Jordi Alba: ‘The problem at Barcelona wasn’t me. I have a clear conscience’

J ordi Alba is scrolling through his phone. “There’s nothing, eh,” he says. The story breaks almost the moment he walks through the door and he hears it here first, told as he enters the room. It’s not official yet and he can’t find anything to confirm it, but it soon will be: Lionel Messi is going to Miami. As for the man who laid on 23 of the Argentinian’s goals, the best left-back Barcelona ever had, the captain of Spain too, there’s no news there either. He doesn’t know where he’s going, not yet. Only that he won’t be here any more.

“It’s too soon,” Alba says at Barcelona’s Sant Joan Despí training ground. “I’m still getting used to this; it’s not easy to go somewhere else.” A winner of 18 major trophies with club and country, he had never intended to leave the Camp Nou but after a summer when the hints were not exactly subtle and a season in which for the first time in a decade his role was reduced, starting 14 league games, a victim of finance as much as football, he decided the time had come to depart – even without a final destination.

His first stop is Las Rozas, the Spanish federation’s place 25km north-west of Madrid. After three days training with Barcelona’s B team at Sant Joan Despí he will be there with the country’s best players to prepare for the Nations League semi-final against Italy on Thursday. For the first time, at 34, he will be wearing the armband, leading a new era under a new manager, the fifth of his international career.

“It was a surprise that Luis Enrique didn’t continue because he was a spectacular coach who built a great group with very young players, but people speak well of Luis de la Fuente and I’m looking forward to it,” Alba says. “And against Italy who, for good and bad, I’ve