Barcelona hired detectives to keep an eye on Gerard Pique

According to reports published by El Mundo, the Barcelona directors were worried about Gerard Pique’s private life, especially his habit of gambling. As a result, they hired a private detective agency to keep an eye on him between September 2009 and early October 2010, for one full year. They were interested in knowing who Pique was meeting and calling.

Barcelona was particularly anxious about the importance the defender gave to card games such as poker. The document reveals that the player would spend somewhere in between €3,000 and €4,000 at a time in casinos, and by his own admission he “gambled a lot and ended up spending €30,000″ when he was in Manchester.

Another such report states how the club kept a tab on the time of his phone calls. Before a Barcelona-Tenerife match, “he was on the phone until 1:23 am”, while after beating Sevilla in January 2010, he was talking “until 5:41 am”.

Detectives even had an eye on him when he was socializing as they followed him to a concert in September 2010. They took several photos of him alongside his teammate and captain Carles Puyol.