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The Basque Invasion
Phil Ball - 13th August 2026
How many Basques can you fit into an EPL? The answer is a finite number -so let’s look at the percentages, shall we? For the 2026-2027 season there will be 20% of them making up the coaching body of the Premier’s 20 sides, with the guilty partners well known. They are Mikel Arteta, Unai Emery, Andoni
Iraola and Xabi Alonso, with the latter joining the party this summer to sort out the chaps at Chelsea. This was also true of the previous season, until Julen Lopetegui was relieved of his burden at West Ham.
The Basque region of northern Spain, with a population of 2.2 million (3 million if you take in northern Navarre and the French bits) is the 4th smallest of the 17 autonomous regions that make up Spain’s state – a statistic which rather suggests they’re punching above their weight in the EPL. But that’s just for starters. The four coaches named above (and Lopetegui) all hail from an even smaller sub-region of the BC, the province called Gipuzkoa to the east. That’s where Real Sociedad play, and its population (700,000) and its square miles (760) make it roughly the size of Warwickshire. How many Premier League managers have come from that neck of the woods? Don’t look it up – the answer’s zero. We’ll give them Shakespeare, but as a creative midfielder I never rated him.
It gets weirder. Three of these four coaches – that’s minus the Emery factor – played in the same neighbourhood team, called ‘Antiguoko’. You’ve probably read about this team by now, since every labouring journo in the wild west has recently done a piece on them, but many years ago yours truly introduced them to the world via the magazine Four-Four-Two – because I live quite close to their strange little ground and my son played for them – and so I guess I could modestly offer up a few insights. So I’ll offer you a few more here for free, because it’s an odd story, sending its dramatis personae to old England and already making a league winner of one of them, Mikel Arteta. And just in case you didn’t know, Arteta’s 2025 signing, Martin Zubimendi, also played for Antiguoko. Perhaps everyone did, in another space-time continuum? Ask Gemini. It knows. It also knows that Arteta and Alonso went to school together (the school’s called ‘Ekintza’ – which means ‘action’ in Basque). Not many of those types of management rivalries in the EPL.
Antiguoko were founded in 1982, spookily the year that the Arteta-Alonso-Iraola triptych was born, and up to their subsequent development with the club, nobody took much notice. Arteta went first, spotted by Barcelona in 1997, followed by Alonso who was signed by Real Sociedad but loaned back to the club to keep him under the radar, because the club were then affiliated to Athletic – as they are at the time of writing. Whisper it in quiet corners of Gipuzkoa, but Alonso used to be whisked by taxi after school over to Bilbao (90 kms) to train with the enemy until his father Periko – ex Real Sociedad and Barcelona, banned Bilbao from signing him. That’s an exclusive for Aficionados. Never previously revealed. Bilbao’s chief scout at the time, José Mari Amorrortu, went along to watch this emerging youth force over in Gipuzkoa and was told that Alonso was not available. Staying to watch a game, he asked who the right full-back was. ‘Iraola’ came the reply. Nobody had noticed him, up to that point – but Amorrortu had a good eye (he went on to manage Athletic and Sociedad) and asked him over to train. The rest, as they say....and the quiet but solid Iraola has ended up succeeding a line of greats at Anfield. The only mistake he ever made was not playing for Real Sociedad – but I’m biased, of course.
This was in 1999, just after Antiguoko had stunned the Spanish football scene by getting to the national youth championship final, beating a host of pro clubs on the way, and then beating the Real Madrid of a young Iker Casillas 4-2 in the final, sending the neighbourhood outfit into hyperspace. I remember it well, and it caused a sort of generalised ‘wtf?’ in La Liga circles. Antiguoko would never be the same again, and by the time they came in for my own son ten years later, they’d garnered such a reputation that I felt that he was being signed by Man Utd. They still produce basketfuls of pros, and it’s an interesting story – but that first main cohort, with three of them the best of mates, will now be slugging it out in the EPL, with Emery, from the border town of Hondarribia, in the mix with them. They all speak Basque, they all wince at being called ‘Spaniards’, but that’s the way the British press refer to them, as a term of convenience. The problem with that resides not just in the identity issue but also in the fact that it bypasses the essence of what they are – of what has caused this bizarre confluence of Gipuzkoa to not only invade the EPL, but to possibly move it forward, to further influence its development after the Catalan stamp of Pep Guardiola.
What’s the explanation? Something in the water? Possibly. When the Basques themselves are asked this question, they tend to trot out the cultural trope that they are hard-working, serious sorts (which they are) and that the tight-knit nature of Basque society demands a certain team-oriented spirit, a suppression of the individual for the good of the collective. It sounds like a happier form of communism, but it does seem to work. The Basques are proud and ludicrously competitive – which also goes some way towards explaining Athletic Club’s own stubborn resistance to relegation, now two years short of a century. They’re a tough lot, and the fact that they don’t suffer fools gladly is most easily observable in Arteta. Emery is almost insanely driven, Alonso smart and slightly harder to read, Iraola the most relaxed of the four, but driven nonetheless. Whatever the truth, it remains one of football’s strangest stories – that three of the four men literally grew up within a mile of each other in San Sebastián, and that the other grew up 13 miles down the road. They certainly share a certain vision, borne of a certain time, place and way of thinking. The fact that is has coalesced in this way, 30 years on, is kind of magical. I can’t wait to see what happens.
Phil Ball will be accompanying us on The Basque Way tour where we will discover the heritage and culture of this unique football region. More information on this tour please please click here
Image credits above;
Mikel Arteta - Prime Video AU & NZ, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Andoni Iraola - AFC Bournemouth, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Xabi Alonso - Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
'The Basque Invasion' is an AI illustration