Gerard Piqué will leave Barça and elite football shortly. The game against Almería will be his last game at the Camp Nou. He announced it this Thursday through a video posted on his Twitter account. At best, his Blaugrana career would last until Tuesday, the day Barcelona plays in Pamplona. The 35-year-old defender has a contract with the Blaugrana entity until 2024 but has decided that he will not continue to be active for another week.
"This Saturday will be my last game at the Camp Nou. I will become one more culé, I will cheer on the team and pass on my love for Barça to my children just as my family did with me. I have decided that it is time to close this cycle I have always said that after Barça there would be no team. And so it will be", reflected the Barcelona player
Piqué will stop dressing as a Barcelona player after fifteen seasons at the Camp Nou, where he arrived from Manchester United. The Catalan returned to Barcelona, where he trained as a footballer, under the guidance of Josep Guardiola in the summer of 2008.
One of the most important defenders in the club's history has so far played a total of 615 games as a Barcelona player and has scored 53 goals and is the fifth player who has played the most games with Barça. With the azulgrana jacket he has lifted 30 titles, with three Champions and 8 Leagues. As for his career in general, he has won 34 club titles plus the 2010 World Cup and the 2008 European Championship with Spain.
For many seasons, Piqué was a fixture in Barça's line-ups, with all the coaches he had, from Guardiola to Xavi, including Tito Vilanova, Tata Martino, Luis Enrique, Ernesto Valverde and Quique Setién. However, last summer Xavi informed him that this course his participation was going to be greatly reduced, to the point that he has become the team's fifth central defender. He has participated in nine games, five of them as a starter.
The club reacted by saying that there had been talks in this regard since the summer and that the player had been left to make the final decision. Barça assures behind the scenes that it shares the footballer's decision and that he is leaving one of the benchmarks of Barcelona. At the end of the video of him, Piqué stated that "sooner or later" he will return and he does so looking at the box.
Piqué makes his decision after the Barça assembly in which Joan Laporta and Mateu Alemany criticize the decision of the team captains not to lower their salary. The match against Inter in which he made mistakes and which meant the practical elimination of Barça from the Champions League also pushed him to make this decision. To make matters worse, a sector of the Camp Nou received him with whistles in the match against Villarreal. The video that he posted on Twitter had been in the making for a couple of weeks.
