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Athletic Bilbao's success despite using only local players

The Financial Times Weekend Magazine had a big feature article by Murad Ahmed on the Athletic Club of Bilbao. For more than a century, only those born or raised in the Basque Country are eligible to play for the club, the only one in top flight European football to restrict itself to local players.

Nevertheless, the club are one of Spain's most successful, having won the league eight times. Over the past decade they have performed well enough to qualify for European competition on seven occasions, reaching the Europa League final in 2012.

They are one of La Liga's wealthiest clubs with revenues of €134m in the 2017/18 season, almost double what they earned five years earlier. However, the move from individual to collective negotiation of TV contracts does not benefit them. Previously, top Spanish sides earned eight times those at the bottom of La Liga. That ratio has become closer to 4:1, allowing lesser teams to afford better players.

Athletic club could be seen as an example of that ugly term 'glocalisation', the global-local nexus. One reaction to globalisation is to strengthen regional identities.

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