It’s a real earthquake that has just occurred in Italy when a monument of transalpine football has taken the decision to bow out. Gianluigi Buffon, the last iconic bulwark of Squadra Azzurra and Juventus, has indeed decided to end his career. Even if this announcement has not yet been formalized by the main interested party, the Italian goalkeeper should quickly communicate on this decision via his social networks. It must be said that the Parma goalkeeper had already planned everything. “In my head, there is really a stop sign, a deadline which is June 2023. It’s the maximum, really, really the maximum”he had also confided in March 2021, he was then “already” 43 years old.
Two years later and a new start from Juventus, we will come back to this, to return to his first love, where he made his debut as a professional player, in Parma in Emilia-Romagna, Gianluigi Buffon chose to take his sporting retirement in the same place where it all began almost 30 years ago. During his long and rich career, which began in 1994, the now 45-year-old goalkeeper has amassed several dozen trophies, whether individually or collectively. At the dawn of the year 2000, Gigi, well helped by a golden generation which followed him for a good part of his life like Lilian Thuram and Fabio Cannavaro, had already won two significant titles, a Cup of UEFA and an Italian Cup with the Parmesan club, which foreshadowed the best for the future.
On top of world football
Before embracing the career that we know him, Gianluigi Buffon arrives at Juventus to replace Edwin Van Der Sar, the first non-Italian goalkeeper of the Turin club. His passage will not remain in the memory of the supporters of the Old Lady. Indeed, the former Ajax goalkeeper will multiply the blunders for two seasons and the Bianconeri will lose Serie A twice on the final day. At this time, Gigi appears as the future of a team which seeks to reinvent itself after the coronation on the most prestigious of European stages five years earlier. It will only take him a short time to acclimatize and thus become the impenetrable last bastion that marked the minds of football fans during a good part of the 2000s.
Gianluigi Buffon will notably have played no less than 685 games with the Bianconeri, the second best total just behind Alessandro Del Piero, another legend of the Old Lady, before ending his career in Parma. But it is also and above all with the Squadra Azzurra, whose jersey he has worn 176 times (which makes him the most capped player with Italy) that the goalkeeper, born in Carrara, has impressed many fans. football, including a certain 2006 World Cup where he reigned supreme, conceding only two goals during the entire competition (a csc from Cristian Zaccardo during the group stage and the mythical panenka from Zinédine Zidane in the final) . He will also have been one of the main executioners of the Blues in Berlin, notably by removing the famous head of ZZ from the skylight after a cross from Willy Sagnol during extra time…
A retirement without the Champions League
Since that evening in July 2006 in Berlin, where he splashed the world with his talent, Gianluigi Buffon has then always chased after the title that eluded him. And we are not talking here about a Ballon d’Or that he would have richly deserved for his work but about this famous Champions League which he will have missed so much throughout his career. And it’s not for lack of trying. With the Piedmontese club, he will have reached the Champions League final three times, in 2003, 2015 and 2017, without succeeding in lifting the cup with big ears. In desperation and seeing his place crumble in Piedmont, despite the historic hegemony of the Old Lady in Serie A, the Italian goalkeeper decided to try his luck in Paris.
But after a contrasting year and without much success with Paris Saint-Germain, Gianluigi Buffon was already at Juventus with the same objective. And two years later, the now legendary Bianconero goalkeeper was to give up his place in the group in favor of a certain Wojciech Szczęsny, who then began to assert himself as the renewal of a Turin team in full decline. And if you think about it, the descent into hell of the Old Lady is linked to the departure of the most worthy representative of class and Italian romanticism. Here is the rather extraordinary itinerary of a world champion until the twilight of his career in Serie B. The world of football has in any case said goodbye to one of the best goalkeepers of the 21st century, if not history, who will have won almost everything during his career, to the hearts of hundreds of thousands of football fans around the world.
