OLEGUER PRESAS may have had a glimmering football career but he is now more known for his politics.
The former Barcelona defender won the Champions League and also played in a certain Lionel Messi’s debut.
Oleguer played 175 times for the Catalan giants during a five-year spell between 2003 and 2008.
He was part of the squad that beat Arsenal in the 2006 Champions League Final, alongside club legends such as Carles Puyol and Giovanni van Bronckhorst.
Despite playing for one of the best clubs in Spain, he never played for the national side, instead opting to represent Catalonia.
He left the LaLiga side in 2008 for Dutch giants Ajax.
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The defender spent the rest of his career in Holland before hanging up his boots in 2011.
And he is indeed very proud of his career.
Speaking to Diari de Barcelona, Oleguer said: “I am proud to have arrived at Barca, for me this is success.
“Then you win a Champions League or you don’t, or a league… It depends on many factors.
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“What is the result of effort and dedication is this entire trajectory. I’m proud of that, yes.”
However, he is not living off his footballing career and instead has gone on to support political causes and Catalonian nationalism.
Despite also winning two LaLiga titles, politics was always on his mind.
As many of his team-mates went on to play for Spain, he rejected the chance ahead of the national side’s success at the Euros and World Cup.
He said: “I did not feel this commitment to a national team that does not represent me in any way.
“On the contrary, it generates rejection and aversion in me for what it represents.
“The conversation with [Spain manager at the time] Luis Aragones was very frank, honest and calm. It’s not that I can’t feel comfortable, it’s also that I’m not interested.
“I haven’t seen or followed the European Championships or the World Cups, it doesn’t have much sense.”
And he was aware of the impact his views had on people’s opinion of him.
He added: “When you’re in the thick of it, some picked me up as an icon because of what I said and some hated me.
“I was always quite aware of that.”
In his youth, he was considered to be quite rebellious as he attended protests in Barcelona and Amsterdam.
When promoting his 2006 book Camí d’Itaca, he said of his political escapades: “I know that everything I say can have a lot of repercussion, but in what sense? Controversy, newspaper articles, radio comments, conversations… and will something change?
“Even knowing that it will not change immediately, you have to get wet, because indifference is equivalent to giving up.
“And we have to dream, whatever the cost, because it is the only way to get closer, even if it is with the slow passage of time, to the utopia. We have to be optimistic. Ithaca is not that far away.”
But now Oleguer is more focused on battling against the commercialisation of the sport he was once at the top of.
He told VilaWeb: “For years, football has been a business, a spectacle, focused on making economic profits.
“Fans are no longer fans, they are spectators. Members are no longer members, they are consumers of the club.
“Everything revolves around money.”
The former Barcelona star also runs a football project that aims to take away the competitive nature out of football.
He said at a Tedx event in Tarragona: “I thought training football was the way to go.
“But I didn’t like the things I saw in traditional training football.
“In this sense, the project was an opportunity to, from a passionate point of view, hold training sessions where learning was not solely football-related in order to seek the sporting excellence that is usually sought, but with vital learning and where the football aspect was not central.
“I realised that grassroots football is very focused on performance and from my point of view there are human situations that I don’t like and that make me feel uncomfortable.”
At the project, people get to enjoy the beautiful game without being sucked into the competitive side of football.
Speaking to Marca, he said: “It has been good for us not having competition for this moment of joint learning that aims to change the most competitive and individualistic dynamics.
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“If we had started in a competition without doing any previous work, it would have been more difficult to explain to them that the result is not important and that we all have to play together.
“We live in an unjust society, and I try to do what I do to put an end to inequalities.”
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
