Money no substitute for great coaching
That they were capable of high tempo, thrillingly attacking football has been evident in patches since Marcelo Bielsa took over last summer. At home against PSG in the group stage of the Europa League, for instance, they were breathtaking.
They struggle to reproduce that sort of form consistently though, and even the staunchest of Bielsa’s disciples must have doubted whether his side could produce that sort of football for sustained periods against a team of the quality of United. For 180 stunning minutes, they proved they could.
That was not merely a vindication for Bielsa’s idealistic style of football, but it also called into question one of the most basic tenets of modern football: transfers.
Since at least the days of Brian Clough and probably before, it has been the orthodoxy that a good manager needs to be able to buy well. More recently, it’s taken as read that sides must have scouts all over the world, combing through the backwaters of every league from Honduras to Ghana looking for bargains.
Athletic, with their policy of signing only Basque players, give the lie to that.
Signings are such a part of the game that nobody ever stops to think about them. Transfer deadline day has replaced FA Cup third-round day as the red letter date in January, which says much for football’s lurch from romanticism to commercialism, yet Athletic spent a total of just €7.5m on players in the past year.
That they have never been relegated and continue to hang around the top half of La Liga shows just what can be achieved with astute coaching and team spirit based on a sense of loyalty and a deep connection to the values of a club.
Under Bielsa, Athletic have reached the final of the Copa del Rey, the quarter-finals of the Europa League — in which they face Schalke 04 this Thursday — and, despite a recent slump, have a reasonable chance of Champions League qualification.
That’s not to say that all transfers are a con, or even that most are, but the obsession with signings does seem a peculiar manifestation of a consumerist society that would rather spend on something new than develop what is already there.
Up to a point the transfer system can be seen as a vast mutually beneficial conspiracy: players like them because it allows them to renegotiate contracts, agents like them because without them they wouldn’t exist, fans like them because they offer excitement and the possibility of short-term fixes, the media likes them because they add to the whole soap opera of the game, managers like them because they help them plug gaps and offer the possibility of salvation (“with two or three more signings...”). Even clubs, who end up having to pay for them, like them: for smaller sides they offer a source of revenue; for bigger teams they offer a source of glamour.
Of course, the nature of Basque identity helps, both in attracting players to Athletic and in giving them a common cause to play for. It’s equally true that that must be carefully managed. Nobody these days seems to mind a Basque-only policy, but imagine the consternation if, say, Celtic instituted a policy of fielding only Glaswegian Catholics, or Hakoah reformed in Vienna and selected only Jewish players.
But you do wonder how many other clubs would benefit from focusing on local youth, supplementing with only the occasional outside transfer to plug obvious gaps.
In a sense, Barcelona are the perfect example of that, their starting line up often featuring as many as seven Catalans. Contrast say, Chelsea, whose academy, for all the money spent on it, hasn’t yielded a regular first-teamer since John Terry, who made his debut in 1998.
Athletic could, of course, suffer in the summer and see the likes of Fernando Llorente, Iker Muniain and Markel Susaeta picked off by wealthier rivals.
But the other problem, as with so much else, is football’s short-termism, its demand for instant success.
Fans, the media and clubs want success instantly or, if not success, then at least a tangible token of potential, which is all many signings actually are.
