Athletic Bilbao is an association football club based in Bilbao, in Biscay in the Basque Country of Spain. The club was a founder member of the Spanish league, better known as La Liga, in 1928, and has won the league championship eight times. As of 2012, Athletic has played for 82 years in the Primera División, the top tier of Spanish football, and is one of only three clubs, the others being Real Madrid and Barcelona, never to have been relegated from La Liga. The club is known for its policy of recruiting only players from the greater Basque Country, a region which includes Labourd, Soule and Lower Navarre in France as well as the Spanish provinces of Biscay, Guipúzcoa, Álava and Navarre. This policy, which for many years applied both to signings from other clubs and to youngsters admitted to the club's academy, has in recent years become more flexible, so that players whose career developed in the youth system of other clubs in the region are now acceptable, irrespective of their country of birth. Athletic won the Copa del Rey three times between 1914 and 1916. The team of that period included the prolific goalscorer Rafael "Pichichi" Moreno; he scored the first goal in the San Mamés Stadium on 21 August 1913, scored a hat-trick in the 1915 Copa del Rey final, and his 89 games for the club produced a total of 78 goals. Since 1953, the top scorer in La Liga each season has been awarded the Pichichi Trophy, named in his honour. On 29 September 1940, Telmo Zarra played his first league match for the club. During his time at Athletic, he won six Pichichi awards, a league record, and helped the club achieve a league championship and five Copa del Rey trophies. He retired in 1955, having played 352 matches and scored 333 goals. Since 2006, the annual Zarra Trophy is awarded to the highest goalscorer of Spanish nationality in La Liga. Joseba Etxeberria, who joined Athletic from Real Sociedad in 1995 for a record transfer fee of €3 million, is the player with the most appearances for the club in the last 30 years. He signed a one-year extension to his contract in 2009 in which he agreed to play the 2009–10 season unpaid in the hope of reaching 500 games before he retired; he finished the season (and his professional career) on 514.

Players

Appearance and goal totals include matches in La Liga, Copa del Rey, Supercopa de España, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and regional competitions. Substitute appearances are included. Table is initially sorted in descending order of appearances and includes all Athletic players who have made 100 appearances or more. A statistical analysis by El Correo in 2023 showed that the more historic players at the top of the list had played many more minutes overall than those from the modern era with fewer or no substitutions available – Orúe was on the field for the entirety of all matches he played, with contemporaries Panizo, Gaínza and Canito not doing so only twice apiece, contrasting sharply with the likes of Muniain and Susaeta whose totals for coming on and coming off were each well into the hundreds. On the other hand, the stats do not count the increasingly lengthy stoppage time typically being applied in the 21st century.

Key

Club captains

Listed below are all the captains of Athletic Bilbao since football became professional in Spain with the introduction of La Liga in 1929. Note: One club man; played for the club throughout his professional career.