“Here, each village was its own universe, cut off from everywhere,” says Bernardo Atxaga. “San Sebastian is only a short drive away these days, but back then it was like another world.”
Atxaga is one of the Basque Country’s most renowned literary figures and a friend and neighbour of the family of West Ham United head coach Julen Lopetegui.
He is speaking to The Athletic at a table in the Iturri Ondo (‘by the fountain’) bar on the main square in the town of Asteasu, where he and Lopetegui, 57, grew up, now a 40-minute drive from the northern Spanish city of San Sebastian. It is part of the Basque Country, a region of northern Spain on the border with France of three million inhabitants that share linguistic, historical and cultural ties.
Atxaga offers a tour — across the paved stone square with its pretty splashing fountain, past the 18th-century town hall with its arched gallery, and down winding cobbled streets that are shaded from the mid-morning sun. Just around the corner is the Lopetegui family house, a typical brick dwelling that has been significantly expanded and modernised in recent decades.
Asteasu’s main square (Dermot Corrigan/The Athletic)
When the former Spain, Real Madrid, Sevilla and Wolverhampton Wanderers manager was a boy, the home included a garage storing buses the family owned and stalls for pigs raised for the menu of the restaurant the family ran.
The Lopeteguis have long been important figures in this corner of the Basque Country, where local sports have traditionally been much more important than football.
“I’ve very few memories of any football final, but all the radios would be on for the pelota finals,” Atxaga says. “All the kids here, the most athletic ones, went for pelota vasca. It was a game central to life here. Julen played it and his brother Joxean was a champion.”
Pelota vasca is a traditional court sport played using your hand or a woven basket to direct the ball. Also known as jai alai, it was and is a professional sport in the Basque Country. In 1986, Joxean Lopetegui won gold in the super-fast version called ‘remonte’.
Further back, the brothers’ father, Jose Antonio, was a sports star, a champion of another traditional Basque sport called harri-jasotze (lifting stones). Under the name Aguerre II, during a three-decade career that began in the 1940s, he set records that still stand today.
“Lifting stones was something enormous here, key to everything,” says Atxaga. “Aguerre II was unique, not just for his strength, but his speed, it was something electric. He could lift a stone of 100 kilos 50 times in a minute. Julen and Joxean inherited both things: strength and dynamism.”
Lopetegui’s father was a champion stone lifter back in the 1950s, famous throughout Spain – little Julen is standing by his side pic.twitter.com/M0xWXYzb5E
— Dermot Corrigan (@dermotmcorrigan) October 28, 2018
Football first grabbed the attention of the village in the mid-20th century via cards packaged with chocolates made down by the coast in Antiguoko, then an industrial suburb of San Sebastian. A sign of Asteasu opening up to the world was Julen going to secondary school in San Sebastian in the 1970s.
There he started watching Real Sociedad play at their old Atotxa stadium. By the time La Real won back-to-back La Liga titles in 1981 and 1982, he was a goalkeeper in their youth ranks.
After starring against Real Madrid in the 1985 youth Copa del Rey and seeing his opportunity to become a starter in Real Sociedad’s first team blocked by Spain’s No 1, Luis Arconada, Julen and his father accepted an offer to join Madrid’s Castilla youth team, where he could launch his professional career.
The stroll around today’s Asteasu, population 1,500, shows little sign of the bustle of the modern world. There are lots of carefully restored gleaming white houses, the beautiful brick 14th-century San Pedro church, nicely manicured gardens and sheep avoiding the sun by lying in the shade.
On a roundabout near the house where Lopetegui’s father, now 93, lives, flies the Basque ‘Ikurrina’ flag, with its white and green crosses on a red field. This is a reminder of the struggle against central Spain, which included the Basque terrorist group ETA’s (the initials for ‘Basque homeland and Liberty’ in the Basque language) campaign of violence from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Julen is proud of his eight Basque surnames: Lopetegui, Agote, Aranguren, Arteaga, Eizmendi, Kalparsoro, Usabiaga and Ugartemendia, inherited from his great grandparents. Still, representing Real Madrid or being Spain national coach from 2016 to 2018 was never an issue in the village, says Atxaga, who has won Spain’s national literature prize (2019) and the equivalent Basque version (2014): “There will always be someone who makes a comment, but it was never a problem.”
Behind the town hall is a sculpture showing ‘segalaris’, another traditional Basque sport involving cutting of hay, with bets often made on who could do it fastest. The artist is Mikel Valverde, who has illustrated many of Atxaga’s books. Valverde is the brother of Athletic Bilbao coach Ernesto, another close friend of the author.
The sculpture in Asteasu depicting ‘segalaris’, the traditional Basque sport involving cutting hay (Dermot Corrigan/The Athletic)
Many of European football’s top coaches come from this area. Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, is from San Sebastian. Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola hails from Usurbil, an industrial town on San Sebastian’s outskirts, and Bayer Leverkusen’s Xabi Alonso is from Tolosa, a 30-minute drive up into the mountains. Unai Emery, of Aston Villa, comes from Fuenterrabia, an hour towards the border with France. Real Sociedad coach Imanol Alguacil is from Orio, a short trip the other way along the coastline.
All have different styles of football but a strong competitive streak. Through playing and coaching careers with many twists and turns, Lopetegui has retained family characteristics honed during his upbringing in Asteasu.
During his nine months at Wolves, his tactical nous was clear as he lifted the team clear of relegation, while his stubborn character was evident when differences over transfers saw him resign five days before the 2023-24 season began.
Asteasu’s modern pelota court (Dermot Corrigan/The Athletic)
As The Athletic finishes the tour by the town’s new modern Pelota Vasca court, Atxaga says he has not asked Lopetegui about such decisions. But a drive to succeed in every sport has always been present in Asteasu.
“It was always important to win,” he says. “It’s not the best Basque attribute, for me, but here competition is taken to the extreme. There was always a masculine thing, to show that you were a winner.”
(Top photo: Dermot Corrigan/Getty Images)
