Gerard Piqué, the former Spanish defender and World Cup winner, has had his hands full after retirement.
After co-founding the Kings League and making it a success story, he has now turned into a lecturer for MBA students, as he visited Harvard University in Boston and spoke to business students about the Kings League.
Piqué spoke to MBA students who had enrolled in the Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports course, talking about the rapid growth of the extremely popular 7-a-side competition. He further discussed the potential to reshape the sporting landscape.
The former Manchester United and Barcelona star was invited by Professor Anita Elberse (a renowned authority on sports and media). Together with Elberse and David Moreno (the associate researcher), Piqué discussed how the competition has leveraged fan engagement and social media to create a fresh football experience.
This wasn’t the first time Piqué delivered a lecture at Harvard. Back in September 2017, the former Barcelona legend touched on his former club’s philosophy as he highlighted its balance between local identity and global reach.
Though, if his stint at Harvard made him look very smart, he tarnished his image with an outlandish take on another sport… Tennis.
He appeared as a guest on the Bajo Los Palos podcast, hosted by former teammate and legendary goalkeeper Iker Casillas.
During the episode, he talked about his love for tennis and stated that he feels Tennis and Basketball are the 2nd biggest sports behind Football. However, he also criticized numerous aspects of the sport, including the two-serve and deuce rules.
Although the episode came out in February 2025, certain clips have resurfaced and are going viral and causing uproar among Tennis Twitter for his absurd takes.
He proposed that tennis should do away with the traditional two-serve rule:
“Why do you serve twice in tennis? It’s 30 extra seconds of someone bouncing the ball. People don’t want to see that.”
Moreover, he stated he wasn’t a big fan of the traditional scoring rule of having to win advantage when in deuce and then going back to deuce if you cannot win a point on that advantage.
“Nor do they want to watch a game that stretches out with deuce-advantage-deuce-advantage. We should implement a golden point at 40-40.“
His broader sentiment remained that Tennis, as a sport, needs to adapt a quicker approach in order to attract the next generation of fans who are more into watching things like Netflix or HBO Max.
His takes have been branded outlandish because the “traditions” aspect of the sport is one of the reasons why fans love this sport so much, especially the tense moments and the back-and-forth during the deuce points. But Piqué is wrong from a statistical point of view as well.
According to a report from the USTA (United States Tennis Association), tennis participation in the USA has grown to a record 25.7 million. This marks the 5th year in a row that the sport’s popularity has witnessed growth.
