List of Athletic Bilbao players

This article is about Athletic players with at least 100 appearances. For all Athletic players with a Wikipedia article, see Category:Athletic Bilbao footballers.
Joseba Etxeberria is ranked 5th for appearances and 18th for goals, as of 2024.

Athletic Bilbao is an association football club based in Bilbao, in Biscay in the Basque Country of Spain. The club was a founder member of the Spanish league, better known as La Liga, in 1928, and has won the league championship eight times. As of 2012, Athletic has played for 82 years in the Primera División, the top tier of Spanish football, and is one of only three clubs, the others being Real Madrid and Barcelona, never to have been relegated from La Liga.[1]

The club is known for its policy of recruiting only players from the greater Basque Country, a region which includes Labourd, Soule and Lower Navarre in France as well as the Spanish provinces of Biscay, Guipúzcoa, Álava and Navarre. This policy, which for many years applied both to signings from other clubs and to youngsters admitted to the club's academy, has in recent years become more flexible, so that players whose career developed in the youth system of other clubs in the region are now acceptable, irrespective of their country of birth.[2][3][4]

Athletic won the Copa del Rey three times between 1914 and 1916. The team of that period included the prolific goalscorer Rafael "Pichichi" Moreno; he scored the first goal in the San Mamés Stadium on 21 August 1913, scored a hat-trick in the 1915 Copa del Rey final, and his 89 games for the club produced a total of 78 goals.[5][6] Since 1953, the top scorer in La Liga each season has been awarded the Pichichi Trophy, named in his honour.[7]

On 29 September 1940, Telmo Zarra played his first league match for the club. During his time at Athletic, he won six Pichichi awards, a league record, and helped the club achieve a league championship and five Copa del Rey trophies. He retired in 1955, having played 352 matches and scored 333 goals.[8][9] Since 2006, the annual Zarra Trophy is awarded to the highest goalscorer of Spanish nationality in La Liga. Joseba Etxeberria, who joined Athletic from Real Sociedad in 1995 for a record transfer fee of €3 million,[10] is the player with the most appearances for the club in the last 30 years. He signed a one-year extension to his contract in 2009 in which he agreed to play the 2009–10 season unpaid in the hope of reaching 500 games before he retired;[11] he finished the season (and his professional career) on 514.

  1. ^ "Athletic Club records". Athletic Bilbao. Archived from the original on 14 February 2010. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  2. ^ "Official Site: The Club". Athletic Bilbao. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  3. ^ "Official Site:History 1973–1998". Athletic Bilbao. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  4. ^ Mondal, Subhankar (12 May 2009). "Spanish Inquisition: Athletic Bilbao – Football's Last Romantics". Goal.com. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  5. ^ "The Cathedral". Athletic Bilbao. Retrieved 25 May 2010.
  6. ^ "Official Site: Rafael "Pichichi" Moreno". Athletic Bilbao. Retrieved 4 May 2010.
  7. ^ "Jugadores míticos han ganado un premio que cumple 50 años" (in Spanish). terra. 17 February 2003. Retrieved 18 April 2010.
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Zarra was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference spantops was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Ball, Phill (2003). Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football. WSC Books Limited. p. 37. ISBN 0-9540134-6-8.
  11. ^ "Etxeberria will play for nothing". BBC News. 2 October 2008. Retrieved 23 March 2010.