The announcement of the divorce of Shakira and Gerard Piqué confirms that it is impossible to be famous and have a minimally hermetic private life. The love beginnings of the couple had the incentive of a parity tie for popularity, with a media projection that completed the birth of their children. The sentimental triumphs and failures of soccer players are not an invention of social networks. There is a long tradition of gossip (from Garrincha to the cover of Interviu with Gaby Schuster through Romário’s fleeting girlfriends or the passion between Lola Flores and Gustau Biosca).
In the case of Piqué and Shakira, the shared years frame a historic phase for Barça and Spanish football. The original passion is confirmed in a plethoric moment: the World Cup in South Africa, which consecrates that you can play like Barça but without Messi, and the happiest phase of Guardiola’s Barça. And as if football wanted to be the mirror of the evolution of so many love stories, Barça and the national team squeeze their glory with a legitimate voracity but that installs them in a complacency that invests more energy in living on income than in projecting itself towards the future. And like so many apparently indestructible loves, after the routine and flaccidity, both in the case of Barça and that of the couple, come the painful decisions while the virtuosos of slander do the autopsy on Shakira’s last song.
Piqué and Barça represent two ways of understanding media magnetism. Barça maintains the method of controlled institutional filtration through moderately sectarian trial balloons. Piqué, on the other hand, follows an intuition that disconcerts his rabid pursuers. The club and the player aspire to live outside the rumours, but they know that if they do not deny them, they are exposed to the scavenging feast of parasites or the journalistic force of evidence. But the personality of each other makes them expose themselves with a mixture of collective responsibility and defiant boasting.
Everything that Piqué does outside of football is amplified and distorted (sometimes because it suits him). And, now more than ever, Barça needs football to be in the background, behind a list of serious problems. Some problems that until today have been defined through diagnoses that, when filtered, seem catastrophic but that, in public, are covered with conditional hopes.
Piqué and Barça share the audacity of not conforming to the media status imposed on them. This creates controversy and requires waterproofing against attacks, especially when they are frivolous or interested. But neither Piqué nor the current board of directors represented by Joan Laporta shy away from hand-to-hand combat. That is why they make it so that, apart from football, you end up sympathizing or disliking what they do on the pitch and in offices, and also with what they broadcast outside. For example: when you have to live a situation as democratic and transversal as that, with the same absurd arbitrariness with which you fell in love, the time comes for you to have to listen or say the evil phrase: “We have to talk.”
