Athletic Club, Bilbao’s most treasured sporting institution, has a long history in Spain’s most prestigious cup competition, the Copa Del Rey. For the citizens of the Basque country, however, the competition is much more than a display of quality on the pitch. It is an essential symbol of their region’s sacred struggle to uphold their Basque identity and history. In this long-read article, Ian Wolff, a history teacher north of London, takes us along his journey of discovery.
Can You Hear the Lions Roar?
I was regretting spending €1.5 on a can of Coca-Cola as the train seemingly began to slow down. For a brief moment, I wondered whether we had entered the Basque country yet. This question was soon answered by virtually every building in sight.
Whilst I had known about the proud regional identity of the Basque people before arriving in Bilbao for the first time in the summer of 2023 and again in April of 2024, I could not help but stare in amazement at the enthusiasm for Athletic Bilbao on April 6, 2024, when the beloved lions of the famous San Mames Stadium would, yet again, attempt to end the forty year trophy drought for the largest Basque city. On this evening, Athletic Bilbao would face Mallorca in the final of the Copa Del Rey. Bilbao were heavily favoured, well ahead of Mallorca in the La Liga table and had already beaten Barcelona and Atletico Madrid en route to playing in the final that evening. Recent heartbreak in this competition was still raw, as “Athletic Club”, as they are known domestically, had lost to Barcelona 4-0 in the 2020-2021 final and were, possibly more painfully, beaten 1-0 by local Basque rivals Real Sociedad the year before in the final. Surely, tonight, four decades of heartbreak in this competition would end?
As I walked to my hotel room, this appeared not a possibility or dream, but a certainty in the mind of every one of the city’s occupants. Every apartment block, jewelry store, hairdresser, corner store and chiropractor had the club colours displayed in their windows. A small terrier was kitted out at the reception desk in my hotel. The cleaning and hotel staff duly followed suit with everyone else in the city. Rarely had I witnessed a civic identity so strong as what I saw on that day in Bilbao, and it continued into the evening as I wandered toward the Plaza Nueva. I took my seat on one of the elongated stone benches, most of which were bordering the main square, but with a small portion protruding slightly into the centre to surround a tree and some small vegetation in one corner. I sat beneath such vegetation and gleefully watched the revelry gradually intensify. A small toddler, duly in his Athletic Club shirt and barely able to walk, ambled after a balloon that had gotten away despite his best attention. Behind him, primary school-age children created chalk designs on the ground as teenagers gathered in circles to paint each other’s faces and share cigarettes. Large groupings of adults shared beers from coolers and began endless rounds of chants and songs commemorating their beloved ‘Atleti Club’. Women with alcohol in one hand and handles of strollers in the other spoke to each other casually, occasionally glancing from side to side to remind their children not to give in to the temptation to jump off the stone benches.
Past and future pride
I ended up sharing my bench with students from Leon, who had come to Bilbao simply to witness the pageantry of the evening. After trying to practice their English with me for a matter of minutes, they ended up easily convincing a tourist from Huddersfield to stand on one of the stone benches and attempt a club chant. After a pattern of attempts and reminders, the locals simply chanted along with him before giving him loud applause, which he accepted enthusiastically.
“This is awesome”, he told me, grateful he could finally speak English to express his delight. “I’m just here for a stag do, and we just stumbled upon this. It’s amazing”. I couldn’t agree more, and shared his sense of surprise, however slightly. Whilst I knew the Basque region had a reputation for offering fantastic hospitality to tourists, the reputation for regional identity preceded it just as much, and I wondered how they would react to someone from outside their proud-and undeniably beautiful region attempting to be involved with such an important event as a final for Athletic Club, one of the region’s most venerated institutions. Independence movements which proclaimed “keep up on both”-violence and political activity- were recent parts of their history, and, although condemned by the vast majority of their population, it was clear that these feelings and experiences had left their imprint on the modern Basque situation. The previous summer, when visiting the small town of Mungia, a short ride from Bilbao, I had asked a seventeen-year-old at a bus stop what made him most proud to be Basque.
“ETA”, he said immediately.
