Athletic, Sociedad and the hunt for Basque identity
By Paul Hyland
Football is littered with legends of the local lads come good. Glaswegians of a certain persuasion and vintage will never tire of romanticizing about Jock Stein’s marvelous Lisbon Lions — a team all born within 30 miles of Parkhead who managed to break down the famous Italian catenaccio and deliver Britain its first European Cup. These are the stories supporters are drawn to, the ones that provide an emotional investment by giving them something to identify with. North Londoners can often be heard bellowing about how the Walthamstow-born 2018 World Cup Golden Boot winner is one of their own. And for four years in the 1980s, every player who ended the season with a Spanish league winner’s medal had grown up within the confines of the Basque Country.
With Real Sociedad and Athletic both winning back-to-back titles between 1981 and 1984, Spanish football was the subject of a Basque duopoly. But soon it would no longer be possible for a team of locals to take on the world and win. Football was catching on to the fact that casting a wider net gave you a better chance of signing the best players. And the best players gave you the best chance of silverware. With that discovery, the localness of football teams began to disappear. Nowadays the world’s best football teams are a model of cosmopolitanism. Barcelona’s best player is Argentinian; Juventus’s is Portuguese; Liverpool’s is Egyptian. No wonder Spurs fans sing so much about Harry Kane. The fact he is a local lad running out for the first team has made him the exception, when once he would have been the rule.
But in the ’80s, at a time when football clubs across Europe were waking up to the possibilities of looking further afield, the Basque clubs continued to look within. And it worked. The bourgeois elites of Madrid and Barcelona, with stars plucked from all corners of the world, from England’s Lawrie Cunningham and Germany’s Ulrich Stielike, to Denmark’s Allan Simonsen and Germany’s Bernd Schuster, couldn’t prevent Real Sociedad from bringing a first title back to San Sebastian in 1981.
At a time when European football was far from the globalized megamart we know today, Sociedad’s two consecutive league titles fed the belief that regional unity was key to sporting success. Athletic Bilbao taking the crown in ’83 and ’84 only added fuel to that fire. For a time, the Basque Country’s two major clubs fulfilled the two major purposes of a football club: One, to epitomize the regional and cultural particularities of those in the stands; two, to win stuff.
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Most world-renowned football clubs started out as purely local enterprises. Teams like PSV Eindhoven and Bayer Leverkusen were founded for the workers of the local industries. Celtic FC was set up in 1887 to aid the poor Irish immigrant community in Glasgow. The megalith of Manchester City was once nothing more than a support network for young men affected by gang violence, unemployment and substance abuse in the east of the city. All of those clubs were founded with the community in mind; that was what they were for. By the 1980s, when most clubs had long outgrown their local neighborhoods, the Basque clubs could still boast their connection to their community along with league success. The two would soon become mutually exclusive.
The Basque Country relinquished its control on La Liga in 1985, when the title headed east to Catalonia. By that point, the landscape of Spanish football was starting to shift. Barcelona ascended to their first league title in 11 years thanks to the goals of Scotsman Steven Archibald and German Bernd Schuster. The pichichi award was picked up by Mexican Hugo Sanchez, who repeated the feat for three more seasons. The Basque duopoly was replaced by a Catalan and Castilian one, the league changing hands between teams from the two regions until Galicia’s Deportivo La Coruna picked up their first title in 2000. Football’s globalists were taking over, the nationalists left trailing in their wake.
Teams of local lads who could take on the world are by that point the stuff of a bygone era. England’s first European Cup winning team, the Busby Babes, were all born in the British Isles. That club’s most recent European Cup win, 40 years later, involved players born in places as far-flung as Serbia, Argentina and Madeira. For the modernization of football relied on globalization, and the principle that the greater the pool of talent available, the greater a team’s potential for success. Nowadays there is effectively free traffic of the best global talent into a small number of clubs representing a similarly small number of European leagues. The biggest clubs spend hundreds of thousands establishing scouting networks worldwide in the hunt for the next gem to give them an edge on the competition. And in that never-ending Gold Rush football clubs have chosen their own reason for being. They exist to win.
Most clubs don’t struggle to make that leap. Quite often, they don’t have much choice. When a traditionally local side drops down the pecking order in favor of their more diverse rivals, imitation becomes the sincerest form of flattery. Real Sociedad’s two league titles, as well as a Copa del Rey in ’87, preceded a barren spell which saw them finish a disappointing 11th in 1989. A few weeks later, they broke with tradition and signed John Aldridge.
The affable Scouser was famously the first non-Basque to pull on the txuri-urdinak shirt, joining from boyhood club Liverpool that summer. The move was not met fondly. It was anathema to those who saw the club as an extension of themselves, of their linguistic, cultural and ethnic place in the world. Legend has it that Aldridge was first welcomed to the Zubieta training ground by the words “indios fuera” (literally “Indians out”) sprayed across the outside wall. What was a sensible move on a sporting level — Aldridge had scored 50 goals in two and a half seasons at Liverpool, winning the league and League Cup — was, to certain sections of the support, tantamount to accepting an outsider ethnically and culturally unfit to represent them.
Aldridge famously applied himself. He adapted to the lifestyle, learned Spanish and most importantly he put the ball in the net. It’s easy for fans to warm to a foreign player who can score 33 league goals in two seasons. The positive reception that greeted Aldridge on a ceremonial return to Anoeta in 2015 was testament enough to that. These days, foreigners are no novelty at Sociedad. While the first-team squad retains a strong local edge, including nine players born or brought up in the Basque Country, Sociedad have a spine built of players from Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium and Portugal. A certain French World Cup-winning striker, now of Atletico, is also famously a product of the Sociedad youth team.
