Ask any Barcelona supporter prior to December 2022 to name an all-time best XI and Dani Alves would have been as certain to be in the list as Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta or Xavi.
He was Pep Guardiola’s first signing when he took over in 2008, and would go on to win 26 trophies with the club, en-route to become the most decorated player in the history of the game anywhere.
Request a best XI now and there will be a nervous pause as an alternative right back is searched for. Alves’ achievements as a footballer remain, but the sadness and repulsion invoked by his crime in the early hours of December 30, 2022 have left people wishing to erase his name from the collective memory.
It wasn’t just that he was an entertainer and a winner on the pitch, Alves won over the club’s supporters with his larger than life personality – whether he was picking a banana up and eating it while staring down the racist who had thrown it on to the pitch during a match in 2014; offering to donate one of his kidneys to team-mate Eric Abidal when he was struck down by cancer in 2011; or coming back to the club on a minimum wage in 2022 when they were struggling to pay new signings, he represented for them someone who was more than just a very good player.
That image has been shattered as the details have emerged of his behaviour in the early hours of December 30, and by his subsequent conviction for the rape of a 23-year-old women in the toilets of the VIP area of a Barcelona nightclub.
When he was first arrested and charged former team-mates were stunned and desperate to disbelieve the worst. When first asked about his arrest Xavi said: ‘I feel bad for Dani, because I know him. It surprises me because of how he always behaved when he was with us.’
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