I pondered this as I watched him relax with his girlfriend on the ride back to Bilbao. I teach at a four-hundred-year-old school for boys in the United Kingdom, working with students from ages 11-18, and had traveled to Bilbao to spend a week as a visiting teacher at an Ikastola, a specific Basque language educational complex whose express purpose was to maintain Basque culture and traditions amongst future generations. In my thirteen years of teaching, both at my current school and previous ones, I have had several students proceed to join the military, and I often worry for them when they do. The idea of them killing another human being, or being killed themselves, is always incomprehensible to me, and that is under the guise of the British armed forces. The idea that one of them might idolize a terrorist organization-and, in another time and a place not so long ago and very near-or rather, exactly-where I was standing, would have been part of it, seems beyond foreign.I discussed this by email with Harri Beobide, a prominent figure in Basque secondary education and board member of the organisation EuroClio, an association of history teachers across Europe who organise events to discuss approaches to teaching history. She was quick to inform me, providing statistics from provincial and state elections, that the Basque people today support only political means of protecting their autonomy, and that it is “one thing is to ‘be’ Basque or feel Basque and not Spanish and other thing to defend violence”. I knew this conceptually, and knew that the hundreds of thousands of people who had put on their Athletic Club shirts and hung the club colours from their balconies had a strong regional pride that did not in any way involve wishing harm on others. Those same shirts and colours still carried a history with them, however, and while this is the case for a great multitude of clubs across Europe, the story of how Athletic Club and the Basque identity join hands through time is one of the more fascinating the continent has to offer.
Back to the Past
German aviators, in the service of the Spanish rebels, have bombed Guernica, burning the history city venerated by all the Basques.
-Jose Antonio Aguirre, President of the Republic of Euzkadi, established on 1 March, 19361.
“If submission is not immediate, I will raise all Vizcaya (the Basque country) to the ground, beginning with the industries of war. I have the means to do so”2. The voice of Nationalist General Emilio Mola from March of 1937, during the height of the Spanish Civil War, is one that, at times, still seems to echo through the green hills of the Basque country today. This threat was far from an isolated uttering, and came amidst a longstanding backdrop of what, in the view of the Basque people, were oral incursions into their sacred right to autonomy. Even before the war, leader of the Fascist party Falange, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, had described his party’s doctrine by explaining that Spain had apparently “deteriorated because of three divisions. Firstly, the division caused by regional separatism. Secondly, by political parties, and thirdly, by class struggle”3. All three were issues of quintessential importance to the Basque people, and remain so today. Predictably, an atmosphere of defensiveness permeated an area filled with iron mines, political separatist movements, and a population which saw its identity most importantly reflected in the protection of its regional culture.
It was only one month after Mola’s statement in March of 1937 that a second warning, this one made more robust by the support of the Nazi Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, was given.
“Franco is about to deliver a mighty blow against which all resistance is useless. Basques! Surrender and your lives will be spared”4.
The following afternoon, on April 26, 1937, one of the most infamous civilian massacres in history took place at Gernika. Gernika was a medieval market town whose history as a Basque cultural centre goes back roughly seven hundred years. Under five thousand residents maintained a community where people from the surrounding rural areas would conduct trade and commerce, and were developing a fledgling arms manufacturing industry, both of which were aided by good train links with Bilbao. This town, which journalist George Steer, contemporary journalist for The Times in London, referred to as “the centre of Basque cultural tradition” in his reporting of the massacre5, was subjected to three hours of not only continual aerial bombing but fighter jets which flew low above the town centre to target the civilian population attempting to hide from the assault. As it was market day, many farmers had arrived with their cattle and sheep, only to watch in horror as many of those same animals ran frantically between flaming buildings, burning to death from the effects of white phosphorus. The farmers themselves choked from smoke and dust in shelters and cellars that stood little chance against the might of the Luftwaffe. In the aftermath of the massacre, the nationalists attempted to explain the wreckage of the town as a burning6, but it would be cemented in the mind of history by Pablo Picasso in one of his most famous works, completed in the same year and simply entitled eponymously with respect to the town-Guernica. With a past containing events such as this, it becomes understandable that a sense of defensiveness might inform the Basque regional identity, and might be expressed through the region’s most popular sporting institution.Today the market in the centre of Gernika looks like any normal collection of stalls and garages, with green colouring providing scant decoration to a few of the necessary structures supporting the roof. A mural of Picasso’s work lies near it, with museums and the famous Gernika tree providing ever-present reminders of what happened almost ninety years ago. However, the original Picasso landscape that has forever imprinted the massacre on modern memory lies in Madrid and the Reina Sofia Museum. That one of the most poignant and meaningful symbols of the abuse of the Basque people might lie in what many Basques consider, effectively, Francisco Franco’s back yard, is a contradiction that serves as a somehow appropriate entry into an exploration of what the Copa Del Rey means to Athletic Club – not simply as a sign of footballing success, but as a statement of an irrepressible regional identity.
