Footballers who have retired in 2026 including ex Chelsea, Liverpool and Barca stars | OneFootball

We are only just over a month into 2026, but some well-known former Chelsea, Barcelona and Liverpool players have decided it’s the end of the road for them.

Time is a curse for a football fan, as a host of players we have watched for major periods of their career call it a day and hang up their boots.

Here, we have looked into five players who have called it a day in 2026.

Marco van Ginkel

An eight-times capped Netherlands international, Van Ginkel represented big clubs like Chelsea and AC Milan, but his careers at both clubs were short.

In England, he also played for Stoke, but the midfielder featured in his home country for the majority of his career, playing more than 100 games for both PSV Eindhoven and Vitesse.

At 33 years of age, Van Ginkel has hung up his boots.

Miralem Pjanic

Pjanic had a very successful career at club level, playing for giants such as Roma, Juventus and Barcelona.

The Bosnian won seven trophies with Juve, one with Barca and was named Roma’s footballer of the year in 2014.

At international level, he’ll go down as a legend, having represented his country over 100 times, while he contributed to two goals in his three World Cup games.

Pjanic technically retired in the final days of 2025, but who cares for such semantics? Any excuse for us to relive his glory days at Lyon.

Mamadou Sakho

Sakho left Paris Saint-Germain for a Liverpool team which wasn’t particularly good while he was there, and in doing so ended his spell of winning trophies: four at PSG and not a single one in his career after that.

The Reds finished second in Sakho’s first campaign there, before slipping to sixth and then eighth in the Premier League for the following two seasons.

Sakho was on the club’s books as they finished fourth the next season, though he was on loan at Crystal Palace when that happened.

He would move permanently to Palace, netting Liverpool a healthy fee, then back to France with Montpellier, before his final spell in professional football with Torpedo Kutaisi in Georgia.

Emmanuel Gigliotti

Who? You might ask. And that would be fair, as Gigliotti played just once for Argentina and had only two spells outside Latin America – one in China and the other for Novara in Italy.

When Gigliotti played there, the Piedmont region club were in Serie B, and the striker represented them for just 10 games, scoring twice.

Greg Cunningham

Manchester City are by far the biggest club Cunningham ever represented, but he played just five times for them, and that was before bog money transformed their side.

The Irish defender played the majority of his career in the Championship, racking up 252 appearances in the English second tier, while he also won League One and the Football League Trophy during his time with Bristol City.

After leaving Preston in 2024, Cunningham headed back to Ireland to play club football there for the first time, for his local side Galway.

The 35-year-old played 33 games for Galway before hanging up his boots, stating he was “fortunate to fulfil my childhood dream.”