Athletic Club, the main character on the CIES Atlas

The Demographic Atlas produced by the prestigious Swiss research centre CIES Football Observatory has revealed that Athletic were the only club among Europe’s ‘big five’ leagues to use only homegrown players during the 2020-21 season. As for all 31 European UEFA leagues, Denmark’s Lyngby BK are the only other team to have had no foreign players in their starting line-ups.

After Athletic (100%), Osasuna (85.3%) and Huesca (82.7%) are the LaLiga clubs that come closest to the Lions, although in their case their squads include players from all over the state.

Last month CIES published a report which showed that Athletic was the team with the highest percentage of minutes played by its youth players in Europe’s top leagues.

What’s more, the 2020-21 CIES Demographic Atlas also indicates that Athletic, with an average age of 27.1 years, is the fifth youngest club in terms of players employed during the last LaLiga campaign.

In the “Stability” section CIES analyses the average number of months players spent with the first team during the 2020-21 season. In this ranking, Athletic comes third place in LaLiga (48 months), behind only Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. With all 31 European leagues included, Athletic is seventh behind Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, FC Barcelona, CSKA Moscow, Burnley FC and Tottenham Hotspur.

Curiously, the report also analyses the height of the different players used by European clubs during their respective league competitions. Athletic, with an average height of 180.1 cm, is 12th in the LaLiga ranking and is mid-table in the continental ranking, which is headed by Germany’s FC Union Berlin (186.6 cm), while Beitar Jerusalem of Isreal, with an average height of 177.7 cm, props up the table at the bottom.