One of the icons of Barcelona hangs up his boots in elite football. One of the symbols of the best Barça in history is leaving the club with a stamp of urgency. Gerard Piqué (35 years old) announced this Thursday around half past six in the afternoon through a video posted on his Twitter account that tomorrow, Saturday, he will say goodbye to the Camp Nou in the match against Almería. He could still play on Tuesday in Pamplona but he is already there. He then said goodbye to the team of his life and to top-level professional football, at least in his facet as a player.
His fifteenth season at Barcelona will not be complete. Until now he has played 615 games as a Blaugrana, the fifth player with the most games in the history of the team.
After being a starter and important during the whole of his career, he had been cornered on the bench by Xavi, and singled out from the board, along with the rest of the captains, for not lowering his salary and thus contributing to lighten the worrying salary mass of the entity.
Piqué has never been a secondary actor and does not want to prolong his agony of the current course when he has participated in only nine games, with five starts. “I will become one more culé, I will cheer on the team and I will pass on the love for Barça to my children just as my family did with me”, narrates the footballer in the video.
The center-back has a contract with Barcelona until June 2024 but he renounces the year and a half of his contract and forgives his amount, an issue that will undoubtedly help the club's economy. Barça, through its president, confirmed last night that the player's predisposition in this regard is total and that the details of the resolution of the contract are being finalized. Joan Laporta found out yesterday about Piqué's decision.
“I have decided that it is time to close this cycle. I have always said that after Barça there would be no other team. And so it will be, ”says the defender in his video. At the end of the year he will end his relationship with the club, although he will no longer be in the derby against Espanyol, originally scheduled for December 31.
Piqué's announcement comes after a few difficult months for the defender. In May, Xavi informed him that his participation in the team would be little less than residual and ordered him to leave Barça so as not to accumulate substitutions. Piqué then opted to continue and was convinced that he would reverse his situation. But the defender became the last center-back for the coach, who even made a full-back (Marcos Alonso) the starting line-up before opting for La Bonanova's.
With 30 titles as a Barcelona player behind him, the matter had become unbearable for Piqué. Although beyond the sporting aspect, the player is upset with the board.
In fact, he began to think about the video that he posted after the assembly of delegates on October 9. In that assembly, Laporta and the director of football, Mateu Alemany, openly criticized the four team captains, Piqué among them, for not lowering their salary. A few words that did not sit well among the locker room totems. That message from the armchair came before his poor performance against Inter, a game in which Barça was practically eliminated from the Champions League.
The atmosphere around the player became rarefied and a sector of the Camp Nou whistled at him when he appeared on the scene in the match against Villarreal, an unprecedented event as Piqué had always been a footballer with practically unanimous communion with the Blaugrana parish. If anyone represented the Barcelona spirit on the pitch, it was him, a member of a family with culé roots.
All these events made Piqué decide to rush his goodbye and commented on it a few days ago in the locker room, although nobody knew the exact moment when he was going to officially announce it. Most likely, Piqué will appear at a press conference with Laporta in the middle of next week.
Guardiola recruited him in the summer of 2008 to return home after his tour of Manchester United and Xavi will have been his last coach at Barça. Is it a point and end in his relationship with the club? Well, the end of Piqué as a Barcelona player is not yet written. In the video, he himself concludes that sooner or later he will return and he says this sentence looking directly at the box. The footballer-businessman Piqué is running as the future Blaugrana president. First player and then president. In that he would resemble the founder of the club, Joan Gamper.
