Jordi Alba: 'The problem at Barcelona wasn't me. I have a clear conscience'

FOND FAREWELL: Jordi Alba attends a farewell event at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona. Pic: Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images

Jordi Alba is scrolling through his phone. “There’s nothing, eh,” he says. The story breaks almost the moment he walks through the door and he hears it here first, told as he enters the room. It’s not official yet and he can’t find anything to confirm it, but it soon will be: Lionel Messi is going to Miami. As for the man who laid on 23 of the Argentinian’s goals, the best left-back Barcelona ever had, the captain of Spain too, there’s no news there either. He doesn’t know where he’s going, not yet. Only that he won’t be here any more.

“It’s too soon,” Alba says at Barcelona’s Sant Joan Despí training ground. “I’m still getting used to this; it’s not easy to go somewhere else.” A winner of 18 major trophies with club and country, he had never intended to leave the Camp Nou but after a summer when the hints were not exactly subtle and a season in which for the first time in a decade his role was reduced, starting 14 league games, a victim of finance as much as football, he decided the time had come to depart – even without a final destination.

His first stop is Las Rozas, the Spanish federation’s place 25km north-west of Madrid. After three days training with Barcelona’s B team at Sant Joan Despí he will be there with the country’s best players to prepare for the Nations League semi-final against Italy on Thursday. For the first time, at 34, he will be wearing the armband, leading a new era under a new manager, the fifth of his international career.

“It was a surprise that Luis Enrique didn’t continue because he was a spectacular coach who built a great group with very young players, but people speak well of Luis de la Fuente and I’m looking forward to it,” Alba says. “And against Italy who, for good and bad, I’ve faced lots of times. They’re in reconstruction, like us, but Italy is Italy.” 

If Alba admits the call-up was a surprise, it serves as a reminder that he’s not done yet and he is not searching for semi-retirement; it may, though, be all he can get, his least eloquent answer almost becoming his most eloquent, a glimpse of the uncertainty, the fear of ruling out options he may need. When it’s put to him that a player who has just returned to the selección, given the chance to prove people wrong – and boy does Alba love to prove people wrong – doesn’t go leaving the European elite, he replies: “Yes … no … well … look …”

“I’m really happy to be back in the squad. I’m looking forward to it and I see myself being able to stay there for some time,” he says. “But that’s a decision I have to take independently of the national team. If I had a couple of clubs, maybe I’d be able to tell you: ‘I prefer this kind of option.’ But I have nothing so I prefer to wait, see the best option on a sporting level but also for everything else, including the family. Wherever it is, [to continue with Spain] you have to compete, to be in good shape physically.” 

And so, passport on the table, to the inevitable question. There has been interest from Internazionale and Atlético Madrid, Inter Miami have asked and Saudi Arabia circles, but what about England? “You see the Premier, the atmosphere there. I talk to teammates in the selección who have played there and they say England’s special. I always had the idea that ‘one day maybe …’ But I was always focused on Barcelona and the Spanish league so I didn’t really think about any other league.” 

Now he has to. “Of course, but I have to see which teams want me first. And then … well, I’m open to all sorts of proposals, in Europe, outside Europe. Wherever I go, we’ll be fine, but it’s not easy. I want to weigh everything up.”

That doesn’t sound much like a man who wanted to leave, still less someone who had it all planned. Alba resisted efforts to force him out last August, the club desperate to save his salary and pushing a loan deal with Inter, then in October declared his intention to retire at Barcelona. “Yes, yes, this is what I wanted,” he says of going now, not entirely convincingly. “I thought about it carefully and agreed with my family. When I said I wanted to stay that’s how I felt but taking everything into account it’s the right moment to leave. Of course if I’d been playing more minutes, maybe I wouldn’t have reached this point, had those thoughts. I’ve been at this club 18 years; it’s half my life.

“After so many years, having won it all, you have to assimilate that you’re going. But the decision is mine, without anyone telling me what to do. The club, the president; they gave me the chance to choose. I had earned that right.”

How freely he could choose is another matter. The club’s captains, its veterans, had come to be seen as a problem: pushed towards the door, they became scapegoats for Barcelona’s financial crisis, their performances judged through cost – accused of being an obstacle to progress at best, of sinking them at worse. Here’s a sample headline from last autumn: “Busquets, Piqué and Alba: a €200m mortgage.” And yet although Gerard Piqué has retired and Sergio Busquets and Alba are going, still Barcelona must cut almost €300m. The news that breaks as Alba walks in underlines that: Messi is not coming because they can’t afford him.

