Gerard Piqu\u00e9, the legendary 35-year-old Barcelona defender, says he will retire from football when Spain\u2019s La Liga goes on a break for the Qatar World Cup later this month.
\n\u201cFootball has given me everything; Barcelona has given me everything. You cules [Barcelona fans] have given me everything, the Spaniard said on Thursday in a heartfelt social media post that included a montage of clips from his childhood.
\nPiqu\u00e9 has long been an integral player at Barcelona, winning La Liga eight times and picking up three Champions League titles in more than 600 appearances at the Catalan club.
\nThe defender came through the club\u2019s renowned La Masia academy, which has produced the likes of Lionel Messi, Andr\u00e9s Iniesta and current Barcelona manager Xavi.
\nIn 2004, he moved to Manchester United, where he won the Premier League and Champions League before returning to his boyhood club in 2008.
\nPiqu\u00e9 would make 183 appearances during Pep Guardiola\u2019s time at the club, establishing himself as one of the world\u2019s best defenders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gerard Piqu\u00e9, the legendary 35-year-old Barcelona defender, says he will retire from football when Spain\u2019s La Liga goes on a break for the Qatar World…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2476,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}