Carles Puyol: Heart of iron
Even the Barcelona vintage of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta needed a rock to do their dirty work. The club’s longest-serving (and most successful) captain reflects on a stellar career and the importance of giving something back
The Barcelona icon laid bare
Ashaggy mop of curly hair lies in the dirt, barely able to see a thing as there’s so much gravel in his eyes. Blood trickles down from his nose, his cheeks grazed as he pounds the rock-hard floor with his fist. He gets to his feet, brushes as much dust and grit from his clothes as he can, and holds out one hand, beckoning across a self-assembled foot-tennis court.
“Come on, serve!” he bellows, breaking the sleepy Saturday morning tranquility
in La Pobla de Segur, a small Catalan town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. “And you’ll see what I’ve got.”
Four teenagers, plus their football coach Jordi Mauri, have been playing for an hour. So desperate was the face-planter to stay in the previous point from a seemingly impossible position, this 14-year-old – who had only recently started playing organised football – had attempted a face-first diving header, in full Superman mode, to stop the ball from bouncing.
“Normally, a kid of that age would start crying or want to stop,” Mauri later recalled. “He was more bothered about losing the point than half of his nose. That competitive mentality was in his blood. This was where I saw the character that I knew would make him a professional.”
That 14-year-old did more than just make a mere living from playing football. That 14-year-old realised a childhood ambition to play football for Barcelona, “the team of my heart”, not once but on 594 occasions.
That 14-year-old won 21 major honours for club and country, including six La Liga titles, three Champions League crowns and the World Cup. That 14-year-old came to encapsulate the character and warrior spirit so prized by Barça fans.
That 14-year-old with his scraped-up face in the dirt was a certain Carles Puyol Saforcada. The story he is about to tell Fourfourtwo from Uyo, an increasingly thriving city on the southern tip of Nigeria where he is promoting the African leg of the Champions League Trophy Tour, is one of how a humble country boy became not only one of the most revered defenders in history, but also an ambassadorial symbol of just how powerful 21st century football can be.
SAND-STUFFED SOCKS
Nestled in the heart of rural Catalonia, about 120 miles north-west of Barcelona, La Pobla de Segur is the sort of place you never leave. Not because it bears any resemblance to Royston Vasey, but because its spirit marks who you are. Shepherds still walk their flock around the outskirts of the town, whose 3,000-strong population work the fields, in the nearby hydroelectric plant, or await the summer tourist season.
Isolation can make daily life a strain, yet the sense of community fostered here breeds a strength of character unique to Catalonia’s mountainous interior.
It’s this upbringing which has informed Carles Puyol’s career more than anything else. His father Josep ran the Mas de Gras cattle ranch for all of his working life until he died in a tragic farming accident in November 2006. It has since been taken over by Puyol’s older brother Putxi. The family’s matriach Rosa maintained order in the same home they still live.
“There’s no doubt that people who come from the Catalan interior are hard-working,” Puyol tells FFT. The influence in his never-say-die displays is obvious.
“I grew up around very industrious people whose culture was built on hard work, and my parents played a crucial role in educating me in that way. They’ve instilled those values from an early age and I’d like to think they’re the sort of characteristics I used to bring to the pitch.”
Like so many other football-obsessed kids, Puyol used to “spend his days swapping football stickers” according to one childhood friend. Teachers at the local Sagrada Familia school recalled a “whip-smart” pupil who was good at maths, but “didn’t like studying all that much and football even came up in his essays”.
After school he would head straight to the playground and have a kickabout, or to La Pobla’s branch of the Barcelona supporters’ club (since renamed in Puyol’s honour), where he was known as Litos, his affectionate childhood nickname, meaning ‘Little Carles’.
“When Barcelona were losing, he’d get too annoyed and just go to bed,” explains big brother Putxi, himself a gifted player who was the top scorer in Catalonia’s semi-professional leagues in 2013-14.
Honing his skills on the streets, Puyol was part of a very successful school team which dominated the local area – “he was worth two or three players,” that team’s coach Pep Ortega told Spanish newspaper El Pais in 2002 – but it wasn’t until 1992 that his talent truly revealed itself. La Pobla’s amateur adult side had won successive promotions under coach (and local taxi driver) Mauri, obliging them to start up a youth team.
