Barely 24 hours after hanging up his boots, after being sent off against Osasuna in the last match with Barça, Gerard Piqué commented for the first time, in an interview with the streamer Ibai Llanos, his feelings about a withdrawal that he had planned for some time months, his plans for the future and his totally different version of his dialogue with the referee at El Sadar, Gil Manzano.
"I go into the tunnel and tell him that it always hurts us. He points to me and says, I think Carles Naval, 'he's expelled'", explained the former player, who denies having said "I shit on your fucking mother" as he puts it the minutes, a phrase that, according to Piqué, was said by a member of the Barcelona team "inside the locker room". "He expels me for telling him 'you're always the same'. What he puts on the record is once he's already expelled. You can't say anything," he added, in addition to saying that "the referees lack empathy." "He will want to put me into six or eight games, but I am already retired (...) I would like to see the referees with microphones, and that they come out to speak after the game," he concluded on the subject.
"Now I'm free, you no longer have to be pigeonholed and answer what you have to. I didn't shit on anyone's mother yesterday," said a released Piqué, who once retired does not have being president among his priorities, "right now." del Barça: "I think at some point I'll feel like it. Right now I don't have it in my head. I want to do many other things. In the future, I would like to help the club of my life to exploit all the potential it has" .
Beyond the false farewell to football in Pamplona, the former player recalled with special affection his last day at the Camp Nou, where he experienced a communion with the fans that "he did not expect". "I have always considered that the farewell did not have the importance that I later realized it does. You realize how much people love you and appreciate you. I hate farewells and I wanted to leave from one day to the next. The match was well and I left very, very happy," he acknowledged.
His last day as a Barça player was at El Sadar, but his retirement could have been earlier, shortly after Xavi recognized the few opportunities he was going to have this season. "I wanted to try it. The sensations from the beginning of the season were not the best in general terms. I saw that the break was an opportunity to make that decision. I did not make the decision before because there were injuries and I could not let the team down (... .) After some training I was about to quit."
"I thought that when I retired I'd be sad, but I'm happy. I look back and the road is spectacular. I've squeezed every day of my life. I've had a blast. I hope to continue living life like this", said a Piqué who He also revealed a conversation with Joan Laporta before the start of the season, "it lasts in the first few minutes", in which the president asked him to reduce his public exposure and not appear in the media. "I made a commitment to several things. One of them would be not to do anything off the pitch, such as appearing on content of any kind like Twitch. I also promised myself that I wouldn't talk to the media," he said.
He also had words of praise for the president of Real Madrid: "I am an admirer of Florentino. I think that everything he has done for Real Madrid has been tremendous." Instead, he criticized the Super League project headed by the white president, in addition to Laporta and the president of Juventus, Andrea Agnelli. "But for me the Superliga is nonsense and he was wrong," criticized Piqué, who advocated other innovative formats to modernize football.
"The feeling it gives me is that today's youngsters find it much more difficult to feel attracted to football. You have to try to create short and entertaining products. 90 minutes of the game seems like a lot to me, but rules should be found that make the most exciting product", concluded a Piqué about his vision of football who this Thursday, in a theater in Barcelona, will present a new project with Ibai Llanos.
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