Come midnight on Thursday, when the shutters are closed on the transfer window and the audits show a summer of voracious consumption by those at the top of football’s food chain, the wider, less reported emotion across the professional game will be solace. Predatory buyers will have been reined in, at least for four months. Players can park their distractions. “I listen to our head coach when he says it’s a relief when the window ends,” the president of Athletic Bilbao, Jon Uriarte, told The Times.
On the face of it, it’s a peculiar stance for his club. Look only at the audit and Athletic are serial winners in the sport’s free-market, hyperinflationary economy. In the past decade they have benefited from the sale of the highest-priced goalkeeper in history (Kepa Arrizabalaga, to Chelsea), the costliest defender at the time (Aymeric Laporte, to Manchester City) and persuaded Bayern Munich to seal what was then the most expensive transfer in Bundesliga history: €40 million (£34 million) on the defensive midfielder Javi Martínez.
That trio partly explains the healthy balance sheet at a club enjoying a splendid new stadium, a state-of-the-art training facility and an unusually empowered fan base: Uriarte, a 44-year-old entrepreneur and former banker who spent six years working in the City of London, was in June elected by the club’s members, honouring the democratic ownership model that Athletic have in common with Real Madrid and Barcelona.
It’s a model, as Uriarte acknowledges, that draws envy from supporters of clubs who take their orders from remote bosses. “You look at Manchester United, where the fans are shouting at the owners,” Uriarte says. “In pre-season we visited Newcastle, where the relationship between fans has been good since we played each other in Europe in 1994. The sense of belonging in English football in places like Newcastle is huge. But there is this contradiction. The biggest sense of belonging in football is in Britain, but the most aggressive ownership model in the world is there as well. That’s a challenge: How are English fans made to feel they are part of something in their club if they are owned by corporations with maybe only a financial goal?”
The one-fan-one-vote model has its downsides, too. Uriarte, initially in two minds about whether to go through with a long-term “dream” of being Athletic president, found aspects of electioneering uncomfortable. “There were nasty attacks on social media,” he said. “We’d been warned but it was worse than expected.” When Athletic’s 40,000-odd members voted him in ahead of two alternative candidates, he abruptly confronted urgent tasks. He took office two days before the contracts were due to expire on 120 players across the various age groups of the club’s academy .
At Athletic, the academy is an absolute priority. This is a club who occupy their high-to-middling place in football’s food chain under rare restrictions. In the June elections, while rival would-be presidents may have been catty, each tempting voters with seductive would-be coaches — Marcelo Bielsa on one ticket; a teasing suggestion of Mauricio Pochettino; Ernesto Valverde on the winning ticket — on one promise there was unanimity. Athletic will always stick to the defining aspect of the institution, the non-negotiable that binds them to the Basque region: “We play with Basque players,” Uriarte says firmly. “Nobody wants to change that philosophy.”
It’s a selection criteria that has been observed for more than a century: only those born or raised in the region of Bilbao, its surrounding counties, or a little way across the French border, will represent the club on the pitch. That’s a catchment area with a very small population: “There are three million in our market,” Uriarte adds.
Which means, in the neo-liberal economy of elite football, Athletic are self-excluded from the trickle-down logic of the global market. If a star is sold to the Bundesliga or the Premier League, a bought-in replacement needs to show bona fide links to somewhere between Biarritz and Pamplona. “It’s a two-sided coin,” says the Athletic president. “On the one hand your market is very reduced — when you need to hire someone, you cannot hire whoever you want. But thanks to this philosophy, the togetherness of our club, the connection between the players and the fanbase is amazing. We’ve been very competitive — we’ve never been relegated, uniquely with Real Madrid and Barcelona.”
At the same time, Uriarte is old enough to remember when the Basque-only “philosophy” meant more. It meant breaking Madrid or Barcelona’s grip on the top of La Liga. As a schoolboy, he ran into the woods near home to collect branches to be used as makeshift flagpoles in celebration of Athletic defending their Spanish league in 1984. That was their last title to date. He is realistic about the remote prospect of Athletic, who finished eighth last season, claiming another. “We can win the cup. We’ve reached [two of the last three] finals and we won [the last but one] Spanish Super Cup. It’s achievable to win a Europa League or a Uefa Conference League.”
A decade ago, with Bielsa as coach, Athletic were indeed in a Europa League final, with Manchester United and Paris Saint-Germain eliminated en route to finishing runners-up to Atletico Madrid. But in the summers that followed, they learnt to fear the transfer window. Fernando Llorente, the centre forward, joined Juventus for free, having wound down his contract. There were surreal deadline-day incidents, such as Martínez’s dead-of-night attempt to retrieve his belongings from the training ground after the club had stubbornly resisted Bayern’s pursuit, only to be apprehended by a security guard. And the 11th-hour collapse of Ander Herrera’s proposed move to United in 2013, when nobody could quite confirm whether a set of lawyers claiming to represent the player were for real or not.
Herrera did join United a year later, bringing €36 million (£30.5 million) into that flush Athletic treasury. Yesterday, the new president closed a circle by welcoming Herrera, 33, in front of several thousand fans gathered at the San Mames stadium. Back as a returning loyalist, the Bilbao-born midfield warrior has re-signed, initially on loan, from PSG. “I’m grateful to United and PSG, but I’ve always stayed connected with Athletic,” Herrera told the fans. “This club leaves a special mark on you. You might leave Athletic, but it never leaves you.”
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