“It has been like a story that starts on the playground in Fuentealbilla,” Andrés Iniesta said, and now this was The End. In the auditorium in Barcelona’s old port where he had just announced his retirement on Tuesday afternoon, there was a lot of applause, some tears and a request, delivered softly, almost apologetically, like everything he says. Could his family come down, Iniesta asked, shielding his eyes from the spotlight? And could that picture go back up? As they made for the stairs, on the screen above he appeared again, the way he was. A tiny boy, about four, in a red jumper and blue dungarees, foot on the ball.
For that boy, Iniesta said, one night in Belgium would have been enough, but there were 1,015 more of them, across 22 years. They were the best nights of his life and the lives of many others too, which is what gave them meaning, what gave all of it meaning. He was 18 when he played his first professional game, a 1-0 win at the Jan Breydelstadion in Bruges at the end of October 2002. He was 40 when he played his last, a 3-2 defeat at the Khalid Bin Mohammed Stadium in Sharjah in June 2024.
