Carles Puyol will arrive in Nagoya on 19 September to support teqball’s debut at the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 Asian Games. The former Barcelona and Spain captain will attend the opening ceremony, visit the Athletes’ Village and meet content creators before travelling to a school to play football and teqball with students. He will then head to the Nagoya City Higashi Sports Centre, where he will interact with fans between the five finals and present medals alongside the president of the Olympic Council of Asia -OCA-, Joaan bin Hamad Al Thani. His programme will conclude the following day in Tokyo, where he will attend the swimming finals with International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry.
Puyol retired in 2014 after spending his entire professional career with FC Barcelona, winning 21 official trophies with the club and lifting Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup with Spain. After a brief spell in Barcelona’s sporting management structure, his main public role has involved transferring the image of leadership, integrity, sacrifice and team spirit associated with his captain’s armband to competitions, children’s projects, social campaigns, brands and sports seeking greater visibility or international legitimacy. Some of those relationships have lasted for years; others were one-off activations connected to a sponsor. Together, they form a second career defined less by a specific position than by the commercial and institutional value of his name.
A captain to open doors for teqball
Puyol’s relationship with the International Teqball Federation -FITEQ- dates back to at least 2018 and has included international championships, exhibitions and promotional appearances. Teqball is played on a curved table and allows competitors to return the ball with any part of the body except the hands and arms, combining elements of football with singles or doubles formats. For a discipline created in 2012 and still expanding, involving recognised former footballers helps explain its rules through figures the public already knows. Puyol’s role in Japan takes that function a step further: teqball will make its debut at the continent’s leading multi-sport event, with five titles at stake. His presence connects football culture with a discipline seeking to establish national federations, enter new markets and continue progressing within the international sports movement.
That role is not an exception within his post-playing career. In 2015, he joined LaLiga’s international ambassador programme alongside other former players tasked with representing the competition in different countries. That same year, he became a member of the Laureus World Sports Academy, which uses sport to support social projects. He has also worked repeatedly with FIFA and UEFA on international trophy tours. In 2017, he took part in the Champions League Trophy Tour presented by Heineken in Colombia; in 2018, he accompanied the World Cup trophy during the Coca-Cola-sponsored tour in South Africa and participated again when it visited Atlanta in May 2026. These organisations are not merely calling upon a world champion, but upon a former captain whose career allows an event to be associated with responsibility, respect and collective effort.
Children’s football as a common thread
Children and the social dimension of sport have appeared repeatedly throughout his collaborations. In 2019, he became a global ambassador for the Danone Nations Cup, an international under-12 tournament whose final brought teams from numerous countries to Barcelona. “I am very proud to be an ambassador for one of the best tournaments in which children under the age of 12 can compete,” he explained at the time. During the pandemic, he joined Vicente del Bosque in ‘#UnaGranFamilia’, an initiative created by Danone, the Red Cross and the Spanish Federation of Food Banks to support vulnerable families. With Scotiabank Fútbol Club, he fronted the ‘El Entretiempo’ and ‘Todos a la cancha’ campaigns, linked to inclusion and children’s football in Latin America, and visited a project in Colombia developed with the Barça Foundation. In 2026, his appointment as an ambassador for Guayaquil, American Capital of Sport, once again brought him into contact with students, schools and youth competitions.
Another part of his activity directly reflects brands’ ability to reuse the values built during his playing career. He became an ambassador for Uniqlo when the Japanese company entered Spain, fronted Nutrisport’s relaunch in 2024 and participated in individual activations for Orbit, Mahou and several Barcelona sponsors. In September 2026, he attended IFA Berlin to activate the five-year agreement between the club and Midea. “World-class performance is never about individual talent alone. It comes from hard work, continuous improvement and trusting the people around you,” he said there. Lending credibility in this way also carries risks. An investigation by ‘elDiario.es’ placed Puyol at a legends match held in the Maldives in 2022 as part of a promotional trip organised by OmegaPro, a company that Spain’s financial regulator, the CNMV, had added to its list of unauthorised entities two years earlier and which was later identified as a pyramid scheme. His representative explained that the former player was on holiday with his family, decided to participate because friends such as Eric Abidal were playing, and received no payment or other consideration. There is no evidence that Puyol knew about the company’s illegal activity or had any contractual relationship with it.
Founder, agent and investor
Puyol has also tried to turn his experience and contacts into projects of his own. Together with Iván de la Peña and Ramón Sostres, he launched Footalent, a football agency whose development began before his retirement and which he publicly helped build in the years that followed. In 2016, he became one of the driving forces behind Olyseum, alongside Andrés Iniesta, De la Peña and Carlos Grenoir. The platform was created to bring athletes and fans closer together before evolving into Olyverse, with projects involving blockchain, digital assets and the metaverse. Its most recent development is linked to Supstar, which uses an artificial intelligence-powered digital twin of Puyol. He was also among the early investors in 8fit, an app focused on fitness, nutrition and healthy habits, and acquired a stake in The Animals Observatory, a Catalan children’s fashion brand, in 2025.
These investments do not form a single business strategy, just as his brand appearances do not always amount to permanent contracts. The common element is his ability to transfer an identity built over more than a decade wearing Barcelona’s captain’s armband into different fields. For some companies, that means representing discipline and performance; for children’s projects, providing a role model; for institutions, giving their initiatives an internationally recognisable face; and for emerging sports such as teqball, reaching an audience that does not yet know their players or competitions. In Aichi-Nagoya, his task will be to make a sport debuting at the Asian Games immediately recognisable through the authority he retains from his time as a captain.
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