Johan Huizinga was right: play is central to life. In his seminal and much-praised Homo Ludens, first published in 1938, Huizinga argued that play had an essential role in the development of civilization. To understand humanity in any rounded sense, it had to be taken into account. And of course, one key latter-day manifestation of play was the rise of organized sports from the nineteenth century on. It is thus surprising that until relatively recently mass sport was not thought an appropriate topic of research for serious social scientists. The attitude seemed to be that nothing so enjoyable could be worthy of sustained analysis. From the 1990s on, however, a belated and continuing series of studies into the ever-more prominent phenomenon that is modern sport has begun to dispel that prejudice. Since the attitude, however, still lingers and since the roles of mass sport in the development of modern Basque society have been significant, an aim of this chapter is to unravel the socio-political contexts of a very particular and nationally famous Basque football team, one whose sense of identity is central in the hearts of minds of its supporters: Athletic Club de Bilbao.

This chapter, however, also has an even more important aim: to understand, via the study of local football, how the Basques have constructed their own version of the new. As stated earlier, nationalists may laud both certain splendid moments of Basque history and distinctively Basque variants of modern Western culture.