Why You Just Have To Love Athletic Bilbao

Pin It

Those crazy Basques:

• They want independence from Spain but want to be in Europe
• They have sticky out ears except the ones that don’t
• They are short and squat except the ones that aren’t
• They have a different blood group except for those who don’t.
• They have an unintelligible language. (They do so no arguments there)

Stereotypes and half facts (Maybe full facts in some cases) but you have to respect their desire to be different. Any region that purports to be a country based on a language whose only relative is a slight resemblance to Sanskrit and some blood cells has to be described at best as persistent.

And in football they are different too.

There are various football teams in the Basque country in Spain (Real Sociedad, Alaves, Osasuna). It is one of the traditional hotbeds of football in fact as the game was brought to the country by English sailors in the late nineteenth century. Bilbao wear the red and white stripes as a student brought over 50 Southampton shirts and gave them to the team after he couldn’t get enough of their previous color while in London, they had previously been wearing Blackburn colours.

Athletic Bilbao are a traditional club who stick to their traditions and this means they have that Basque desire to be different.

So why do you have to love Athletic Bilbao?

Well in a world of multinational, multilingual, multimillionaires Bilbao still stick to only signing Basque players. They have relaxed the rule slightly in the last decade or so and now sign players who have been brought up in the Basque country but may not have had “Basque blood” and they also sign players with Basque ancestry, the Jack Charlton rule of ancestry if you like, but essentially they are still a fully Basque team. This doesn’t come without its critics though. Within the basque country itself they are the big spenders constantly tempting younger players away from the other Basque clubs and they always have to pay over the odds in the transfer market because they can only buy the Basque players that come onto the market and are good.

When Celtic won the European Cup they famously didn’t have a player born more than 30 miles from the ground. That could never happen again could it?

Well this year Athletic Bilbao are currently fifth in the Spanish league and under the guidance of Marcelo Bielsa they are playing some of the best football ever seen at the Catedral with a young team brimming with talent. (Bielsa is not Basque of course, but then again neither was Howard Kendall but he managed them too)

As I write this they are playing away at real Madrid and losing 3-1 and they are down to ten players. However they could conceivably have been out of sight in the first half after a couple of awful misses before Real Madrid equalized.

If this team continues to develop as it currently is and more importantly holds onto its best players they could conceivably qualify for the Champion’s league this year. That would be an achievement in itself.

And then you would have to love Athletic Bilbao even more.

photo credit: txadonak via photopin cc

Pin It