Despite competing with players a couple of years older than himself, a 14-year-old Puyol excelled as a bulldozing attacker who terrorised opposition defences from the right wing. He was also a more than capable goalkeeper, until mum Rosa banned her youngest son from playing between the posts when a routine doctors check-up revealed problems with his spine.
“He was a crack!” said the senior team’s goalkeeper Alfonso Garreta, who helped the youngsters. “He was an obedient kid, friendly and, like his mum, had a heart of an angel. A winner, a matador. One day, we played local rivals Tremp and he lit up the field as we won 8-0. In the first half he played in goal; in the second, as a forward, he scored a hat-trick.”
One of his early report cards reads like any Puyol display from his 15 years as a professional. “Tall, excellent in one-on-one situations, very good coordination and excellent in the air,” began the summary. “Constantly supportive. Balances when to defend and when to attack, and also manages aggression and strength with skill and dexterity. Well-adjusted personality with great work ethic and desire to improve. Winning mentality. Stable private life.”
It didn’t take first-team boss Mauri – who had seen that foot-tennis diving header first-hand – long to spot his potential diamond in the rough and soon invited Puyol to train with the seniors, later blooding his 16-year-old prospect in the adult league.
He also invited Puyol, older brother Putxi and best friend Xavi Perez to training sessions at 7.30am each morning. For months, Puyol would attach heavy rollers around his waist and sprint as quickly as he could, go for runs through the woods with Mauri’s German shepherd Zeus, or do weighted sit-ups with 10kg of sand stuffed in two football socks thrown over both shoulders.
“I was at those sessions, the three of us, maybe for one week,” pal Perez told El Pais in 2002. The pair remained lifelong friends, and later business partners, until Perez died in a car crash in 2016.
“It was cold, it was early. Eventually, I just said, ‘Carles, you just go, you’re the one that enjoys it.’ He was always better at football than me. Always, always, always. He was a beast and did things with the ball I’d never seen before.” Puyol persevered with the early starts – “I never managed to arrive earlier than he did, he had the attitude of Johan Neeskens,” Mauri once laughed.
Explaining how he taught his protege to take curling free-kicks, the coach adds, “His second attempt, he hit the post. The third, straight in the top corner. He found it so easy to learn.”
“EITHER HE GOES HOME, OR STAYS AND TRAINS FOR A FEW DAYS”
Mauri’s strategy was simple. By the end of the 1994-95 campaign, and after six months of intensive coaching in La Pobla, he would use contacts at Real Zaragoza – where he was doing his coaching badges – to get his trainee a trial. Puyol was so precocious that news of the
“I GREW UP AT LA MASIA FROM AGE EIGHT. PUYOL ARRIVED LATER AND ADAPTED LIKE A SURVIVOR, A FIGHTER. HE’S STILL THE SAME NOW” – XAVI
16-year-old’s displays in the adult game reached Barcelona, despite the youngster having only 18 months’ organised football under his belt.
“My friends kept telling me, ‘Come back home for the weekend, as there’s this phenomenon of a kid playing for the first team,’” explained Ramon Sostres, a lawyer from La Pobla who worked in the Catalan capital at the time.
Sostres couldn’t believe what he saw and resolved to help this talent from his hometown. He knew Barcelona president Josep Lluis Nunez socially and arranged a trial for both Carles and his brother Putxi in a 1995 Barcelona C friendly.
The elder Puyol was let go, as he was beyond the 18-year-old age cut-off for players to be admitted to La Masia, but Carles was kept on.
“Look, Ramon,” academy head Joan Martinez Vilaseca told Sostres, “you’ve got two options. He either goes home and we carry on looking at him there or, if he’s got some family here in Barcelona, he stays and comes to train for a few more days.”
In one of those early matches, Puyol came up against future Barça team-mate Xavi. “No one could get the ball off him,” Puyol told the Spanish press in 2009. “I just thought, ‘They’re never going to sign me if there are kids that good.’”