When it comes to ball games, always leave a Basque be…A small grass pitch is all they need.
–Ibaizabal magazine, 1902. This was the first known reference to football in the Basque language.
Athletic Club was founded in 1898. At the time, the city was defined by its mining and industrial culture, and each triumph on the pitch was celebrated with chants of “aliron”. So important was the mineral, originally found by British engineers in Basque mines, to Athletic Club’s supporters that they would eventually chant “aliron, aliron, el Atletic es campeon”! (“Hurrah! Hurrah! Athletic are champions”!). As the area’s industry led to the development of a thriving port, and that thriving port began to cooperate symbiotically with a bustling commercial centre, Athletic Club began to publicly and competitively represent this burgeoning identity on the sports field, and the success of the wider region demanded the football team also maintain such standards.
Only four years after the club was founded by a combination of British people in the Basque country and young men from the Basque region who had studied in Britain, their first title arrived. The 1902 Alfonso XIII Coronation Cup was won in the club’s first match outside of their Basque homeland. This would be the start of a deluge of trophies, but not before a series of events that would become even more important to the club’s-and the region’s-identity than any trophy.In 1910, the red and white shirt that has become synonymous with the club was worn for the first time, and the year after, in 1911, perhaps the most famous policy of the club began: a policy that only players native to the Basque country or having learned or trained in their youth in the Basque country were allowed to play for the club. Henceforth, each time a pass was played, a shot or challenge was attempted, or a save made, it was done by someone the supporters of the club not only felt was one of them, but knew was one of them. The desire to appreciate purely Basque skills was still not entirely quenched, however, as four years after the implementation of this policy, a Basque national team would play its first matches in Bilbao and Barcelona in 1915 (this team would proceed play only two matches during the thirty-six years of Franco’s dictatorship, from 1939-1975). The burgeoning quality emanating from the Basque region would not go unnoticed in the rest of Spain, and when Spain entered the World Cup for the first time in 1934 in Italy, ten of the eleven players were Basque, and five played for Athletic Club, which, six years earlier in 1928 joined four other Basque clubs as one of the ten founding members of the phenomenon today known as La Liga.
Nothing…stopped the conquerors resolution to crush every aspect of Basque nationalism…threatening notices were displayed: ‘If you are Spanish, speak Spanish’. Regionalist feelings in any form were portrayed as the cancer of the Spanish body politic.
–Anthony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.
This hugely successful period in Basque footballing history was predictably and tragically truncated by the Spanish Civil War two years later. In 1937, the club’s players went into exile, and the club was stripped of its assets. It was re-founded, however, only a year later as Bilbao Athletic. After three years of almost perpetual suffering throughout Spain, the war came to an end in 1939-but the suppression of the Basque culture did not.
Capturing the Flags
Under Generalisimo Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime, the Basque language was banned from any public use, with schools such as the Ikastola which I had traveled to Bilbao to visit a predictable casualty. The Basque flag, the ikurrina, could no longer be displayed7. Italian foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano even expressed his desire to celebrate his ally Franco’s victory over Basque resistance by acquiring “flags and guns captured from the Basques…A flag taken from the enemy is worth more than any picture”8. The Basque people, both then and now, would undoubtedly agree with him. Whilst nuns read out death sentences daily for interned Basque prisoners in nearby Amorebieta9, Franco forced the club through decree to change its name to Atletico de Bilbao (while also taking the opportunity to rebrand the Copa Del Rey the “Copa de Generalisimo”, after his own title).
