Athletic Bilbao B
Bilbao Athletic, officially named Athletic Club "B", is the reserve team of Athletic Bilbao, a football club based in Bilbao, in the autonomous community of Basque Country. The team will play in the Segunda División B in the 2018–19 season. Founded in 1964, the team holds home matches at the small stadium attached to the club's training facility at Lezama, or occasionally at San Mamés Stadium, with its 53,500-seat capacity, for important fixtures.
Athletic Bilbao cantera
The core of boys from the local Biscay region are first introduced into the Lezama "Alevín" teams at around 10 years of age and advance by an age group every season through "Infantil", "Cadete" and "Juvenil" levels. The players who are retained by Athletic after their Juvenil A spell (aged about 17) typically join farm team CD Basconia in Basauri, with the squad normally expanded further with signings from the regions’s youth clubs, most notably Danok Bat and Antiguoko who regularly challenge the professional academy teams for the title in their División de Honor group. A number of senior players have also emerged from the Txantrea club in Pamplona who have a collaborative agreement with Athletic (renewed for four more years in 2017).
The players usually spend one or two seasons at Basconia before the best are promoted to the reserve team Bilbao Athletic and then on to the senior team when considered ready to do so. There are exceptions to this sequence; notably Iker Muniain showed such promise that he was promoted early to "Juvenil A" as a 15-year-old in 2008, was selected by Bilbao Athletic as soon as he turned 16 in January 2009 and became a senior team regular at the start of the next season.