Former Argentina forward Carlos Tevez, who has been without a club for the past year, announced his retirement from the game on Saturday.

“I’m retiring, it’s confirmed,” the 38-year-old told America TV in Argentina.

“As a player I gave everything I had in my heart and that leaves me at peace with myself.”

Tevez played 76 times for Argentina, including at two World Cups, and was a part of the gold-medal winning team at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

At club level, he started and ended his career with Boca Juniors, winning the Copa Libertadores in 2003, but in between he enjoyed huge success and no little controversy in England and Italy.

In 2006 he joined West Ham but his subsequent transfer to Manchester United a year later became mired in the ‘third-party ownership’ dispute which was to prompt changes to both Premier League and FIFA regulations with regard to player contracts.

At Manchester United he won two Premier League titles and the 2008 Champions League, scoring in the penalty shoot-out against Chelsea.

A year later he made the controversial decision to cross Manchester to join United’s biggest rivals, helping City to win the 2011-12 Premier League, their first English league title since 1968.

He later decamped to Italy winning two Serie A titles with Juventus before returning to Boca Juniors in 2015.

Tevez was marked by the death of his adoptive father, Segundo Tevez, from Covid-19 in February 2021 and stepped away from Boca in June that year for family reasons.

“I stopped playing because I lost my number one fan and I lost the desire. I was eight years old when he came to see me play,” he said on television.

He said he now plans to become a coach.