Despite the suppressive atmosphere, Atletico de Bilbao, as they were then known, managed a remarkably quick rise to the top of Spanish football once again, winning its third double in 1943, taking the La Liga title and Copa Del Rey, and becoming the first club to retain the league trophy. Ironically, the weakening of the team due to the Civil War had forced the club to use several youth squad members who would, over time, form the spine of a team capable of accomplishing such triumphs, including Angel Zubieta, who would become the youngest player ever to play for Spain at the time at seventeen years old. This would be the dawn of an era that has become known to the club’s history as the era of the “eleven local boys”. The club made its debut in the European Cup in 1956, and built a new main seating stand alongside the famed San Mames arch, which had long served as a representation of the industrial identity of the city. Most importantly, however, and true to form for the region it represents, the club proudly went against the growing trend in Spain at the time of acquiring foreign players by establishing the youth teams Athletic Juvenil in 1960, Bilbao Athletic in 1964, and planning Spain’s first football academy in 1969 (opened as Lezama in 1971), a year in which the Copa Del Rey would return to Bilbao after an eleven year absence.
The fact that the Copa Del Rey had been absent from Bilbao’s San Mames Stadium for so long would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier. Atletico de Bilbao had won the Copa Del Rey in 1950, 1955, 1956, and 1958, leading Bilbao-based journalist Ramon Mandiola to proclaim that “the Cup final is a match between Athletic and some other club”. However, after only one victory in the 1960’s and one in the 1970’s (a decade in which the club went back to the name Athletic Club in 1972), the club decided to celebrate its 1983 La Liga victory (part of a double winning season that saw it also reclaim the Copa Del Rey) with a new tradition. In a tribute to the iron mining that not only had long been ingrained with the history of the region but had also played a role in the very founding of the club, it was decided that the flat-bottomed barges that once carried the region’s iron through the estuary Ria de Bilbao would now be used to carry the club’s trophies over the water of the River Nervion during their victory parades. Over a million people lined the river banks to see the Gabarra sail up the estuary and into the city centre in 1983, and likely few, if any, believed their precious lions of the San Mames would have to wait multiple decades for the chance to do this again. However, forty years later, as evening darkness began to descend over Bilbao’s Plaza Nueva on the night of the 2024 Copa Del Rey final, it was clear that despite Athletic Club’s record as the second most successful club in the history of the competition (behind only Barcelona), twenty-three titles was not enough. Only twenty-four would now suffice.
Living the 90 minutes
I took my place amongst the eager crowd of spectators staring transfixed at the massive television screen in front of them. Many of them, I could tell, had only heard about Copa Del Rey victories from parents or grandparents, whose spirit and energy they expressed in every twitch of their faces or shift of their body weight. This gathering represented a potpourri of history and regional identity infused together to create a mixture that thickened the air with expectation, apprehension, and, as the countless Basque flags that hung from the surrounding balconies made clear, abundant pride.
Remember what you are, show what you love.
–Motto on the introduction at the Athletic Club Museoa, Bilbao
Most cup finals begin in a cagey fashion, with both sides reluctant to take too many risks, and this match was no exception. Both sides played simple passes designed to keep possession, and probed methodically for an opening. The young men surrounding me in Athletic Club shirts sipped beers with a gradually slower pace, their eyes fixed on the screen in front of them. While reactions to the game play were cautious and apprehensive, the response to the sight of King Felipe VI of Spain appearing on screen was forceful. Derisive whistles pierced the night air as adolescent girls thrust their middle fingers upwards in front of the elevated television screen. Patron of the competition or not, he was still the living embodiment of a power structure that had long attempted to suppress their priceless regional culture, and tonight, after forty long years, he would again be forced to surrender his trophy to the pride of the Basque capital-surely?
Unfortunately for the spectators packed into the Plaza Nueva, RCD Mallorca had other ideas. After Athletic Club failed to clear a corner then close down at the top of the box, Dani Rodriquez was able to fire beautifully into the top corner, causing the Mallorca supporters inside the Estadio de La Cartuja in Sevilla to erupt with unbridled joy, and the red-and-white clad Basque citizens around me unable to consume their beverages through their clenched teeth. They had long realized I was not a native of Bilbao, but accepted me, for the evening at least, as a kindred spirit.
