On Saturday, the traditional Basque club wants to finally win a major title again in the Spanish Cup final. The story of a football-crazy city – and its legendary barge.
The Bilbao fans want nothing more: the “Gabarra”, the ship from 1984, should finally float again.
Athletic Bilbao
Bilbao, on a May day in 1984. It’s a hard time in the Basque Country, the old industries are dying, a flood has devastated the city, heroin is contaminating the youth. ETA terror and repression poison politics.
But over a million people have gathered on the banks of the river, which stretches almost 20 kilometers from the sea through the suburbs to the city center. They are cheering on the Athletic Bilbao team, who have just won the league and cup double. To celebrate, the team sails along the fjord on a blue barge belonging to the harbor authority, past chimneys and blast furnaces, escorted by countless other ships.
Bilbao in April 2024, easygoing and prosperous. Nowhere in Spain is the prosperity and quality of life as high as in the Basque Country. Its capital has rid itself of industrial pollution so successfully that the international term “Bilbao effect” has been coined. Urbanists use it to describe how star architecture and the resulting pull in culture and science can reverse decline.
Bilbao reinvented itself: through the Guggenheim Museum by Frank J. Gehry, a metro by Norman Foster and finally through the construction of the new San Mamés stadium. Centrally located, a large video screen in its outer shell announces like a billboard what’s going on in the city and at its favorite child, the Athletic Club.
Of course, everyone knows that these days. Before the Spanish Cup final on Saturday against RCD Mallorca, the club colors are omnipresent in the city: on the Licenciado Poza nightlife street, an Athletic flag hangs in the supermarket entrance, a garage door is painted red and white, the bakery sells red and white packets of chips, In the bar, the water is served in Athletic bottles, and there is even a mannequin in the club jersey in the car dealership. The anticipation grows every day, as does the nervousness. The “Gabarra” should finally be let off the leash: the blue barge from back then.
The mythical celebration of 1984.
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It is still lying under the San Mamés in front of the museum in the city harbor. The “Gabarra” is freshly painted and has had a long time to make itself look pretty. While Bilbao became a hotspot, she waited; While the city is now hardly missing anything, it symbolizes a longing that has become an obsession. Athletic hasn’t won a major title since May 1984.
It is an almost unbearable situation for Spain’s traditional club par excellence. Athletic, founded in 1898 with an English name as a tribute to the footballing pioneers of the river meadows, was once so dominant that it shaped the football language in the kingdom. The word “alirón,” for example, which describes the jubilation of a newly crowned champion, comes from the mines of Bilbao, where the workers reported an iron discovery to their British bosses with similar euphoria: “all iron.” To this day, a top scorer in Spanish sport is called “Pichichi” – after Athletic’s star striker of the 1910s – and the best home scorer is awarded the “Zarra” trophy, named after Athletic’s goalgetter of the 1940s and 1950s.
Considered one of the greatest talents in Spanish football: Athletic wing Nico Williams.
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Like Real and Barça, Athletic Bilbao has never been relegated
Athletic has won the cup 23 times and the championship 8 times. In 96 years, the club has never been relegated from the Primera División – something only Real Madrid and FC Barcelona have achieved. The club managed all of this despite, or perhaps because of, the policy that had been in place since 1912 of only competing with Basques – opinions on this point always differ.
At the last general meeting there was a debate until late into the night about whether the children of Basques abroad should also be admitted. But the existing practice remains that only those who were born or trained as footballers in the Basque parts of Spain and France or in the semi-Basque region of Navarre can play for Athletic.
In the club they call voluntary self-restraint “the model” or “the philosophy”. In view of the oversaturation of globalization in football, it is currently seen as exemplary than ever. This is as positively timely as the students who sit at small wooden tables in front of the bars in the city center in the afternoon and play cards instead of staring at their cell phones. And so fitting for an area that is booming in business, gastronomy, tourism and yet still boasts an archaic mysticism, between the mostly fog-shrouded mountains of its small, rainy country with its very own sports such as the ubiquitous pelota, in which the players have a ball Smash against a concrete wall with your bat or your bare hand.
In the Park of Mercy not far from San Mamés, the tree trunks are decorated with crochet in the club’s colors, a generational project of the church: “No matter how old you are, braid in red and white!” is there for explanation. Athletic as a meeting place – that’s how they see their club, and that’s why on that May day in 1984 there were as many people on the banks as the population of Bilbao’s entire province of Biscay. Even in the most tense moments of terror and separatism, the club was always seen as the one religion that everyone could agree on, the “Cathedral” of San Mamés as their temple, and the games therein as a kind of holy communion.
A church generational project: In the Park of Mercy not far from San Mamés, the tree trunks are decorated with crochet in Athletics club colors.
fhp./NZZ
Athletic belongs to everyone – that’s how the professionals see it too. “As boys, everyone here dreams of being part of something like this,” said Iñaki Williams on the evening of reaching the final after a triumphant 3-0 win against Atlético Madrid: “It’s a great pride to represent my city’s team and that Club I love.” Williams, the son of Ghanaian immigrants, was given his very Basque first name because of the priest Iñaki, who took the refugee family under his wing and often took the child with him to Athletic’s training ground.
The triumphant 2024 Cup semi-final: Athletic Bilbao plays exhilaratingly – and defeats Atlético Madrid 3-0.
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Today he and his younger brother Nico, 21, form the star duo in the fanion team’s attack. Both could have accepted one of the offers from top international clubs long ago. But Iñaki, 29, has been loyal to Bilbao his entire career, and Nico just extended his contract until 2027. His mission: “I want to see the ‘Gabarra’.”
In the championship, Valverde’s team is fighting for a place in the Champions League
The chances are better than ever since May 1984. In the third term of the experienced coach Ernesto Valverde, Athletic has an inspiring team that is fighting for a place in the Champions League in the championship. The final opponent Mallorca, on the other hand, is a candidate for relegation. Not the caliber of record holders Barcelona, against whom Athletic lost four cup finals in the last 15 years, or of Atlético and Real Sociedad, the other conquerors since 1984. Athletic have only won two Spanish Super Cups since then. The first time in 2015 there were even calls in some places to climb the “Gabarra”, the desperation is now so great. But most people considered the occasion too puny for such a sacred act.
Now around 50,000 fans will travel to the final location in Seville, the rest can watch the final on a big screen in San Mamés or in one of the many pubs. In the “Zaharra” bar, for example, where club scarves hang on the wine shelves and framed photos of games from the old San Mamés on the walls, where the beer is served from red and white taps and the bartender Javi tells us that an Athletic player lives diagonally across the street and someone else often goes for a walk here with his girlfriend. “Normal people like you and me, except they play football and I make Kalimotxos,” the national drink of the youth, red wine with cola.
Javi is 41 years old and has been an Athletic member since he was four. He knows all the old pictures, all the old stories. But he has never consciously seen Athletic win anything. Like the whole town, he is nervous. And he knows what he wants to do when a lifelong dream comes true on Saturday: “Then I’ll personally let the ‘Gabarra’ off the leash.”
Ready for the next mission: the “Gabarra” in the port of Bilbao, freshly painted.
fhp./NZZ
