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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
The Last Genuine Local Team: Athletic Bilbao Surviving in the Spanish League - Page 1
by Jonathan Shulman
A regular season NHL game in Montreal is suspended for twenty minutes when local protestors manage to enter the court and tie themselves to one of the goals. They are carrying signs calling for Quebec’s separation from Canada and the release of local Quebecer terrorist suspects. Naturally, this incident comes as no surprise, since political protest is common in hockey games. In fact, the home team, the Montreal Canadiens, is associated with the region’s separatist movement and only uses Quebecer players in its squad.
This description surely sounds ludicrous. Professional sports have little to do with politics in Canadian reality, especially when it concerns sensitive issues such as the division of Canada. In general, sports hardly ever serve as a political tool in North America (aside perhaps from issues of racism, such as Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s ban on African-American players). Moreover, the mere thought of a team only employing players from a certain ethnic background is inconceivable; not only is such a policy racially discriminatory by itself, it is also bound to be disastrous on the professional level, since the talent pool for such a team is incredibly small. However, such a situation does exist in the professional sports scene, and not in a society that can conveniently be dismissed as fundamentalist or conservative by a patronizing outsider. It happens in Western Europe, and in the world’s most popular sport: soccer.
Athletic Club is the soccer team of Bilbao, the main port city of Spain’s Basque county. The aforementioned incident, completely absurd in North American culture, did in fact take place in February 2002, when Athletic played host to Spanish Champions Real Madrid; dozens of people invaded the pitch, or playing field, carrying signs, forcing the referees to suspend the match. Again, hardly anyone was surprised. Arguably the strongest Basque symbol in the world, the club’s essence is as political as it is sportive. Therefore, calls against the Spanish government and cheers for the Basque separatist movement are often heard in the Bilbaoan San-Mamés stadium. Indeed, as soccer researchers Vic Duke and Liz Crolley point out in their book Sport, Nationalism and the State, no occasion seems more appropriate for protest than the annual home match against Franco’s favorites (35) ¾ the cocky, Real, or royal, Madridians, if they even deserve this title, for of Real’s eleven starting players, six were foreigners. Athletic, on the other hand, fielded eleven Basques, the traditional la cantera , an all Basque-squad, as it always does.
The Basques are one of Europe’s oldest peoples. Although they are formally a part of Spain, most Basques regard the Spanish people as foreigners, and so a persistent (although rather unsuccessful) nationalistic struggle for independence has taken place in this small part of the world for the last century. The link between soccer and politics in this case is evident even in the simplest chronological sense: Both Athletic Bilbao and the local nationalist movement emerged in the late 19 th century and gained popularity during and after the Spanish civil war. This is not a unique phenomenon. In many other parts of the world, sports and particularly soccer have been used as a tool to advance certain ideologies. By and large, even the worst totalitarian regimes in modern times have made it a practice to avoid soccer stadiums, which in turn became centers of political demonstrations. In the Soviet Union, for instance, the only place where one could openly express his objection to Communism was in Spartak Moscow’s ground, or stadium, a unique spot in the city that the secret police dared not enter (Kuper 46).
Similarly, sport sociologist Jeremy MacClancy applies the same principle to the Basque case. In “Nationalism at Play: The Basques of Vizcaya and Athletic Club de Bilbao,” he states that during the years of Franco’s regime, soccer “became one of the very few legal ways by which Basques could demonstrate who they were and what they were made of” (192). Moreover, the club’s relentless commitment to the Basque goal has won it “great popularity throughout the country” (186), even though and perhaps because, it was forced to give up the original name of Athletic Club: as part of his attempts to eliminate all regional, separatist elements from Spain, Franco forced all institutions to Hispanicize their names. From 1941 until Generalissimo Franco’s death in 1975, Athletic Club de Bilbao was known as Atlético Bilbao (Duke and Crolley 36, MacClancy 191). Hence, since supporting a certain club can often serve as a powerful way of expressing political ideas (the right to self-determination in this case), it is only natural that a team with such a glorified ideological history as Athletic insists on using only Basque players. Or is it?
In the contemporary European soccer market, relying strictly on local talents is practically suicidal. In fact, the use of foreign players, which today has become nothing less than a necessity, was just as acceptable in the past. Men from neighboring countries or from South America have played professionally in Europe since soccer’s first days; even the greatest players in Spanish football (soccer) history, Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo Di-Stefano, were not born in Spain, but came from Hungary and Argentina respectively. What allowed teams such as Athletic to succeed with no outside help in earlier periods, however, were the strict limits imposed on imported players: in most cases, a club could not have more than three foreigners on its squad, which of course meant that at least eight local players played in every match.
Historically, then, Athletic is one of Spain’s most successful clubs, the winner of eight national championships and twenty-three king’s cups (local competition separated from the regular league). Only two teams have bigger trophy cabinets: Real Madrid and Barcelona. When discussing recent times, however, the picture changes dramatically. Bilbao has not won any title since 1984, and is generally no longer considered to be a leading force in Spanish soccer. True, it is still one of the only clubs in Spain ever to avoid relegation, but except for one successful season in 1998, which earned the club the third place in the league, it has become quite insignificant from a pure sportive perspective. Athletic has declined so much recently simply because soccer does not operate in a void. The globalizing trend that has swept the world in the last few decades has not skipped over the world of sports. Calls for the elimination of foreign limitations were heard in Europe as early as twenty years ago, but the international federations, fearful of the chaotic implications of such a move, disregarded them at the time. The game’s highly nationalized structure was kept in place until December of 1995, when the European Union court of appeals delivered a ground breaking decision.
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