Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton
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of success
The route started at Basilica de Begoña, the church dedicated to the patron saint of Biscay, the Virgin Begoña. The bus made slow progress onto the south side of the river that runs through the city. It was carrying the players and staff of Athletic Club de Bilbao, one of the oldest football teams in Spain. Their destination was the City Hall, only a 15-minute walk away, but this particular journey took three hours. The starting-point was significant: before every season, the club’s directors and players visit the church to pay their respects. And they ask for a good season ahead.
No one was in a rush. The noise came from all sides, people cheering, waving and singing as the bus edged through the crowds. There were thousands of them, waving flags and dancing on either side of the Ayuntamiento Bridge. You could hear them from the Palacio Ibaigane, the old-fashioned central office which Athletic still uses, where the boardrooms are oak and the woodwork a dark, dark mahogany. The vibe there is stuffy English bank rather than community club. But the people here were young and old, grandchildren with their grandparents, making memories that will last forever.
There were even some who hired boats along the river, the Ria de Bilbao, to catch a glimpse of their heroes. There were at least a hundred of them on a catamaran and another five on a dinghy.
The boats cruised in from the north-west, past the Guggenheim Museum, which stands just yards from the place where this story began. That is the Campa de los Ingleses – the English pitch – where, next to the river, British émigrés, mainly ship builders from the south coast, but also miners from the north-east, arrived in Bilbao in 1898 and were the first to play football in the city. A plaque marks the spot, inscribed with a poem written by Basque poet Kirmen Uribe:
This is where the English played.
Here on a field by the river.
When there was only grass and a small graveyard.
Sometimes the ball went in the water,
and they had to go and get it.
If it went far they threw little stones
to bring it closer to the shore.
The stones made waves, little waves
which grew bigger all the time.
In the same way Athletic played in Lamiako,
then in Jolaseta, then, finally in San Mames.
One wave, then another, then another.
The English influence is still retained: the name of the team, Athletic Club de Bilbao, is an Anglicised one, while the red-and-white striped kit came from a club member, Juan Elorduy, who sailed to Southampton with the plan of bringing back 50 blue-and-white Blackburn Rovers kits, to match the original Athletic colours. He could not find any, so instead he brought back the first kits he saw, which were the red-and-white stripes of Southampton. He brought back 50 kits in all: 25 were for Athletic Club and 25 for another club that had recently been founded by Bilbao students in Madrid: Atlético Madrid.
The culmination of the celebration came when captain Carlos Gurpegi stood on the balcony of the City Hall and raised the Spanish Super Cup to over 50,000 fans watching below. The date was 18 August 2015 and this was the first trophy Athletic had won in 31 years. They had just beaten the dominant Barcelona 5–1 over two legs, crushing the League and Cup holders 4–0 at its home stadium San Mames (where the VIP bar is called Campa de los Ingleses). Aritz Aduriz, a player that Athletic had released twice before, scored a hat-trick in the biggest club game of his career. This victory was sweeter because Athletic achieved it with a team made up only of players from the local region.
As I retrace the journey of this procession, I see Athletic imagery everywhere: cafés with Athletic flags hanging outside, kids wearing Athletic shirts on their way to school; cars with Athletic bumper-stickers. This is a club that unites the community. It makes people proud.
This local-only policy is best explained by former Athletic president José Maria Arrate, who wrote in the club’s 1998 centenary book: ‘Athletic Bilbao is more than a football club, it is a feeling – and as such its ways of operating often escape rational analysis. We see ourselves as unique in world football and that defines our identity. We do not say that we are better or worse, merely different. We only wish for the sons of our soil to represent our club, and in so wishing we stand out as a sporting entity, not a business concept. We wish to mould our players into men, not just footballers, and each time that a player from the cantera makes his debut we feel we have realised an objective which is in harmony with the ideologies of our founders and forefathers.’
The policy was established in 1919, when the club backed the city’s movement for Basque autonomy. The relationship between the two was strong; the football club was run by socios (members), who could attend general meetings and elect a president and directors to run the club. Athletic is still run on this model. The policy only counted towards players, so it was no problem that the club’s first four managers were all English. The most successful of them, Fred Pentland, was appointed in 1921.1 Basque players – from Athletic and neighbouring Real Sociedad, who dropped its Basque-policy in the mid-1980s – had just formed the bulk of Spain’s 1920 Olympic Games silver medal-winning side. Its aggressive style of play was dubbed furia Espanola, Spanish fury, a nickname the Spanish were happy to adopt – though it originated as a less than admiring term for a ferocious Spanish attack on Antwerp in 1596.
Athletic won its first trophy with Pentland in charge, the 1923 Copa del Rey. He was persuaded to leave to coach Atlético Madrid and then Real Oviedo, but returned in 1929, in time for Spain’s first season with a national league. This was the most successful period in Athletic history, as they won two league titles – the team was unbeaten in the top flight in 1930 – and four Spanish Cups between 1930 and 1933.
Pentland saw coaching as a form of education and embraced the chance to develop up to 80 players in the club’s cantera, or academy. ‘The big clubs will have a coach and … his business will be to teach the young players unity,’ he wrote in 1921. ‘This will do away once and forever with young players playing for themselves alone.’ In 1932, after Athletic’s two straight titles, Spanish newspaper AS asked Pentland to explain his success. In a series of articles, he wrote about his philosophy. It was not just technique, but ‘the psychological and intellectual aspects of a game … in which the morality and intelligence of a player are a prerequisite’.
You might think that reducing the talent pool to only three million players – while other clubs in this globalised industry can and do recruit from all over the world – would leave Athletic struggling, or playing catch-up. The opposite is true. No club has provided more players to Spain’s national team than Athletic. No province has provided more players to Spain’s national team than Biscay.
Athletic have won eight league titles and 24 Cups, and are third in the all-time Spanish trophy table (this is a big deal in Spain). Out of all the teams in the top leagues across Europe, Athletic’s total of 32 trophies is tenth in the all-time list. There are only three teams never to have been relegated from the Spanish top division: Barcelona and Real Madrid, as you might expect. And Athletic Club de Bilbao.
The morality and intelligence that Pentland wrote about gives them an edge. Their difference gives them an edge. Even their weakness gives them an edge. I went to Bilbao to find out how.
It’s the morning after another night before. Another piece of history was made at San Mames, and again Aduriz was at the centre of it. He lit up a run-of-the-mill Europa League game against Belgian team Genk by scoring each of Athletic’s goals in a bizarre 5–3 win. I thought he might not last more than ten minutes: he collided with the post after tapping in his first goal, ending a move that he began with a pass to Iker Muniain from the centre-circle. Muniain beat his man, crossed for Raúl García to head back across goal, and Aduriz scored. He played on, his 35-year-old body energised by a fervent home crowd, and scored two more before half-time. Another two goals in the second half and the papers had their headlines. ‘Historica’ wrote Mundo Deportivo. ‘Aduriz