Liverpool FC remains his last club: Joel Matip (33), English champion and Champions League winner, has ended his playing career.
It was fitting that Liverpool FC announced the end of the professional career of a man on Saturday morning who, in the summer, had even been linked with a move to Bayer 04 Leverkusen amid the Bayern rumors surrounding Jonathan Tah. But in the past few months, Joel Matip has remained unattached – now the center back is hanging up his boots.
The Reds were and are the last club of the now 33-year-old, who has had to deal with protracted injuries in the recent past. Most recently, he suffered from a cruciate ligament rupture in December.
In 2016, the 27-time Cameroon international (who played at the 2010 and 2014 World Cups) moved from his boyhood club FC Schalke 04 to Anfield, where he occasionally emerged as an absolute top defender alongside Virgil van Dijk.
All titles with Liverpool
During his time on the island, Matip won practically everything there was to win as a team: the Champions League, UEFA Super Cup and Club World Cup in 2019, the Cup in 2022, the League Cup in 2022 and 2024, and the English Super Cup in 2022. Above all, however, he was part of the Liverpool team that finally celebrated the championship during the Corona period as the first in 30 years.
The bottom line is that the 1.95-meter giant played 201 official matches in the LFC shirt, which had actually signed him from Gelsenkirchen on a transfer-free basis – which probably makes Matip one of the best transfer-free transfers in modern football.
Matip won the 2011 DFB Cup and Super Cup with FC Schalke 04, for whose professionals he made 258 appearances between 2009 and 2016. In the same year, he and Schalke reached the semi-finals of the Champions League.