So… listen to this… nicknames are like badges of honor for a footballer… and of course the most honorable footballer of all has to be one of many names… the caveman, the shark, the bull, the wall, the gladiator, the lionheart… the captain of captains… but no matter what they called Carles Puyol… what they meant to say was that he was the bravest man in the sport and an absolutely relentless defender… while most players these days get all worked up over the smallest hit to their faces… worried they're gonna lose out on a modeling gig or a multimillion dollar ad campaign… Puyol did not care, as Franco Baresi, another of the all time greatest, once said: “Puyol would put his head where other players wouldn’t dare to put their feet”. . .
and he meant that literally… we’re talking about the kind of guy who saw Roberto Carlos lining up for a shot… and no matter how many legends about his power Puyol had heard… he cleared the ball off the goal line with his face… It’s no wonder that among the 36 injuries Puyol suffered throughout his career… you can find a fractured eye socket, a broken nose and a broken cheekbone… Puyol was a selfless leader, one who never thought twice about putting his body on the line so his teammates didn’t have to… as he said it himself: “The players around me, they are the superstars… I don’t have Romário’s technique, Overmar’s pace or Kluivert’s strength… But I work harder than the others… I’m like the student who isn’t the smartest, but works twice as hard and comes out on top in the end”. . .
and those aren’t empty words, he lived by them since he was child… The average Barcelona star gets put into La Masia at the age of 10 and they grow up with a personalized coach and diet… every tool they could possibly ever need, being told they’re wonderkids, that one day they’ll become superstars… but Puyol’s life was nothing like that… Up to the age of 17, he was just some kid playing for this miniscule club in the 3rd division of his regional league… He had tried playing on goal, as a right back, winger and striker… he was good everywhere but nothing seemed to be the perfect fit… and even if everyone at the club could tell he was a cut above… the one time a Barcelona scout happened to come by… he literally left at half time… disappointed with the quality of the players available… Shortly after, a chance to go on trial at Zaragoza came… but he refused… Puyol had been hopelessly loyal since he was a child… His family even recalls a time when he shocked everyone by failing a school year on purpose, so he could stay behind with his best friend who was going to flunk regardless… It was Barcelona or nothing… Puyol would likely prefer to end up working in a factory than having to put on another club’s shirt… And it was only with two years of academy football left… that Barcelona invited him to train at their academy… for one day… There were no promises, he knew most likely he’d never step foot there again and he admitted that he was preparing for that… but that’s where his father came in… The man was an absolute workaholic, just the thought of his son turning out to be a quitter made him sick to his stomach, so that day he told him: “If they send you back home because there were other players better than you, that isn’t a problem… but if they send you back because someone else tried harder than you… you’re no longer welcome in this house”. . .
At the end of the day, even if there were more talented kids… they just couldn’t tell a boy who had worked so hard all day to go home and never come back… so instead they kept telling him to come back tomorrow… over and over again… and about 30 days later, they caved in and let him join the academy for good… However, this was just the first step… because if once upon a time Barcelona was forced to rely on their academy, ever since the Bosman law had been employed by UEFA, they had gone a bit crazy in the transfer market… and by 97, there was only one academy player in their starting eleven…. meaning that out of the 32 housemates, Puyol had at La Masia that same year… only 3 would go on to become standout names at the clubs… Reina, Valdés and Iniesta… but while the three took very straightforward and quick paths towards the limelight… Puyol wasn’t so lucky… As much as everyone at the club seemed to have endeared themselves to him… it was clear that Puyol was not a stereotypical Barcelona player… never as subtle, never as refined… After years in the B team, the one time first team coach Louis Van Gaal had ever paid him any attention was to mock his appearance, asking him if he “didn’t have enough money to pay for a haircut”. .
. and soon, with the dutch manager seemingly only interested in buying one dutch player after the other… he even tried to ship Puyol out to Malaga, but again… the kid dug his heels into the ground and refused to move…believing that, if another of his old housemates, Xavi Hernandez had managed to make it into the team… one day so would he… and almost 1500 days after leaving the academy, with Puyol now 22 years old and still playing as a right back… Michael Reiziger got injured and once Van Gaal was forced to give Puyol his debut… He never let go… Less than a year later, with Barcelona’s captain, Luis Figo having left for Real Madrid, everyone in Catalunya wanted his head on a plate… so once the two clubs met for the first time since… they knew that if Figo scored, all hell would break loose… and the one tasked with stopping him… was, of course, Puyol… and for 90 minutes he stayed within inches of him, breathing down his neck… as one newspaper put it: “Even as Puyol went against one of the best in the planet, it felt like an equal fight… One he dominated, without ever succumbing to the dark arts”. .
