Bilbao: A career of quiet steel, not noise
Juan Carlos Bilbao, 37, looks back on a 21-year career that took him from San Sebastián to Rotterdam, with the medals to prove he was more than a journeyman.
The café in Madrid is quiet, the kind of place where a man can talk without raising his voice. Juan Carlos Bilbao, out of the game since last season, orders a cortado and settles into a chair that has seen better days. He is 37, but the eyes are older.
“People think you retire and you miss the noise,” he says. “I miss the dressing room. The noise I can live without.”
Bilbao’s playing days ended after the 2062/63 season with Sparta Rotterdam. His career touched nine clubs across four countries, a number that suggests restlessness but which he insists was strategy. “Every move was a step. Not always up, but always forward.”
The numbers are solid: 828 club games, 31 goals, four caps for Spain. The honours list includes a Spanish First Division title with Athletico Madrid in 2051/52, a league and cup double in 2052/53, and French silverware with FC Nantes. Not bad for a player who started in the C and B teams of Real San Sebastián.
“I was never the star,” he says. “I was the one who made sure the star could be the star.”
That role earned him a move to Athletico Madrid in 2049/50, where he spent four seasons and won the league twice. “Athletico was the making of me. The pressure, the demands, the expectation—you either grow or you break.”
He broke, but only in the sense that he left to keep growing. FC Nantes, Valencia, Olympique de Marseille, Sparta Rotterdam. The list reads like a travelogue, but Bilbao is quick to correct. “It’s not a holiday. It’s work. You move because you want to play, and because someone wants you.”
Now, out of the game, he is not coaching, not punditing, not even scouting. “I’m doing nothing. And I’m enjoying it. The game gave me everything, but it also took everything. Now I take it back.”
He pauses, looks out the window at the Madrid traffic, and smiles. “I have no regrets. Not one.”