BILBAO, Spain -- An Athletic Bilbao employee is showing me around the club's legendary San Mames stadium. A proper kit for an old football club, isn’t it? (France, as it happens, is dismissed entirely. The allegations range from ignorance (understandable) to some form of soccer-based cultural imperialism (a bit of a stretch, if I’m honest).The roots of that identity are well documented. I needed to see what inspired so many generations to fall in love with this club over and over again. Athletic is the rare team in elite soccer that refuses to take advantage of the globalization that has transformed the game — mostly for better, occasionally for worse — in the last two decades or so; it adheres to a strict policy of fielding only players born or raised in the Basque regions of Spain and France.That’s all for this week. They’re professional 1-0 win means they’ve now gone four games unbeaten in the league. It helps that the club has the financial strength to resist all but the most lucrative offers for its stars, enabling it to keep its squad together.Modern soccer conditions its fans to think in a very specific way.
The club reportedly felt Marcos Asensio did not quite fit the bill and turned down the chance to bring him into their ranks as a teenager. The span of reactions was surprising: some enjoying sport, live and fresh and new; some struggling with the eeriness of the empty stadium; some so bored that they could not bear to watch more than a few minutes.Was that, though, as it was assumed to be, because of the absence of fans? But this particular final has a chance to be even more special. Athletic is reliant on its own youth academy, and on its ability to pluck players from a handful of other teams in the region: Real Sociedad in San Sebastián, Osasuna in Pamplona and, in recent years, Eibar. Of course, there are times when San Mamés, the club’s stadium, will roar its disapproval. He could never, really, say no, not even after he was sold for the second time, reduced to tears at the thought of having to leave yet again. The host are 5.5 to win, the visitors 1.6 and a draw is 4.05. Keep safe.It has always seemed odd, then, that so many fans — and players and coaches and pundits and journalists — regard themselves as devotees of one league in particular.
But what matters, deep down, is that people know what you’re talking about.There is no argument over which of those names is correct. Athletic Bilbao host Real Madrid this weekend, with the league leaders looking unstoppable at the moment. Change will not be so easy to effect in an altered marketplace, and problems will have to be solved, at times, by things other than cash.The approaches are different, of course, but the outcomes are broadly the same. Clubs will have to spend less, in the short term, and spend better to succeed. To an English-speaking audience, Athletic Bilbao is much more instantly familiar than Athletic Club; Sporting Lisbon evokes a clearer image than just “Sporting.”There are, as everyone knows, whole oceans between the soccer that is played in the Premier League and that which is offered by, for example, Serie A. Bilbao is a wonderful place and Athletic has a fascinating history. For everyone else, it is measured in the league table, an annual review held every weekend. This is not a hyperbole. This is an emblem that links the prestige of a 19th-century essence with the current pride of one of the most successful teams in Spain. Would they have had the same reaction had the stadium been full? Success, at Athletic, is in doing as well as a neighborhood team that has to take on the world can do. Do you like getting emails? Even after the rule of Francisco Franco, Basque people were still deemed inferior which led to violence and forms of terrorism. And one programming note: Marcus Rashford features in this week’s Set Piece Menu, too.But written into the unspoken contract between Athletic and its fans is the tacit acceptance that there will be fallow years. The same thing happens when you write about Sporting Lisbon — actually titled Sporting Clube de Portugal — and, occasionally, Inter Milan — properly called Internazionale — too.If you are enjoying this newsletter every Friday, please pass it on to a friend (or four) and tell them to sign up at nytimes.com/rory.In the last few years, it’s got to the stage where we could probably add using Red Star Belgrade instead of Crvena Zvezda to that list. You will, very occasionally, see references to Arsenal London, too. He gave all of his stars a rest on the weekend for the match against Real Betis. They also place great importance in developing local players through their cantera (youth systems), and were among the last major clubs to adopt a commercial sponsor logo on their jerseys (Athletic doing so in 2008 and Barcelona three years later). But perhaps their most significant conquest — they’ve never been relegated in their 120-plus year history.
This is the colorful tale of Athletic Club, a one-of-a-kind team located in Northern Spain — Basque Country.On the way, perhaps something of a mystical feeling might come over you.