own kind like Umtiti’s or securing signings like Pablo Torre’s. “Piqué and Canales have an influence on the day-to-day life of Barça,” a source who knows how things are working at the club tells ARA. The scheduling of deferred payments to the central office will depend on this coordination. Because the successful footballer par excellence has also been the highest paid defender in the world.
