Ainhi García, the artificial intelligence engineer who spent two years dating Spain international Nico Williams, has broken her silence on their breakup with a series of veiled social media posts shared from a beach holiday. The message prompted the Athletic Club Bilbao winger to respond with a cryptic post of his own.
Williams returned from the World Cup with the trophy in hand, one of several national team players who became the centre of intense media attention this summer. Reports say García had supported him from the other side of the Atlantic during the tournament, chanting his name from the stands at his matches, but that once he was back in Spain she told him she wanted to end the relationship.
Reasons behind the breakup
The reasons for the split, after what had appeared to be two idyllic years together, remain unclear. Some accounts point to the relationship simply wearing thin, while others suggest García was unsettled by photographs showing Williams visibly excited and surrounded by women in bikinis on a yacht.
Journalist Javier de Hoyos reported speaking with people close to the couple shortly after news of the split emerged. Those sources told him the pair had ended things on good terms and that the love had simply run its course, insisting there had been no infidelity and no third party involved.
Days later, García appeared to complicate that version of events. She deleted a declaration of love she had posted for Williams on social media just ten days earlier, a move that did not go unnoticed by followers and fed further speculation about the circumstances of the split.
García's Instagram messages
Neither Williams nor García had commented publicly on the breakup until García used her Instagram account to describe the stage of grief she says she is now working through, as she tries to adjust to the absence of the man who had been her partner for the past two years.
Alongside a set of photos from her beach holiday, she wrote that what the sea takes was never meant to be lost, only for a person to learn to let it go. On another image she struck a more hopeful note, writing that the sea is blessed for its power to heal everything. Friends and followers responded with messages of support, telling her how valuable she is and that her ordeal would soon be behind her.
Williams later posted his own reflection on Instagram, which was also read as a veiled reply to García: he wrote that the mind is the place where everything begins.
Nico Williams and Spain's World Cup summer
Williams plays as a winger for Athletic Club Bilbao, the Basque club based in Bilbao, and is a regular for the Spanish national team. García works as an engineer specialising in artificial intelligence.
Williams was among the Spain squad who returned home with the World Cup trophy, and several of his teammates have spent the summer break under close public scrutiny. Attention has also focused on the friendship between Marcos Llorente and Ferran Torres, and on Barcelona forward Lamine Yamal, who has continued making romantic gestures toward Inés García while causing a stir at a Madrid hotel over his demands, including sending his breakfast back several times.