What does it tell us that a bastion of Basqueness has so willingly opened its doors? Perhaps it tells us that opening the door to foreign players changes the relationship between fans and their clubs. Or even that it changes the way fans identify with the regions the clubs represent. If a football club is a source of local pride, a diverse football club provides a different sense of local pride than a homogenous one.
For that reason, comparing the recruitment policies of two relatively local rivals in Real Sociedad and Athletic Bilbao raises difficult questions about football. At what point does a football club cease to be representative of a community? Does a club represent its community, or does the community represent the club? Or even both? And what does a football club exist for in the first place?
Counterintuitively, Athletic have been the more successful of the Basque clubs since Aldridge landed in the Gipuzkoa province. They remain one of only three teams never to be relegated from La Liga. Sociedad, meanwhile, were relegated in 2007. They finished runner-up in the 2015 Copa del Rey, winning the Supercopa the same summer. A Marcelo Bielsa-inspired Athletic outthought and outscored Manchester United in the 2012 Europa League. The Basque-only Athletic are the story of qualified success: Never great, but always good enough.
Until this season. Having flirted with a relegation battle earlier in the campaign, Athletic currently find themselves in 11th place, though only five points above the drop zone. The philosophy by which only players who learned the trade in the Basque Country may represent los leones is the hill their league status might be set to die on. For as former president Jose Julian Lertxundi put it: “You don’t even touch the philosophy: there are sweeter ways of committing suicide.”
Con cantera y afición, no hace falta importación. With home-grown players and local support, there’s no need for you to import. So goes the motto which has characterized Athletic’s recruitment policy for over a century. Though its regional dimension is relatively recent, with the rule originally being devised to include native bilbaínos, the philosophy has had to remain pragmatic, pliable. It now relates to people born, brought up or trained in the broader, cross-national area known as the Basque Country. Aymeric Laporte’s move to Bilbao in 2009 could be justified on the basis that he had received some of his footballing education in the French Basque Country. The philosophy seems impossible to stretch any further without abandoning completely — something Athletic simply will not contemplate.
The fork in the road taken between Sociedad and Bilbao symbolizes the complexities of Basque regional identity. On the one hand, the Basque Country is a culturally and historically distinct community, home to speakers of a language isolate, once ruled by a set of autonomous laws (fueros) abolished in the 19th century, and a breeding ground for separatism. On the other, it’s one of the many distinct communities that make up a whole nation, the birthplace of the Spanish Jesuits and home to two of Spain’s most important 20th Century authors in Unamuno and Pio Baroja.
Athletic and Sociedad embody the two poles of a debate on Spanish nationalism that began at the end of the 19th Century. The 1898 Generation, a literary movement of which Unamuno and Baroja were members, by and large attempted to reconsider Spanishness. To them, the cultural center of Spain was Castilla, and all regional variations were simply offshoots of that core identity. The movement’s heirs in the 1927 Generation often sought to re-emphasize the regions as the center of Spanish cultural output. Sociedad, a Basque team that accepts foreigners, reflect the ’98 group’s view that regional culture is secondary to national culture. Athletic’s self-styled philosophy of hiring only those connected to the Basque Country reflects the way later thinkers re-emphasized the importance of the regional ahead of the national.
The two philosophies also present a second interesting question. What is the purpose of a football club? Sociedad’s abandonment of the Basque-only philosophy was a vain bid to recapture their early ‘80s success. Athletic willingly sacrificed their chances of winning in order to maintain a sense of Basque identity. Even when relegation appeared a serious possibility, they refused to contemplate a change of philosophy. Sociedad exist to compete; Athletic exist for something else entirely.
In a market where players can move more of less freely across national borders, clubs may pick one or the other, but not both. And why ought success to matter to the local supporter who no longer feels represented on the field? When we see our clubs attain success, do we sacrifice a sense of being reflected in them? That question is political and timely — to what extent does diversity diminish the identity of the individual?
Perhaps the two purposes — representation and success — are reconcilable. Perhaps a football club produces local sentiment as much as it reflects it. In other words, couldn’t the presence of foreigners in the local side help regional identity to include outsiders? In 2010, El Mundo reported that over a quarter of the population of the Basque Country come from outside the autonomous region. A cosmopolitan football team seems a much better representation of the Basque demographic. Plus, it allows followers of Sociedad to consider themselves modern, open-minded and progressive, in contrast to the conservative closed shop at Athletic. Uniting against a common enemy is as much a part of a club’s myth making as anything else.
Maybe Athletic’s Basque-only philosophy sacrifices success in pursuit of a regional ideal that’s already well past its sell by date. It ignores the true diversity of the region’s population. It’s a symbol of the region’s dwindling separatist leanings. If relegation ensues, Athletic’s fans might finally be left with a team they no longer recognize.
The Unexamined Game is a series exploring the intersection of philosophy and football. You can find the previous articles in the series here:
Toward a philosophy of football
Pep Guardiola, tiki-taka and the end of football
Ball don’t lie: Football’s problem of other minds
How Isaac Newton ruined football
Stefano Pioli, and the power of mindfulness
Raheem Sterling, Michel Foucault and football’s racist discourse