Rodrigo Palacio hung up his boots and switched to basketball

The Argentinian Rodrigo’s palacerunner-up in the world in 2014 with the Argentine soccer team and until last season a player for the Italian Brescia -Serie B-, gave a surprise on Tuesday by announcing that he moved to basketball at the hands of Garegnano 1976Italian fourth division team.

Palacewho shares his birthplace (Bahía Blanca) with Manu Ginóbili -Argentine basketball legend- and has been without a team since the end of last season, announced on Monday his retirement from the world of football at the age of 40 with a message to his account from Twitter: “Many thanks for everything, football”.

However, the surprise came this Tuesday when posted a video on the same social network where he appears to be playing a friendly tournament wearing the Garegnano 1976 shirtfrom Serie D of Italian basketball.

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“Don’t let anyone tell you until what age you can play basketball,” is the phrase the former soccer player, who is 1.76 m tall, accompanied in the video.

At 40 years old, after a season in Brescia in which he played 33 games, scored six goals and provided four assists, Palacio began his second sports career, this time in a sport where he his hands.

The ‘braid’ was not satisfied with the dream debut. His first match wearing the Garegnano shirt ended in defeat (73-65), in a game in which he scored just four points.

Before his retirement from football, Palacio also wore the shirts of Argentine teams Bella Vista, Huracán, Banfield and Boca Juniors before traveling to Italy to establish himself as one of Argentina’s great names in Serie A, where he played for Genoa , Inter Milan, Bologna and Brescia.

His journey with the senior team, the albiceleste, where he played in two World Cups, Germany 2006 and Brazil 2014, will inevitably be marked by his mistake facing the door in the final against Germany in 2014, which could have been the decisive goal to lift the long-awaited World Cup -which was ultimately won by the German team-, in a game that ended with the ball rising.

Palacio, at the age of 40 and after a football career of two decades, begins a new sporting stage in Italian basketball, in the modest Milanese club of Garegnano 1976.