Forum | Saints and Athletic Bilbao by dirk_doone

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Saints and Athletic Bilbao 16:45 - Apr 20 with 2014 views

Talking about 2 of our foreign players, Raimundo Perez Lezama and Sabino Barinaga, in another thread, got me thinking about the links between Saints and our sister club in the Basque country, Athletic Bilbao, which go back a long way. This is largely a copy and paste job and there are links to the sources below:

"In the late 1890s, the Spanish city of Bilbao was a powerful industrial area that attracted many migrant workers, amongst them shipyard workers from Southampton. The coastal locations of the two cities meant that they had shared trade links over the course of the 19th century, and so the migration of Southampton workers to Bilbao was a natural next step.

Having been founded a decade earlier in 1885, Southampton FC (or St. Mary’s Y.M.A. as they were known then) had already built up a sizeable local following on their way to winning three Southern League championships on the trot between 1897 and 1899. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that supporters of Southampton would introduce football to their new communities on the north coast of Spain.

These workers founded a football club that would eventually become known as Athletic Club de Bilbao, after merging with another local club called Bizcaya in 1903.

As a major port city, Bilbao very much mirrors Southampton, geographically as well as in industry and importance. The two cities’ football clubs also play in red-and-white stripes and black shorts. This is not a coincidence.

Athletic’s original strip was white, then blue-and-white halves before 1909, when Bilbao student Juan Elorduy picked up 50 shirts in Southampton when catching the ship home. The colours are the same as the City of Bilbao’s flag. The club started using its now-familiar colours in 1910. The surplus Southampton shirts from Elorduy’s haul were sent to Athletic’s Madrid youth brand — the future AtlÃ©tico Madrid - so they too adopted Saints' colours.

During the Spanish Civil War, it was Southampton which provided the greatest offer of asylum to their displaced Basque friends, providing more campsites for the children than any other UK city. Yet their support of the Basque country during the civil war years did not end there.

Among the volunteers who went to fight in Spain were a group of men from Southampton, four of whom died in separate battles between 1936 and 1938 as they fought to defend democracy and freedom of speech. There is a plaque in Southampton dedicated to their memory.

Fourteen-year-old Raimundo Perez Lezama and Sabino Barinaga Alberdi were among 4,000 refugee Basque children who sailed from Santurce in Northern Spain on the SS Habana in May 1937 to escape the civil war.

The steamship was old, but it managed to evade the blockade of Bilbao — instigated by General Franco’s Nationalists in order to starve the automatous Basque region into submission — to reach Southampton 48 hours later.

The two young Spaniards duly attended local schools while living at Nazareth House in Hill Lane. Having one day walked into the nearby Dell to watch the professionals train, the then Saints manager, Tom Parker, threw them a ball. He soon noted both possessed no little footballing ability and invited them to join the clubs newly introduced ‘B’ side, under the managership of Toby Keleher.

Perez, an agile goalkeeper did well during his first season, playing in 18 league and cup games, while the tall Barinaga playing up front, in the same number of games, excelled, notching up an incredible 62 goals, an average in excess of a hat-trick per game. What was even more impressive was the fact he had never kicked a football before coming to England.

After leaving Saints, Lezema went on to play 197 games for Athletic Bilbao and was capped by Spain while Barinaga scored 70 goals in 149 games for Real Madrid. "

Then, of course, of all the teams we could get drawn against, we got them in the UEFA Cup in 1971. I was at the Dell to see us beat Bilbao 2-1, with goals from Jenkins and Channon, but was not one of the fans who flew over there for the return leg, which we lost.

Since then, Athletic Bilbao have been invited over to play 2 friendlies at St Mary's and I was there for the last one, in August 2016, which we won 1-0..

They still love us over there for founding their football club and for taking care of thousands of their refugee children during the war.

https://medium.com/@nickharland11/the-unlikely-bond-between-bilbao-and-southampt

https://outsidewrite.co.uk/clubs-got-colours-2-athletic-bilbao/

https://www.southamptonfc.com/news/2017-04-21/southampton-refugee-footballers-fe

[Post edited 20 Apr 2020 18:22]

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Saints and Athletic Bilbao on 19:55 - Apr 20 with 1892 views

djsaint

Great link between the clubs!
It's also a great city for anyone who hasn't been, visited the old Stadium but the new looks just fantastic.
Great that they also chose Le Tissier for their inaugural 'One Club Man' award, there is videos of it on the web, worth a little watch.