One of football’s best-ever left backs will bring his playing career to a close at the end of Inter Miami’s MLS season.
Jordi Alba, who was a part of the Barcelona and Spain sides that dominated football for much of the 2010s, announced on Tuesday that he would retire when Inter Miami’s season concludes, the date of which is not yet known as the club enters the MLS Cup playoffs later this month.
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The news comes as a bit of a surprise considering Alba had just signed a multi-year contract extension in May with Miami, the club he joined in 2023 alongside former Barcelona teammates Lionel Messi and Sergio Busquets. Alba’s new deal was set to run through the end of the 2027 season.
“I’m happy to renew my contract because I have the desire to continue competing, and because of how I feel at the club, with the affection I receive from fans at every match,” Alba said at the time. “We have that desire to continue competing, to continue winning, and, hopefully, win as many titles as possible.”
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The defender took a strikingly different tone when announcing the end of his professional career just 145 days later .
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“The time has come to close a truly meaningful chapter of my life,” Alba said in a video posted to his Instagram profile. “I do so with complete conviction, with peace, and with happiness. I feel I’ve walked this path with every ounce of passion I had. And now it’s the right moment to open a new chapter and close the previous one with the best possible feeling.”
Standing 5ft 7in, Alba’s effectiveness as an attacking left back was mostly down to his pace, technical ability on the ball, and seemingly telepathic connection with Messi. Those factors combined to give Alba a better scoring record than most who play his position: 51 goals and 135 assists in 700 professional club games at time of writing.
In an interview with the Guardian’s Sid Lowe in 2023, Alba said his departure from Barcelona was his choice, and that he was doing it to help a team which had just begun to experience financial difficulty.
“The club know the ‘efforts’ I’ve made at certain moments or what I am doing by going now,” Alba said. “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.”
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His retirement announcement follows that of Busquets, who said he would walk away after his own decorated career in late September.
Alba took time in his announcement video to pay tribute to all of his professional clubs, calling Barcelona “the club of my life” alongside the youth clubs where he developed, Inter Miami, and Valencia, where he made his La Liga debut and rose to prominence before his transfer to Barcelona.
The left back won five La Liga titles, five Copas del Rey, the 2014-15 Champions League and the Fifa Club World Cup in 2015 with Barcelona. He captured the 2024 Supporters’ Shield with Inter Miami, and can add one final senior club honor to his trophy cabinet as Inter Miami enters the MLS Cup playoffs later this month.
He won 93 caps for Spain from 2011 to 2023, scoring nine goals. He was on the Spanish squad for every major tournament in that timeframe, including the 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups and the 2012, 2016, and 2020 Euros.
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