. and by the end, not only had he managed to protect Barcelona’s honor, but he added his usual bit of class… escorting Figo off the pitch as the fans desperately tried to assault him… Add to this the fact that over summer, at the Olympics, the Spanish under 23s conceded as many goals in the one match where he got benched as they did in every game he started… and once the next season began, he was already getting his debut for the national team… Suddenly, it really looked like Puyol had turned his luck around, but not only did he injure his knee only 5 days later… ending up in the operation room… but what they didn’t know then is that even once he made it back… just as Puyol was began playing as a center back, unleashing the beast inside him and leading him straight to the league’s Young Player Of The Year award, Barcelona went into the longest trophy drought since the 1930s… starting precisely as Puyol made it into the first team and only ending 6 years later after a gigantic managerial crisis where they sacked Van Gaal, struggling so much to replace him that they ended up re-signing him… only to sack him again… Regardless, throughout those years, as much as they struggled… Puyol kept making a name for himself with one iconic moment after the other and by October 2002 with Victor Valdés beaten… and Obiorah through on goal… Puyol saved his shot using his chest… with the ball hitting him precisely over the club’s badge as the crowd at the Camp Nou gave him his ever standing ovation, reminding me of that famous Tony Adams quote: “Play for the name on the front of the shirt, and they will remember the name on the back”. .
. And by the end of the year, even if his time with the national team had been equally disappointing, after being knocked out of the World Cup by South Korea… Puyol had been named in the UEFA team of the year… and earned himself a contract renewal that not only made La Masia’s ugly duckling one of the most well paid players in the squad, but set his release clause at 180 million euros… as with Barcelona down on their knees, all of Europe’s top clubs were looking to sign him… In fact, Man United got close enough that even the eternally loyal Puyol admitted that “There was a moment when I thought about going… Why deny it? I wanted to win things and back then, we weren’t just failing to win, we were barely competing”.
. . I gotta say, it’s already strange to see old pictures of Piqué and Ronaldo as friends… just imagine if Puyol had joined them too… yeah… Regardless, next year Laporta won the elections, Rijkaard took over as manager, Ronaldinho arrived and still… Barcelona went trophyless one final time… In fact, it was only after Luis Enrique retired and the players voted Puyol as the team’s new captain, that they finally took back La Liga… and things were never the same… as Ronaldinho used to say: “It’s me in front and Puyol at the back”.
. . In fact, just as the next season started….
the two took part in yet another oddly memorable moment… Look…With Barcelona beating Mallorca 2 nil, things started getting out of control and Sergio Ballesteros was shown the red card… but, this time, when Puyol tried to calm the player down, he was met with a slap to the face… and here’s where things got interesting… not only did Puyol not hit him back or, at least, call out for the referee, but when Ronaldinho charged towards Ballesteros… he held him back… I think it’s fair to say that this went beyond fair play… For a man nicknamed “The Caveman”, Puyol was one of the greatest gentlemen to play the game… but as much as he truly deserved every bit of good fortune that came his way… that year would be as devastating as it would be glorious… When asked about the 2006 Champions League final, most Barcelona players will be grinning from ear to ear, but for Puyol… the memory of that day became one of the most bittersweet of his life… Having already taken another league title, the Champions League final seemed bound to be his crowning moment and so, thinking back to how maybe he would have never been there had it not been for the words of his father 10 years before… he talked him into coming up to Paris to watch the final… The man, being a workaholic with a special distaste for big crowds, had never even come to watch his son from the stands, that was the very first time and even then… it only happened, because Puyol got him an early flight that would make sure he was back at work at 8 am… But even though that day, all went well… even though he watched from above as his son lifted the Champions League trophy and was named the best defender in europe… that would also be the last time he would ever be there to watch him… Only a few months later, Josep Puyol passed away in an accident at work… and though Carles would be back on the pitch soon enough… that loss broke him… Over summer, even if he did set up one of the goals of the tournament, Spain was swiftly knocked out of the world cup and once the club season got going, things at Barcelona got pretty bad, pretty quick…. Eto’o and Ronaldinho got into a locker room feud … and before you knew it, they were insisting that only one of them could stay at the club… and, of course, even with everything going on in his personal life, Puyol was the only one who put in the time to talk to both and figure out what happened… And the next training session, with the camera ready to shoot the moment the two clashed… once they arrived, they were all smiles… Still, by the end of the season, not only had they wasted their lead, allowing Real to take the title… but Puyol’s knee gave out once again, forcing him to get a second surgery and leaving him in a cast… which drove him crazy… Whether he realized it or not, Puyol had been using football as a way to drown out his own feelings ever since his father had passed… and once they took it from him, things got tough… so tough that 70 days later, against doctor’s orders, he ripped off the cast and went back to training, as he would say: “Football was my only cure, my support”. .
