Gerard Piqué He has lived some very complicated months, both in sports and personally. The separation of the Colombian singer Shakira has affected his life and seems not to count for much for coach Xavi Hernández, with whom they were teammates in the most glorious era of the Barcelona.
Xavi tries to put Barcelona back on top and in his official presentation in the new season before his public, in the Joan Gamper trophy, the team thrashed Pumas from Mexico 6-0. Piqué was on the substitute bench.
However, the defender, who is 35 years old, wants to show the club and Xavi that he is still valid and for that reason, he made a sacrifice to stay on the payroll.
The judicial mess faced by Piqué and other players
To understand the decision that Piqué made, a bit of context. The club saw “indications of crime” in the contract renewals made by the former president Joseph Maria Bartomeu before resigning from the club, as revealed by the Efe agency.
On October 20, 2020, Bartomeu renewed Piqué until 2024, at Marc Andre Ter Stegen until 2025 already Clement Lenglet Y Frankie DeJong until 2026.
The four footballers involved agreed to lower the ground that 2020-21 season, in exchange for renewing their respective contracts upwards. According to the previous board of directors, these four renewals represented salary savings of between 16 and 18 million euros, about 30 million counting amortizations.
However, Barça estimates that these “absolutely exorbitant and off-market” chips that these four players began to collect with the contract extension represent a salary extra cost for the club’s coffers of 311 million euros.
The objective of the Barça entity was for these contracts to become null and void and for the players to accept the conditions in which they were before signing these renewals since, according to their legal services, they see in these contractual extensions indications of a crime of unfair administration of the previous board of directors.
Piqué’s decision: the salary was lowered
According to the newspaper Mundo Deportivo, Piqué agreed to lower his salary and continue at the club, in the midst of Barcelona’s struggle to stay in financial fair play, after the large investments he made to reinforce the payroll, led by the arrival of Pole Robert Lewandowski from Bayern Munich.
The cases of Ter Stegen, De Jong and Lenglet are more complicated. There is still no agreement with them and the club would be thinking of taking the case to court. If the courts accept Barcelona’s arguments, the players would be left with the salaries they had before the renewal they made with Bartomeu. They would even have to pay back the extra money they have received since then.
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