Jesús Navas: ‘I’m stopping because I have to. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved’
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On Sunday, aged 39, Sevilla’s Jesús Navas brings down the curtain on Spanish football’s most glittering career. A little after 9am in Montequinto, Seville, and Jesús Navas walks past the Jesús Navas Stadium and up the little slope in the sunshine, gym to the left, training pitch to the right. The first to arrive and he’s moving OK this morning, which isn’t something he can say every day, but still he comes. Soon, too soon, he won’t. “It’s my life,” he says, “what I’ve always done, who I am.” The stand bearing his name wasn’t here when he first turned up, a quarter of a century ago. Most of this wasn’t; the trophies at the Estadio Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán, three miles north, certainly weren’t. Everything changes, except him. “I’m the same as the first day,” he says.
![[Sid Lowe]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2018/05/25/Sid_Lowe,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
That day, Navas was 15, a small, skinny, shy boy from Los Palacios, 15 minutes south. It was 2000 and he has been coming almost every morning since, apart from four seasons in Manchester which he enjoyed more even than you might imagine. He is still small, slight: 5ft 7in and 67kg. Still quiet, too: warm company, but not a man with any desire for the spotlight, any delusions of grandeur. Only he is the grandest footballer of all here at Sevilla Fútbol Club.
![[Jesús Navas (centre right) and Ivan Rakitic lift the trophy after Sevilla won the 2023 Europa League final against Roma]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/831c18aa16d97e06bdae8da45988229319973c96/0_0_3104_2069/master/3104.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Navas is the Spanish national team’s most-decorated player and there is a reason his name is written large where he used to train and the B team play, however strange it feels to him passing each morning: because it is written all over Sevilla’s history too. The most significant player in their 119 years, symbol of their academy and their success, their entire model. Navas played a record 393 games for Sevilla – my Sevilla, he calls them every time – left because they needed him to, came back and played 311 more. He has just one left.
![[Jesús Navas pictured in Seville.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1b713a1a35cc9c1c6b14f442900e5fce78b68cd5/0_266_5447_3268/master/5447.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
