Pique spoke with Rubiales to negotiate with UEFA over Club World Cup competition

Both Gerard Pique and Luis Rubiales are currently off the football map, but the exchange of messages and audios between the two from years ago are once again the focus of ‘The Objective’, which reveals one more sequence of this whole story. In this case, we have to go back to 2019, when Pique contacted the former president of the RFEF to tell him of his intention to talk to UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, to offer him a proposal to "compete with the Club World Cup" that FIFA had announced and which will start precisely in 2025.

According to the aforementioned media, it is an idea that the former footballer mentioned for the first time in June 2019. In this first contact about this, Pique asked Rubiales about his relationship with the head of UEFA: "Rubi, how are you getting on with Ceferin? Seeing what they are doing with FIFA and the Club World Cup, I think it would be good to have a meeting with him and talk to him about a project that you could head up and that would be great for UEFA to combat the new Club World Cup". A format initially planned to start in 2021, but which was postponed due to the pandemic.

In April 2020, the date on which ‘The Objective’ also set the meeting for the alleged diversion of UEFA funds to compensate for the reduction in salary of certain footballers, this first meeting is said to have taken place in a video conference attended by Pique, Rubiales, Ceferin and two members of the European body.

Before the scheduled meeting, Pique told Rubiales about the first meeting on the balance of salaries and the former footballer acknowledged that he had taken the opportunity to introduce his idea: "I sent him a little message explaining the idea and he told me that he is very interested and that he would like to talk about it next week in a video call with two of his uncles".

Pique also forwarded a message, supposedly from Ceferin: "It's worth discussing, how about a separate video conference next week between you, me, Giorgio Marchetti (director of competitions) and Theodore Theodoridis (general secretary). I find the idea interesting. A meeting that Rubiales also attended in the end.

'The Objective' also adds UEFA's position after being asked about all these meetings. The European organisation does not deny it, but puts in context that it receives ‘a daily flood of proposals and suggestions from numerous interested parties", although most of them do not go ahead, as "UEFA only comments on projects that its executive bodies have approved".