Lions In Danger Of Extinction

Only footballers formed in Lezama or born in the Basque Country. In less than one line of text, the mother principle of the philosophy of a club born in the 19th century is shaped, under which all the history has been written, landmarks forged, legends created, goals established and sentiments born and that survives kicking and screaming daily through three centuries in which football has suffered a spectacular globalization, where first great amounts of money and later the Bosman Rule (the ruling which authorized the free trade in players within the EU and recognized them as communitarios) have finished by relegating the team of Lions to the second plane of the panorama of national football.

Already three years have passed in which Athletic Bilbao is sweating blood not to break with 108 years of history, but it is obvious that the nightmare of the second division is closer each time and if the team of El Catedral does not quickly apply the brakes to the problems arising in Lezama, this nightmare will end up becoming a crude enough reality. And finding solutions is complicated when a philosophy and tradition so strong exists, though it is obvious to all that Lezama, the principal raw materials factory of Basque football, is not going through its finest moment; and the same house that long ago saw Piru Gainza, Rafael Moreno (alias “pichichi”) or Sarabia grow into myths; saw the emergence of historic figures like Argote, Javi Clemente o Chechu Rojo and emblems like Telmo Zarra, Jose Ángel Iribar or Julen Guerrero, it seems to have lost the foundations that for decades kept the Rojiblancos at the forefront of the elite of Spanish football.

For that reason, it is necessary that Lezama emerges from its ashes, and to do this it is essential to analyze with thoroughness and from within, the problems that have caused the hen of golden eggs to stop fertilizing players of the first order. And if at the present time we find thousands of kids that have passed through the junior ranks of Athletic, but the great majority fail and don’t last more than two years in the Rojiblanco system, it causes some questions to arise; what is the problem of the cantera? Why is there so little continuity? Is it really that the kids selected every year do not reach the expected heights? Or is it a question of “merchandising”?

According to Koldo Asua, coordinator of the Athletic youth system, whose job is supervising the daily work of all the youth teams, “Lezama continues to produce the players that once emerged from this same cantera, what has happened is that football has globalized, and other schools have been created that develop footballers as a serious project; to this we must also add, the advances in the science of physical preparation, and also the fact that the Basque Country is the region of Spain with the lowest birth rate."