Sostres gave Puyol a room in his flat where he stayed for four weeks, training with the C team at 5.30pm every evening. Every night they’d say, ‘Come back tomorrow, 5.30pm.’ One day, guardian Sostres’ phone rang at work. “Tell him he’s staying with us,” said Martinez Vilaseca. “No, better you tell him yourself,” replied Sostres. When Puyol, Sostres and Martinez Vilaseca met at Barça C ground the Mini Estadi, the latter gave the former the news. And told him to cut his hair. Puyol agreed, hoping no one would notice if he ignored the La Masia chief. Celebrations in La Pobla went on long into the night.
A month later, on June 22, 1995, Puyol signed his first contract with Barcelona. Sostres, who went along for moral support, would remain his agent throughout his career.
“DON’T YOU HAVE ENOUGH MONEY FOR A HAIRCUT?”
Puyol’s fight didn’t end with that first contract; it was merely the start of a daily need to prove his worth at the Catalan giants.
No one at La Masia doubted the new boy’s warrior spirit and desire to improve, but few believed Puyol had the natural talent to make it at Barcelona, particularly as an attacker. He was too raw, too dependant on his strength, and too late a developer for the necessary inundation of new technical information to be processed.
The work Puyol put in was ferocious, gradually dropping deeper as first a defensive midfielder, then a full-back where he could make the most of his physical attributes.
“So much of my game was about motivation,” Puyol tells FFT from Nigeria. “People say I had such a successful career because of all the qualities I brought away from the pitch, but you can’t be a professional without some basic football ability. It’s impossible.”
Xavi, who went on to share a pitch with Puyol more than 500 times, still remembers his friend’s early training sessions.
“I grew up at La Masia from the age of eight,” the pass master told FFT from his base in Doha, Qatar in 2016, “but Puyi arrived later, on his own, from his hometown. He adapted like a survivor, a fighter, and he is still exactly the same.” Another former team-mate agrees. “He may not be a 10, technically,” Alvaro Negredo told El Periodico in 2014, “but Puyi has other characteristics in which he’s a 20.”
Four years into his tiki-taka crash course, it seemed Puyol’s Blaugrana journey would end before it had even begun. In the summer of 1999, Barcelona accepted a 150 million peseta bid (equivalent to £700,000 at the time) from Malaga for the 21-year-old defender, who, though a Barça B regular, was yet to make a first-team appearance.
He had only one cheerleader within the club: Martinez Vilaseca, the academy head who had signed him, and the man to whom Puyol has always said he owes his career. The La Masia chief went to first-team boss Louis van Gaal’s office.
“You should see how this kid fights,” he told the Dutchman, who was fresh from bringing back-to-back league titles to the Camp Nou and famous for promoting youth-teamers. “He wants to conquer the world. He was so determined and so driven to succeed that he needed to be given an opportunity.”
After watching Puyol charge around the Mini Estadi for the B team on Martinez Vilaseca’s insistence, Van Gaal wasted no time elevating him to the senior squad.
“In my first training session, Van Gaal called me over,” laughs Puyol, a genuine affection to his voice. “He said, ‘What’s the matter, haven’t you got enough money for a haircut?’ I told him it was my hair which gave me strength and made me run fast. Because he’s a born winner, he said it would probably be a good idea for me to keep my hair long. One of the biggest urban myths I’ve read about myself is that Van Gaal told me to cut my hair!”
Immediately impressed with the youngster’s spirit, if not his hair, Van Gaal blooded Puyol during October’s 2-0 victory at Real Valladolid, replacing the injured Simao.
“The thing I remember most was the nerves,” recalls Puyol. “I was about to complete a dream I’d had since I could walk. When Van Gaal gave me the chance to take to the field, I was so excited. I don’t really remember too much about the game other than the fact we won 2-0, but it was the first step of many going forward.
“WHAT I LOVED THE MOST WAS THE ART OF DEFENDING, BEING THE PERSON TO STOP THE OPPOSITION. THAT IS A QUALITY IN ITSELF”
“At 20 years of age I was already doing the thing in the world I loved most – playing, training and watching football, all day, every day.”
Friends and family back in La Pobla couldn’t believe what they were seeing, not least because of where he was playing.
“We turned to stone when we saw him playing in defence for Barça,” best friend Perez recalled in 2002, “instead of as a winger.”
Twelve months later came the consummation of Puyol’s evolving Catalan hero with a desperate Cule public.
