Luis Figo: ‘I had everything at Barcelona – moving to Real Madrid took its toll’

‘I was a guinea pig,” says football’s first galáctico, the hint of a smile creeping across his face. At his peak Luis Figo was the world’s best player, its most expensive too. Across 20 years, he played more than 900 games, earned 127 caps, scored more than 150 goals and won eight league titles, a European Cup and the Ballon d’Or. He also took his country to their first final, carrying Portugal into a new era. In fact, he carried the entire game into a new era.

There’s a case that the super-club age, modern football, starts with Figo: a pioneer, a guinea pig. Cobaya is his word and his was the transfer that changed everything, his 10bn peseta (€60m) move from Barcelona to Madrid in 2000 like something from a thriller, constantly shifting, so astonishing, so dramatic and just so big that it sometimes seems to eclipse everything else. “I’d like more value given to my whole career than one episode that marks an age and altered the market, the philosophy of football,” he says, yet there is a certain pride too, a reason he has at last decided to tell his story in a Netflix documentary about the move. “It was and is history.”

After all, if it was so big, it is also because he was. So here he is, sitting at a terrace in north-eastern Madrid, the city he hadn’t intended to become his home, talking about the transfer and a lifetime in the game before Madrid host Barcelona in Sunday’s clásico. About the rise and fall of the most ambitious project in football. Why his nation’s most painful night was perhaps his best. And how close he came to joining Liverpool. Even his bid for the Fifa presidency. “That was an ‘experience’,” Figo says, grinning. “You could write a book about that.”

He could write lots of them, packed with intrigue