Former Barcelona assistant coach Robert Moreno has paid tribute to Gerard Pique.

Pique announced his sudden retirement just before the World Cup breakup.

Moreno told Marca: "He is someone special, because he is different. And when you are different, like him, in the end you mark people.

"There are very professional people, who do it very well, who go unnoticed because of their way of being. He is eccentric in many things but everything from being a magnificent soccer player.

"On a day-to-day basis, when you meet him, it's no different. He lives everything this way, he understands that it's a show and that it's a game, that things have to be done that way.

"Then, a person so linked to Barça for so many years makes him a representative of the culé feeling. That is difficult to happen nowadays because footballers pass, leave... and it is complicated. It is clear that a player like he, who has been there for as long as he has been, with the contemporaries he has had and being so important and so indisputable...It automatically places you in the top 3 in the history of Barça."