. And one year later, even if things had gotten bad enough at Barcelona that Rijkaard was given the boot… then, over summer, Spain won the euros… and let me tell you, the reason his country was finally able to break past their image as the eternal underachievers, following 44 trophyless years, wasn’t that their attack was so prodigious but really that their defense was an absolute fortress, not conceding a single goal throughout the entire knockout stage… and almost unanimously, Puyol was seen as their leader… Not just the best defender in the tournament, but in the world… and if anyone disagreed with that opinion, then he made it a matter of fact… You see, the moment Guardiola arrived at the club, he brought with him, Gerard Piqué… a handsome poster boy, born rich right there in the city in a family tied to the club… in other words, the opposite of Puyol… as one newspaper put it, they were “the beauty and the beast”. .
. and maybe whoever said that was a visionary, because no matter how unlikely that partnership looked, in the end it was a fairytale… they complemented each other… If Piqué was known for drifting off mid match, Puyol would never allow that… as Piqué, himself, told the press: “One time, we were winning 4 nil and the game had come to a stop… someone was getting picked up on a stretcher or something… and even then, he was shouting instructions at me… I told him to relax and he responded: “So what? Focus!
I know you””. . .
and well… by the end of that first season, they had won the Champions League… again, only one goal had been conceded from the quarter finals onwards… and Puyol had matched his idol, Maldini, as the only other player to lift two of those trophies, as captain… and the success wouldn’t end there… Then, they doubled down, or I guess, sextuple’d down… becoming the first ever club to conquer all 6 available trophies in a single year. . .
They were the best team in history and then, with most of them getting a call up, it was time for the 2010 World Cup… And again, It was the defense that carried this team… With 4 goals in 4 knockout stage matches, the only way for Spain to take that trophy would be for their backline to remain completely immaculate and so… that was exactly what they achieved… not a single goal was conceded, and still… Puyol’s most memorable moment was not a tackle or a goal line clearance… no… instead, on top of all he had already done, when Spain found themselves struggling against Germany, needing a miracle to seal their place in the final… Xavi whipped in a corner, and in the words of Piqué: “I was trying to get to the ball as well, but then it was like an airplane had flown right past me”. . .
Puyol, the man who rarely scores, had scored maybe the most important goal in 44 years of Spanish history… and if, for a second, you thought that he got “lucky” to score such a big goal… well, not only can you see him planning the whole dead ball routine at half time, but he had already pulled off that same goal, a few months earlier, at El Classico… and ironically, if that time he had angered a lot of fans by kissing the catalan flag on his armband during his celebration… Now he surely had done enough to get the entire country on his side… as even the queen of Spain made sure to go down to the locker room to thank him… to which, he iconically shook her hand while wearing nothing but a towel… Regardless, four days later, not only had Spain been named World Champions, but by the end of the year, Puyol had placed 11th in the Ballon D’Or… But unfortunately, just as it was made official that he was the best defender on the planet, everything came crashing down… 12 days after the Ballon D’Or ceremony, Puyol blew out his knee for a third time, being sidelined pretty much for the rest of the season… but still, even though he only got 2 minutes of playing time in the Champions League final, he still managed to leave his mark… You see, had Puyol just lifted the trophy, it would have been enough for him to overtake Maldini as the most successful captain of all time… but instead, he did something much greater… he handed off the armband to Abidal and let him lift the trophy in his place… why? Because Abidal had just beaten cancer… as Puyol would explain it himself: “I truly believe that was my greatest moment in football… It's hard to explain but… for what it meant, for how hard he fought, he deserved it the most”. .
. Had destiny been as kind to Puyol, as he was to everyone around him on his worst day, he would probably have been there to win the Euros once more, alongside his countrymen… but unfortunately his surgery did not buy him enough time… and his knee did not survive nearly long enough… But no matter what, as he desperately tried to put off a 4th surgery, he still managed to leave the world in awe of his leadership skills one final time… Right in the middle of El Classico hell, Piqué was hit with a lighter that had been thrown from the stands… but if the young man insisted on trying to show the murder weapon to the referee… Puyol did not have time for any nonsense… he took it off his hand, threw it beyond the goal line and told him to focus on the game… 6 matches later the fabled 4th surgery became unavoidable and though he still tried to come back for one more season… It quickly became clear that he was not capable of giving the team his best like his father had always demanded of him… and in his final moment of honor, refusing to milk the club of his heart for money… he terminated his contract on the spot, called up a press conference, announced his retirement and left. .
no fuss… nothing… All he ever wanted to be was a mere servant of the club… but as Piqué would say: “I find it amusing when they talk of signing the “new Puyol”. . .
