Gerard Pique's intimate confessions on The Players' Tribune

Gerard Pique went back over his career in an extensive article on The Players' Tribune. The Barcelona defender revealed he created a WhatsApp group with Real Madrid's players, but also spoke about some of the more delicate moments of his career.  

PEP GUARDIOLA

"When I was 24 years old, I was on top of the world. I had won everything -- La Liga, Champions League, World Cup. I was playing under a genius manager in Pep Guardiola, who really believed in me from the moment I arrived. I was playing for the club I had loved since I was a boy. It was perfect. And then … I had the worst season of my career. Everything seemed to fall apart in 2012. I don’t know why. Perhaps I had lost the fear that drove me to that level.

"Pep started to lose faith in me. For the first three seasons, we had a phenomenal relationship. The truth is, it was an extremely hard time. He wanted his players to be obsessed with football 24 hours a day, and at that point in my life, I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t as committed to that philosophy. Pep simply didn’t trust me anymore, and the crucial moment was when he decided not to play me against Real Madrid in the league. That was crushing to me." 

THE NATIONAL TEAM 

"We are all playing for the same country, with the same dream, and that’s something that I’m very, very proud of. Ever since I was a little boy watching Luis Enrique bleed all over his jersey at the ’94 World Cup, my dream was to play for the national team. I’m extremely proud to wear the badge every four years at the World Cup. Maybe that will surprise some people. If you watch television in Madrid, they’ll tell you a very different story about me. They’ll say that I’m a traitor, and that I want to tear the country apart because of my public support for the Catalan people’s right to vote in the independence referendum."

ALEX FERGUSON

"Around 10 years ago, I was almost f***ed. My whole life could have turned out very different if it wasn’t for Sir Alex Ferguson. I arrived at Manchester United a boy, and I left a man. It was a crazy time for me, because I had never been away from home before. One of my very first matches at Old Trafford, we were in the dressing room putting on my socks next to Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Ryan Giggs and Rio Ferdinand. I wanted to be invisible. I was thinking, 'Just do your job and go unnoticed.'

"Ferguson told me that I was going to play about 25 games that season and I ended up getting 12. It was an extremely difficult time. A mistake [against Bolton] felt like the end of my career. It ended up being the beginning of it, but only because of what Sir Alex Ferguson did for me. You see, toward the end of that season, my agent told me that Barcelona were interested in bringing me back. I could not believe it. My exact words to him were, 'That doesn’t make sense. I’m not playing at United, so why would they want me?' And [Ferguson] said, 'Well, they know you. They believe in you.' He was like a second father to me."  

Messi

"People often ask me what it has been like playing with Messi for so many years. If I had to explain it in one sentence: He is an alien. He is not from this planet. He’s the only player that I can recall seeing play for the first time, way back when we were 13 years old, and saying to myself, “Oh, this kid comes from somewhere else. This is not human.

"He is an assassin. He’s the greatest I’ve ever seen. But, you see, it’s not about the way he attacks. People ask me, “What’s the most incredible thing I’ve seen Leo do on the pitch?” And they expect me to tell them about him dribbling three defenders. And trust me, I have plenty of those stories.

"But for me, the reason that I know he’s from another planet is because of what happens when he doesn’thave the ball. Perhaps you can’t see it on TV, but I can see it on the pitch. You have to see his face when he’s sprinting to win the ball back from a defender. He has a look in his eyes that I haven’t ever seen in another footballer. It is what makes him so great. He is not interested in the spectacle. He rarely even does stepovers. He’s cut from a different cloth. His greatness is in his obsession with winning the ball."