Barcelona had lost star player Luis Figo to bitter rivals Real Madrid, and in the Portuguese midfielder’s first game back at the Camp Nou – “Figo, go fuck yourself,” read one banner – fans were baying for blood.
Puyol gave it to them. Given the job of man-marking public enemy No.1, he followed Figo everywhere – he blocked his runs, got in his face and fizzed into the occasional two-footed reducer.
“Puyol kill him, Puyol kill him,” screamed the frenzied home crowd throughout the second half. The local press were no less enthused, despite the 2-2 draw. “He was the Portuguese’s shadow,” wrote Catalan paper El Mundo Deportivo the following morning. “He didn’t spend a second separated from him and barely let Figo touch the ball.
“Puyol anticipated almost everything. When the Catalan gave Figo a whack, the cheers he received from the fans were as if he’d scored.”
There’s actually an argument to suggest that during the early years of his senior career, Puyol was the sole ray of light at the club. Barça faded badly between 1999 and 2003, a series of ineffective managers and indifferent signings resulting in five successive trophyless seasons, finishing as low as 6th in 2002-03.
A born leader, Puyol embodied the unique, almost stubborn, Catalan condition, and it was no surprise when he was made club captain for the 2004-05 campaign.
He then took it upon himself to personally welcome every La Masia graduate to the first-team squad – telling them the best place to sit in the dressing room, where to find the training kit and to meet every coach – because of the isolation he had experienced in his early weeks with the senior side.
Nor was that anything new. Recognising that Andres Iniesta was an extreme introvert at La Masia, Puyol gave the midfielder his mattress the day he moved out of the famous old farmhouse and into his own flat in 1996. Iniesta’s bed was old, well-used and had broken springs. The pair remain very close.
During those seasons in the silverware wilderness, Puyol refused all offers to leave Barcelona until he had satisfied his trophy-winning itch.
“There was a really bad dynamic in the club at that moment,” he tells us. His delivery for the first time becomes terse. “You hear a lot that if Barça don’t win the Champions League then the season hasn’t been a success, but they will usually win the league or Copa del Rey instead. That attitude comes from the last decade or so.
“We can never forget who we are and where we’ve come from. In those years – 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 – there was nothing. We weren’t even close. We didn’t compete to win titles. At the very least, that’s what your fans demand of you. To compete.”
The appointment of Frank Rijkaard as boss precipitated a change in the club’s fortunes. In 2004-05, Rijkaard made Puyol captain and they won La Liga by four points. The following season came the club’s first European Cup for 14 years.
“The arrival of new directors, led by president Joan Laporta, a new coach in Rijkaard, plus signings such as Ronaldinho, Deco and Samuel Eto’o and the homegrown players already there turned the situation around,” recalls Puyol. “We’d won the league the season before, but
winning the club’s first European Cup since 1992 – and second overall – in 2006 was amazing, especially lifting the trophy as captain and the manner of the victory, coming back from the dead against Arsenal.”
FIRST SPAIN, EUROPE NEXT, THEN THE WORLD
The two-season hangover which followed that defeat of the Gunners in Paris hurt Puyol. He was first to appreciate Deco and Ronaldinho’s increasing love of Barcelona nightlife, and by the time Pep Guardiola was installed as head coach for the 2008-09 campaign, he was the team’s moral compass both on and off the pitch, ushering in the era of arguably the greatest club side in history.
“He doesn’t stop shouting at you on the pitch,” midfield metronome Xavi smiles to FFT. “Sometimes you’ve got to say to him, ‘Mate, that’s enough now, we’re 5-0 up!’”
Guardiola admired Puyol’s winning mentality and his willingness to challenge the Catalan technician’s methods in a constructive way at the pair’s first pre-season meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.
“Pep went to town with Johan Cruyff’s model from the 1980s, adding a high press, which seemed to give us an extra player,” Puyol tells FFT. “It was a rounded, fully-formed way of playing. When we lost the ball, the pressure we put on the ball was very, very quick. That was the key to achieving all those titles and glorious moments.
“What made Pep so special was the intensity and detail in which he prepared for every game. It didn’t matter if we were playing against La Liga’s bottom team or the Champions League final, his team talks were the same. Pep is so competitive and refuses to lose to anyone.