SALUTING THE FAITHFUL: Alba applauds as he leaves the pitch during the Spanish league football match between FC Barcelona and RCD Mallorca at the Camp Nou. Pic: Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images

Small wonder Piqué pointedly noted: “I wonder who’s got to go now. They said we were responsible because of our salaries but we’ve gone and they still can’t sign.” It is a line in which Alba sees himself reflected and it has occasionally felt as if he paid for his contract: there was an economic need for him to be left out as much a footballing one, not so far-fetched to think he would have played more had he been cheaper, while the criticism has sometimes been as fierce as it is unfair – the captains accused of not helping the club through its crisis, as if they created it.

With an agreement finally reached to rescind the remaining year on his contract, Alba tries to bite his tongue where once he might have bitten back, which didn’t always help. He is quick to point beyond the club to ill-defined people outside. But he doesn’t hide that it has stung. At his farewell, president Joan Laporta publicly thanked him for “demonstrating your barcelonismo, helping the club economically by waiving an important part of your salary to give us the margin to sign”, and it is telling that those are words he returns to repeatedly. There’s been a lot thrown his way.

Alba smiles. “But it’s not the club, it’s more the entorno, everything around the club. There are times I’ve made mistakes, I’ve done things I could have avoided, said things I shouldn’t and people criticise you for that. It’s normal. Not everyone can like you. But there have been so many lies and sometimes you find people mix players in with things that are nothing to do with them. In the end the truth has come out. The president, who’s the man in charge, who has all the accounts, said I left the right way, that they’re grateful.

“We all know the economic needs but that’s not about one player. I’ve always said the problem isn’t me, I’ve always had a clear conscience. I did the right things, I helped the club at every moment. And they have always helped me. In the end people have realised. The club and people know what I’m like. When I talk, it’s true. I can’t control what people say, come out every five or 10 days and say: ‘That’s false.’ The manager decided I had to have less protagonism. I think I’ve been good when I’ve been given the chance to play. That’s what I hold on to. It’s not easy to go from 10 years of playing every game to that. I think I’ve handled it well.

“The club know the ‘efforts’ I’ve made at certain moments or what I am doing by going now. They gave me the chance to stay another year. It would have been very easy to. It’s my home. But I thought the right thing to do, the just thing, the honest thing, was to step to one side. No one forced me.”

Alba says he has been “value for money”, that “the problem wasn’t me, or Piqué, or Busquets” and that “when you leave, maybe people look back and value you more”. He admits he appreciates what he had “even more” than when he played every match. “But,” Alba says, “I have always felt affection from the fans. There are lots of lies told, people believe them and that can damage you. [On my last night] at the Camp Nou, everyone applauded me, spoke well of me. That’s what I take with me. It brings me tranquility for the president to have corroborated that at my goodbye. He said that they were very grateful for everything I had done in that [economic] sense.

“In the end, you have to value everything I’ve done in sporting terms too. The economic question has been talked about a lot but I think other things should be talked about, everything I’ve done, we’ve all done, over all these years.” And therein lies the point. Here we are talking vindication: 458 games, 27 goals and 94 assists. Ever-present in the team that won six leagues, five cups and a Champions League.

There’s a smile. A list too of the moments that most marked him, beginning with the first time he had to leave Barcelona, aged 16, to join tiny third-tier Cornella, a rejection that should have hurt but didn’t. “Actually, I had a great time,” Alba says, and it is easily the most animated, most enthusiastic he is in the whole conversation, a kind of innocence, a fun to these memories. “Barcelona is the best school in the world but I knew it was hard and I always had that in mind: I was sure I would make it and if that wasn’t with Barcelona, I always told my dad that I wanted to go to Cornella. I’m from Hospitalet but I always liked Cornella.

“I didn’t think I would play for Barcelona so long, that I would be in the national team 11 years, no, no, no, but I did think that even if I left Barcelona I would go to Cornella and make it to primera. There was a debut with Valencia, the return to Barcelona, Euro 2012, the goal – that was spectacular – the treble in 2015. And then the goodbye: it’s not a title but it’s a very nice moment that makes you happy. I left a good way with the affection of all the fans and I feel very fortunate.”

Guardian