Gerard Piqué, president of the amateur football competition Kings League, starting a new season on March 1, has mocked Real Madrid manager Álvaro Arbeloa with a giant banner hung in the centre of Madrid, in the Gran Vía street, where he reignites a decade-old joke... hours before a Champions League match in Madrid with Arbeloa as manager of the team.
The banner says "No somos tan conocidos, pero lo seremos", meaning "we are not as well known, but we will", highlighting the 'cono' part of the word, meaning "cone".
So where's the joke? Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Arbeloa played as defender for Real Madrid and Spain, he was often called a "cone" because of his slow defensive skills. Despite playing together at the Spanish national team and both winning titles in 2008, 2010 and 2012, Arbeloa and Piqué's relationship became notoriously and publicly worse, with frequent arguments on Twitter between 2015 and 2016.
One of the boiling points of the rivalry came in December 2015, when Piqué said that "Arbeloa calls himself my friend, but he's just a '<em>conocido' (acquaintance), a cono...</em>", publicly acknowledging the mockery towards the by then Real Madrid defender.
<social>https://x.com/KingsLeague/status/2026602256154431939</social>
More than ten years later, Piqué resumes the rivalry know that Arbeloa is back in the public eye since he took over the managing duties from Xabi Alonso last month. Apparently, Piqué said on a stream yesterday that the banner wasn't his idea, but approved it anyway.