“His preparations are incredible – it’s not like your typical coach who ends up saying the same things. Follow his instructions, that’s all he wants. Trust in him.” Guardiola is no less effusive in his praise for Puyol. “He is undoubtedly one of the best players in Barcelona’s history,” said the now-manchester City boss. “He leads by example – you don’t get a lot in press conferences or through his words, but where it really matters, in his deeds.
“He taught me that normally when you’re talking about talent, we’re referring to attacking players, but there’s also defending. It’s not easy to enjoy defending and he’s the biggest exponent of how you do it – you need so much defensive capacity and quality to do that.”
Puyol is too modest to agree with Guardiola, but does concede he is perhaps the last of a dying breed.
“What I see now are defenders who don’t really like to defend,” he says. “Everyone wants to go forward, launch attacks and score goals. What I loved the most was the art of defending, being the person to stop the opposition scoring. That is a quality in itself.”
Put simply, it’s impossible to imagine Barcelona capitulating 4-0 in a Champions League semi-final like they did against Liverpool in May.
The Guardiola era brought 14 major trophies, including three league titles, two European crowns and an unprecedented six honours in the calendar year 2009.
“We were on for the treble and were nervous going out on the pitch,” remembers Puyol of the Champions League final against Manchester United in Rome. “They started well and were all over us for 10 minutes. Victor Valdes, who had been our saviour three years earlier in Paris as well, kept us in it.
“We had so many injuries and suspensions that I was at right-back, where I hadn’t played for a few years. You’d say our defence of myself, Yaya Toure, Gerard Pique and Sylvinho was one of circumstances, but as we settled we started to control the game, took our opportunities and ended up winning 2-0, convincingly. Lionel Messi even popped up with a header!”
Two years later came that Barcelona side’s apogee against the same opposition at Wembley. The Messi, Xavi, Iniesta possession carousel left United battered, bruised and nauseatingly dizzy.
With 10 minutes to go of the 3-1 win, Wayne Rooney is said to have walked up to Xavi and whispered, “That’s enough, you’ve won, you can stop playing the ball around now,” according to Guillem Balague in his book about that team.
Watching on from the bench after struggling with a knee problem which had restricted the skipper’s involvement for six months – he had played both legs of the semi-final with Real Madrid in near-constant pain – Puyol had the best seat in the house.
“We were superior from the very first minute until the last,” he says. “I actually think that’s one of the best performances in Barcelona’s entire history. Were we the best team in history? That’s a bold thing for me to say, but I think we’d be there in the conversation, for sure.”
“GO ON, THE CUP IS YOURS”
He may have only played the final two minutes at Wembley – Pep was adamant the club captain, who had done so much for the city, should be on the pitch at the final whistle – but the 2011 showpiece provided the perfect demonstration of why Puyol is such an icon.
In March, a tumour was discovered in left-back Eric Abidal’s liver and the Frenchman was immediately sent for a transplant.
“The thing I’ll always remember is his relentlessly positive attitude from such an early point in his recovery,” explains Puyol, puffing out his cheeks. “His desire to move forward was unbelievable, and meant that in a matter of months he’d recovered not only from his illness, but to the extent he was back training. That made him an example not only for us, but I think also to wider society and people who have been affected by cancer. Remarkable.”
Puyol resolved to step back from first-team duties after the semis, in the hope that Abidal could prove his fitness for the final. And, should Barça win, lift the trophy in his place as captain.
“He’d helped me so much through my own difficulties that season,” continues a noticeably emotional Puyol. “The thing is, me having a few problems in my knee pales into insignificance compared to what he was going through – that operation saved his life, make no mistake about it. The whole squad loved and admired him – he deserved to be the first to lift the trophy and represent us. He was by my side and I said, ‘Go on, the cup is yours.’”
Up the Wembley steps went the Barcelona squad, and not even Pep knew of Puyol’s plan.
“I was surprised,” Abidal told FFT in 2016. “I was so appreciative of this and him. I still am.”
WALLACE, FLYING TARZAN AND THE MATTRESS ACCEPTER’S WINNER
A born-and-bred Catalan fiercely proud of the region’s cultural identity, Puyol nevertheless loved playing for Spain.
