“If I am still here it is because I really care about the club. Those things affect me as a professional and they affect me as a person.”
Elaborating on his emotional reaction to their
elimination from the competition last month, he said: “As a captain, you have a responsibility to go in front of the camera after this big failure in the Europa League.
“It is a competition that we all said was a target for a trophy. To lose against Dinamo Zagreb is something, for me, that you cannot accept.
“It is not a lack of respect. It is just that when you have standards as a club, this ambition to win, and especially to fail in that way, after winning the first leg 2-0, it was just an honest statement on that.