“We need to win this”, one of them told me, doing his best to incorporate me in the most simplistic manner possible. He need not have made an attempt to speak English. It had been clear from the moment the train had pulled into Bilbao-Abando station.
Shortly before the end of the first half, Athletic Club appeared to have their equalizer when star winger Nico Williams (later to become a star for Spain in the 2024 European Championships) collected a return pass after darting in from the left hand channel and arrowing the ball into the far corner. The Plaza Nueva jumped in unison, covering me with beer and screaming with delight. This, to the dismay of those around me, was ruled out for offside, but Williams would turn provider five minutes into the second half, slicing Mallorca open with a beautiful through ball for Oihan Sancet to drive home at the far post. Beer was again thrown in the air. The occupants of the Plaza Nueva again seemingly jumped skyward in unison. The Basque people were again going to claim their place ahead of all Spain’s regional identities as champions in the Iberian Peninsula’s greatest cup competition. They could feel it. They somehow knew it. They were not, however, prepared to wait for it much longer.
The match, as cup finals so often do, went to penalties. Twenty-three-year-old second choice keeper Julen Agirrezabala, who had already made a remarkable save low down to his left to make sure the match even went to penalties, made another brilliant save for Athletic Club before another Mallorca penalty was blazed over the bar. This provided Alejandro Berenguer the opportunity to slot home the winning penalty, and I could not help but jump high into the air along with the rest of the Plaza Nueva, returning to earth to be greeted by a young man screaming manically in my face and shaking me by the shoulders. Chaos had never felt so good in the Basque country-at least, not in the last forty years.
The symbolic sailing of victory
On the following Thursday, seemingly the entirety of the Basque country lined the banks of the River Nervion to see the Gabarra travel through the Ria de Bilbao estuary. The ikurrina, which remained ubiquitous throughout the city, seemed to shine that much brighter, glancing the sun from numerous balconies onto the citizens (very few of whom were sober) for whom it was such a hallowed symbol. They were at last, on this day and with this accomplishment, secure in the knowledge that the most visible embodiment of their city and regional pride had reclaimed a triumph that demanded both recognition and respect of their skill, and acknowledgement that such rewards were not simply achieved in the name of the people, but by true members of those same people, as had been the case since 1911. It was, after all, what ultimately gave Athletic Club its soul.
Even when sitting comfortably at home just north of London, reminders of the strength of the Basque regional identity are present whenever one engages with the region’s people. When writing an article for the Dutch branch of the European Teachers Association regarding my visits to schools across continental Europe, I sent a draft to all of the teachers from institutions I had mentioned by name. Upon receiving my draft, the teacher I had shadowed at Urrextindorra Ikastola in Bilbao had three simple comments. She corrected me on the spelling of a Basque educational term (“Batxi” vs, “Baxti”), told me that, since the article was written in English, I should continue to refer to the club as “Athletic” rather than “Atletico”-and then told me to use the term “Basque country”.
Surely, I thought to myself, I had not made the mistake of describing the city of Bilbao in an incorrect region? What was she referring to? I quickly messaged her inquiring as to what she meant. What term had I used incorrectly to describe the location of Bilbao? Her answer was quick, and contained only one syllable.
“Spain”.
Ian would like to express his sincere thanks and acknowledgement to the Athletic Club Museoa, Bilbao, at the San Mames Stadium in Bilbao, Basque Country. Information from the museum can be found throughout the article.
Photo Gallery
Let’s review
- Beevor, Anthony, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939, 2006, London, p. 259. ↩︎
- Preston, Paul, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge, 2006, London, p. 266. ↩︎
- The Spanish Civil War, Granada Television Productions, Episode 4: “Franco and the Nationalists”, 1983. ↩︎
- Preston, Paul, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge, 2006, London, p. 267. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 267. ↩︎
- Beevor, Anthony, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939, 2006, London, p. 258-259. ↩︎
- Beevor, Anthony, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War: 1936-1939, 2006, London, p. 264. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 265. ↩︎
- Ibid, p. 451. ↩︎
