Juan Villoro, ambassador for July

Athletic Club has appointed the prestigious Mexican writer Juan Villoro as its ambassador for the month of July. Villoro, a great admirer of Athletic Club, will receive his 125th anniversary badge in his home country, coinciding with the red and white team's pre-season tour of Mexico. Club Necaxa, of which Villoro is a fan, celebrates its centenary by facing Athletic on 19 July at the Victoria stadium in Aguascalientes, and it is undoubtedly the perfect occasion to publicly honour the Mexican novelist.

The Club has appointed Juan Villoro as July ambassador for being one of the internationally renowned writers who best approaches the world of football from a cultural perspective and, of course, in recognition of his countless expressions of sympathy and admiration for Athletic Club.  Juan Villoro thus joins Jon Rahm, Jokin Altuna, Honey Tahljieh, Thomas Hittzlsperger, Marino Lejarreta and Joane Somarriba (representing Basque fans and cycling) and María Arthuer in the list of Athletic Club's 125th anniversary ambassadors.

In this commendable effort to build bridges between culture and football that Juan Villoro has developed throughout his career, there has been no lack of collaboration with Athletic Club's cultural project. Villoro participated for the first time in "Letters and Football" in 2010 and visited us again as a speaker at "Thinking Football Film Festival" in 2021. Now, on the occasion of his appointment as ambassador, the Club had the opportunity to hear his comments at the Madrid Book Fair, where he once again made clear his admiration for Athletic: "It's a team that dazzles anyone who knows it".

Taking as a reference his own wife, with whom he visited Bilbao a few years ago and who became an Athletic fan at heart, Villoro maintains "that people convert to Athletic, because when you witness the miracle, you believe that things are possible, even though adversity seems to say the opposite". Sentimentally linked to Athletic Club by figures such as Iribar and by the important mark left by the Basques of the Euzkadi national team who stayed in Mexico, Villoro considers "very important to recognise Athletic's long trajectory", highlighting that "it has sought the difficult path of conserving the essences, of conserving the values and, for this reason, when it wins, which it does (it is not a team that does not achieve this either), it is all the more worthwhile".

About Juan Villoro

Juan Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) is one of the most important Spanish-language writers in the world. He has been a professor at UNAM and a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Pompeu Fabra Universities in Barcelona, as well as at the New Journalism Foundation, created by Gabriel García Márquez. He has lectured at the Sorbonne, Princeton, Brown, La Sapienza, Complutense, Humboldt, Tokyo, Cambridge and Houston universities, among others.

He is a columnist for Reforma (Mexico) and has written for international media such as The New York Times (USA), El País (Spain) and El Mercurio (Chile), among others. Professor, lecturer and translator, Villoro is the author of more than thirty books in practically all genres: novels, essays, chronicles, theatre, children's literature, short stories and scripts for radio, cinema, theatre and television. His juvenile novel "El libro salvaje" has sold more than a million copies worldwide. In his latest book, 'La figura del mundo', he rescues the memory of his father, the Catalan philosopher Luis Villoro.