Progressing through La Roja’s various age group teams, his warrior spirit shone through every coach he played for. The organiser of squad sweepstakes at major tournaments, Puyol also played a crucial role in uniting the warring Real Madrid and Barcelona factions, alongside Iker Casillas and Xavi.
His response to the person he thought should replace him at Barça when he retired was short, insightful and instructive: “Sergio Ramos.” The team always came first.
Spain flattered to deceive in major tournaments until Luis Aragones’ four-year reign from 2004 added a rod of iron to the game of Europe’s footballing aesthetes. And the country’s first international trophy for 44 years at Euro 2008.
The coach’s racist comments about Thierry Henry should never be airbrushed from history, but that entire Spain squad view Aragones’ mad-uncle man management as vital to every success that followed.
“Luis believed in us more than we did in ourselves, and definitely more than the Spanish public and press did,” Puyol tells FFT. “For two years he kept telling us, ‘We’re going to be champions. Believe me, if we’re not, then that makes me the shittest coach in the world.’
“Those were his literal words and he said them so often that eventually we believed him. For Spain that was half the battle. For years we’d had excellent players but, if we’re being honest, we didn’t really believe we could win a Euros or World Cup.”
Old wounds, however, take a long time to heal. The day before the Euro 2008 Final against Germany, the team were nervous. Their record against Die Mannschaft was poor and these were perennial winners, reared to triumph. “He just made light of the situation,” chuckles Puyol. “Luis called us together for a team talk after training the day before the game. ‘Lads, listen,’ he whispered. ‘Wallace hasn’t trained. He’s not going to play.’ “We all looked at each other, confused. I think it was Xavi who said, ‘Mister, who’s Wallace?’ Luis said, ‘The captain! The No.13.’ He meant Michael Ballack! We couldn’t stop laughing.” As the 22 players gathered in the tunnel the following day, Aragones sashayed past, looked back and winked at his players. “Good luck, Wallace,” he said, patting Germany captain Ballack on the backside and heading pitchside. “It was hilarious,” Puyol tells us. “I don’t know if he meant it the day before, or it was just the forgetful way he was, but we weren’t thinking about the final any more. We were supremely relaxed for what was the biggest game we’d played until that point with the national team.” Almost inevitably, Spain won, 1-0. Two years later, La Roja faced the same opposition in the World Cup semi-final in South Africa. This time, they needed Puyol’s leadership. Goalless at half-time in Durban, he ran up to Xavi walking down the tunnel, the television cameras picking up an animated conversation between the two great friends. “Remember the Bernabeu?” said Puyol as they walked off the pitch, referring to his bullet header from Xavi’s free-kick in a 6-2 dismantling of Real Madrid a year earlier. “The next corner, put it on the penalty spot for me.” “Como si fuera tan facil,” Xavi kept saying. Like it’s that easy. “Can’t you see how big they are?” “Can’t you see they’re like statues?” replied Puyol. “If you don’t put it there, I’m not coming up for any more corners.” In the 73rd minute, Spain got their corner. Xavi did as Puyol had requested and produced the perfect cross onto the penalty spot. “As soon as I saw Puyi start running, I thought, ‘Goal,’” he recalled. The defender began his run from outside Germany’s 18-yard box, his header a 12-yard bullet beyond Manuel Neuer for Spain to reach their first World Cup final.
Perhaps the most incredible part of all this is that Puyol was injured. He had worked overnight with physio Raul Martinez on his troublesome knee and hadn’t even told his team-mates about his issues, let alone coach Vicente del Bosque.
“Even if you cut Puyi’s leg off, he’d still carry on just the same,” Spain left-back Joan Capdevila tells FFT. “He’s a bull, our Tarzan. I had no idea he was injured, because he played exactly the same.
“The power he had in his body wasn’t normal, and I’ve barely seen another player with his muscles. He’s obviously mortal, but that goal was superhuman.”
Back at the team hotel, Puyol’s team-mates were quick to proclaim the most important goal in Spain’s history. “Until Sunday,” he replied. It would be Iniesta, the exquisite-yet-fragile midfielder to whom Puyol had given his mattress at La Masia a decade earlier, who scored it.
“It was important that Andres scored the goal after everything he’d been through,” says Puyol, identifying with the injury troubles Iniesta had suffered before his 116th-minute winner against the Netherlands in Johannesburg. “It was an incredible feeling watching that ball go across the keeper and into the net, as there were so few minutes left. I wanted us to keep fighting because I knew the game wasn’t over – if you let your guard down, that’s it.
