“I want to retire strong, not just by clinging to the game,” explains Raphael Varane, who is retiring from football at just 31 years of age and more than 800 days out due to injuries. “I have fallen and gotten up thousands of times, and this time it is time to stop and hang up my boots with my last game winning a trophy at Wembley,” the footballer clarifies in a statement. In reality, that Manchester derby that he played and won with United was not his last game. There was a death rattle in Italy, where with a free transfer under his arm he answered the call from Cesc Fabregas to join Como. But in August he played the first twenty minutes of a Cup match and asked to be transferred. Since then he had already been anticipating his farewell.
“They say that all good things come to an end…”, confesses the man who arrived in Madrid when he was barely a teenager in his farewell. Zidane, who was then an advisor at the white club, had his eye on him and sponsored an unexpected signing, that of an 18-year-old centre-back who had just settled in at Lens. There he established himself as a starter in December 2010. Six months later he landed at Barajas accompanied by his father, who wore a colourful shirt with tropical motifs that evoked his roots in Martinique. “There were about sixty journalists and I realised that it was something very different to what I had seen until then,” he explained later in an interview with France Football.
Varane was a high school student when he moved to Madrid. He arrived as a substitute for Sergio Ramos, Pepe, Albiol and Carvalho and became undisputed. He won the World Cup with France in 2018, his best year, five years after an injury almost took him out. It happened in May 2013, he damaged the external meniscus of his right knee after a bad move in a game at Espanyol. They said he was out for a month then. What happened was that 72% of that meniscus was removed and his career was marked. “I had to learn to run differently,” he explained later, when discomfort and overloads of all kinds prevented him from having continuity.
Varane, however, had an impressive career. Ricardo Rocha, Ruggeri, Spasic, Woodgate, Samuel, Metzelder and even Cannavaro, who arrived as a Ballon d’Or winner, can attest to the fact that settling into a central position at Madrid is not easy. Varane did it. Nothing suggested that the young man, as lanky as he was frightened, would go on to create a legendary list of achievements: he won the Champions League four times with Real Madrid, with whom he also won the same number of Club World Cups, three Continental Super Cups, three La Ligas and a Cup. 2018 was his best year, when he became the ninth player to win the European Cup and the World Cup in the same season (only Hoeness, Gerd Müller, Schwarzenbeck, Beckenbauer, Maier, Karembau, Roberto Carlos and Khedira had done it before; Julián Álvarez joined later). That year is the best memory in football of a central defender who was imposing on the pitch and, above all, for the speed with which he moved his huge body, a great deal for Real Madrid, who after signing him for 10 million euros, and amortising him over 360 games and 18 titles in ten seasons, received 50 million euros from Manchester United for his transfer.
“I have no regrets, I wouldn’t change anything,” he says in his farewell. “I have won more than I could have dreamed of, but beyond the praise and trophies, I am proud that whatever happens, I have stuck to my principles of being honest and I have tried to leave everywhere better than I found it. I hope I have made them proud.” Varane hangs up his boots and hints that he will stay to work at Como: “Just without using my boots and my shin guards.”
