They haven’t contested a UEFA Champions League group stage match in 16 years, but Athletic Bilbao are natural actors on football’s biggest stage.
A pioneering force while the Spanish game was in its infancy, the Basque outfit is one of just three clubs to have never been relegated from the country’s top flight (Real Madrid and Barcelona are the others) and have lifted the Copa del Rey on 23 occasions. Only Barcelona have won it more.
Granted, the days of league and cup doubles—of which they have five—have long been consigned to the past, but it’s a fascinating past, infused with legend and lore, and because of their history Athletic retain a special place in the Spanish football psyche.
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It was they, after all, who contributed the majority of players to the 1920 Olympic team that so captured the national attention, and it was their heroes—including Jose Maria Belauste, Domingo Acedo and the legendary Pichichi—who delivered decisive wins over Sweden and the Netherlands en route to the Silver Medal.
Pichichi, whose name emblazons the prize for La Liga’s top scorer, continued to watch over Athletic Bilbao’s San Mames Stadium, in which he scored the inaugural goal, long after his tragic death of typhus in 1922. Clubs visiting the ground for the first time began a tradition of laying flowers at his statue—a gesture that lasted until the arena was demolished in 2013, 100 years after its inauguration.
These days Pichichi rests at the new San Mames, where late last month Athletic defeated Napoli to book a place in the Champions League proper for the first time since 1998. They were celebrating their centenary that year, and while they made a hasty exit from the competition their struggles in no way diminished one of football’s more notable centuries.
Even before the club’s first set of back-to-back titles in the early 1930s, Bilbao was the sport’s Spanish hotbed.
Other than the Rio Tinto mines of Andalusia, where the country’s first kick-about is thought to have taken place, the city’s link to football was older and deeper than anywhere else in Spain at the beginning of the 20th Century. As Jimmy Burns points out in his 2012 book, La Roja, the English sailors and merchants who passed through the port served as the game’s exporters, teaching the rules to the local workforce.
Football took root in Bilbao, and given that the city was fiercely and proudly Basque, a policy was eventually adopted that restricted membership to the region. (There is some argument regarding what role the Franco regime played in the policy’s adoption.)
To this day, Athletic only use players with Basque heritage—a constraint that puts last season’s fourth-place finish in an even more impressive light. For while they were able to dominate the first few decades of domestic football simply by generating elite players from within, the popularization of the transfer market began to put them at a competitive disadvantage about the time that Real Madrid embarked on their first Galacticos experiment in the 1950s.
It’s a reality they’ve been forced to grapple with ever since.
They cannot, for example, spend €25 million to acquire Toni Kroos, €22 million to sign Mario Mandzukic or €16 million to land Ivan Rakitic as Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Barcelona did this summer.
Not that they don’t have the money.
Ironically, Athletic’s avoidance of the non-Basque player pool has allowed them to thrive in other ways. By including significant release clauses in the contracts of their top prospects, they guarantee themselves meaningful revenue that can only be spent internally.
The €40 million they recouped from the sale of Javi Martinez to Bayern Munich was invested in the likes of Benat Etxebarria, Kike Sola and Mikel Rico the following summer, and they were left with more than €25 million to spare. Similarly, they’ll use the proceeds from Ander Herrera’s move to Manchester United to bring in additional Basque talent over the next few transfer periods.
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It’s a uniquely local approach to running a football club, and one unparalleled at the upper echelons of the European game—which is where they happen to find themselves.
On Wednesday, in front of more than 50,000 people at the glittering new San Mames, and under the bright lights of the Champions League, Athletic Bilbao will face Shakhtar Donetsk in their Group H opener.
They’ll do it with a set of locally-raised players, a distinctive footballing culture and a place in the history of the sport significant to Basque country, Spain and well beyond.
Jerrad Peters is a Winnipeg-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.