\n<\/p>\n
Athletic Club are truly the pride of Bilbao. Even locals who don’t follow football support the team, which has, for more than a century, been a defiant symbol of the Basque people, and their culture. <\/span><\/p>\n “Athletic Club cannot be understood without understanding our values,” <\/span>board member Igor San Roman said.<\/span> “This club has championed a model that is unique in the world, the values and principles which we have managed to promote over the course of our 127-year history: loyalty to a club, loyalty to colours and, above all, loyalty to the community it represents.<\/span><\/p>\n “There is one enduring message, which is that loyalty is not dead. That is the message we want our players to convey.”<\/span><\/p>\n And they continue to do so because Athletic have never abandoned their proud policy of only picking players with Basque roots or training.<\/span><\/p>\n It’s obviously quite a restrictive recruitment strategy. The Basque Country may be made up of seven historic provinces that stretch from the north of Spain into the south of France but they account for just over three million people in total. <\/span><\/p>\n Athletic, though, make the absolute most of the talent at their disposal, by investing heavily in grassroots football. They also carefully cultivate the deep bond that already exists between Bilbao and its football team. <\/span>As defender Dani Vivian told <\/span>The Guardian<\/em><\/i>, “It’s like you don’t choose to be an Athletic fan; you’re born with it. <\/span><\/p>\n “For us, it’s not just the recent history, not just sport, but the way the club treats its people, how it reaches them. It’s a very special way of being, that very few clubs can create that.”<\/span><\/p>\n Consequently, while the club has a relatively small catchment area, the net result is a squad composed of the same values, pride and passion. <\/span><\/p>\n Athletic thus becomes, “a way of life”, <\/span>as legendary winger Julen Guerrero put it<\/span>, for every single player lucky enough to represent the club and their own people.<\/span><\/p>\n “It’s very deeply rooted, there in the way we work with our academy, in our ideology,” <\/span>Vivian explained.<\/span> “There’s an identification we all share in the dressing room: that definitely helps us compete.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Athletic Club are truly the pride of Bilbao. Even locals who don’t follow football support…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25527\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}