<\/a><\/p>\nPepe hasn’t always been the most popular footballer outside of Real Madrid, with his no nonsense and combative style.<\/p>\n
But he has been a wonderful servant to the club through one of the most successful periods in their history.<\/p>\n
The Portuguese international, with 78 caps and four goals to his name for his country, started his professional career at Maritimo in Portugal.<\/p>\n
His qualities were soon spotted by Portuguese giants Porto, who snapped him up in 2004 for just 1m Euros and three players. There he played 88 games and scored 8 goals before a dream move to Real Madrid in 2007.<\/p>\n
Over ten hugely successful seasons at the club he has become a household name and regularly courted controversy with some borderline criminal challenges. But he has played 327 times for Real Madrid and scored 14 goals.<\/p>\n
He will be a difficult player to replace and while Real Madrid do have the brilliant Raphael Varane to step into the breach over the coming years, Los Blancos will surely miss Pepe’s aggression and sheer will to win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Super servant […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":6112,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[502,166],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7579"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11651,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7579\/revisions\/11651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefootballfreak.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}