“Two years earlier, we’d started something with practically the same group of players and this felt like the chance to complete that cycle. You can win a European Championship, but winning the World Cup as well is something that few teams have ever achieved. Incredible.”
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME… AND BEYOND
After a career typified by an almost psychotic will to put his body on the line, injuries eventually caught up with Barcelona and Spain’s great Homeric warhorse. Puyol suffered 36 of them in total, his knee finally forcing his retirement in 2014.
Had he not done so, Del Bosque would probably still have taken him to that summer’s World Cup, such was the esteem in which he held the centre-back, who had missed Euro 2012 through (another) injury.
Eulogies flooded in, some believing it came too soon, but the fighter faced arguably his toughest challenge. Retirement.
“All I ever wanted to do was play football,” a wistful Puyol tells FFT. “I found it hard moving on from playing and training every day, seeing your team-mates in the dressing room and having fun, but you get used to having more free time. The best thing is spending more time with my family. Vanesa and I had just had our first daughter, Manuela, when I retired and that was a magical time.”
Puyol keeps busy. He plays padel – a tennis-squash hybrid popular in many Latin countries – to stay fit and briefly formed his own football agency, but now he travels the world promoting the positive effects football can have on the poorest, and most remote, communities. It is, he feels, his true calling. In 2007, before his retirement, he went to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama and discuss Tibet’s autonomous state within China.
“I love experiencing other cultures and talking to people all around the world, so these ambassadorial events are a great way of doing it,” he says from the Nigerian leg of the Champions League Trophy Tour. “It shows football’s impact. Seeing such powerful images as children in Dharamsala wearing a Puyol shirt is a source of huge pride for me.”
Tibet’s situation has parallels with Catalonia’s own within Spain, and Puyol was a supporter of the region’s vote for independence in 2017.
“He represents this area’s character,” La Pobla de Segur’s mayor Lluis Bellera said of the town’s most famous son after his 2014 retirement. “It’s not the same as in the city. Life is harder here and things aren’t as easy. He is what this country needs right now – strong, brave leaders with clear heads. He’s a leader, a one-off.”
Much like in Dharamsala, Puyol No.5 shirts litter La Pobla’s streets. In 2010 he couldn’t comprehend such a situation, but in travelling the globe, this most determined of leaders has found acceptance in what he has brought football.
“Yes, I believe it all now, because it happened,” says Puyol, pausing as if contemplating his last two decades. “I’m very happy and proud of the career I’ve had, but it’s about more than just trophies. Playing for the team which has dominated my heart, for my entire career, is something I’m very aware is a dream for millions of kids around the world. I know that because it was my dream, too.”
A dream which began idolising legendary Barça centre-back Migueli, once the club’s record appearance maker and whose Tarzan nickname he would inherit. The combination of physicality, never-say-die spirit and defensive nous was too strong an emotional attachment for the Barcelona faithful to ignore.
“Inheriting that name was amazing,” beams Puyol. “He’s a reference for Barcelonismo, so for him to have supported me during my career – and given me his nickname, too – is the ultimate source of pride.”
In 2014, El Mundo Deportivo wrote, “He taught us lessons which will never be forgotten. Principally, that to be the best central defender in Barcelona history it wasn’t necessary to have the foot of an angel, but to have a heart of iron.”
That desire shone through, even before he was face-first in La Pobla’s dirt all those years ago. An urban myth around the town’s streets says Puyol once threw both a tantrum and himself off the family balcony when mum Rosa wouldn’t buy him a Superman costume.
“The Superman stuff, I’m not so sure,” best bud Perez told El Pais in 2002 before his death. “But he definitely threw himself off the balcony. Nothing happened to him – he really is made of iron. Seriously.”
Puyol is an ambassador for the UEFA Champions League Trophy Tour presented by Heineken, providing fans outside Europe with the chance to experience the ‘Unmissable Moments’ the tournament produces
“CUT PUYOL’S LEG OFF AND HE’D JUST CARRY ON. HE’S OUR BULL, OUR TARZAN” – JOAN CAPDEVILA