Atletico Madrid has scored in 8 of the last 9 LaLiga home games against Athletic Bilbao

Only four clubs have been crowned champions of Spain eight or more times. Real Madrid and Barcelona are the dominant pair, but Atletico Madrid have broken that duopoly twice in recent times, while Athletic Club have been more successful than every other side in the country.

This season, only six points separate them as the top four in La Liga’s developing title race, with Atletico and Athletic going head-to-head at Riyadh Air Metropolitano on Saturday night.

Athletic’s chances of claiming a shock first Spanish title since 1984 are slim, but victory in the capital would at least keep them firmly in the mix and well on course to qualify for the Champions League for the first time in 11 years. However, a win the other way, for Atletico, would all but eliminate the Bilbao side from the title race and leave it a three-way fight moving towards the run-in.

There is an enormous amount at stake. But this isn’t just a story about two clubs locked in a competitive rivalry this season. Their history is fundamentally linked and stretches back well over than a century.

Bilbao was a prime location for one of the oldest football clubs in Spain to spring up in 1898. The game arrived from Great Britain in the latter portion of the 19th century, typically the domain of English or Scottish immigrants, or local students returning home, and prevalent more so in port cities in the north, west and south, like Bilbao, Vigo and Huelva. The latter indeed boasts Spain’s oldest official football club – Recreativo de Huelva, once of La Liga – founded in 1889.

Juan Astorquia had studied in Manchester and, upon returning home was one of seven founder members of what became Athletic Club – the Anglicised name a nod to the original English influence that remains almost 130 years later. Only briefly was it ‘Atletico’ under the oppressive Franco regime.

Today, we obviously know the team as Atletico Madrid. It only changed from Athletic 37 years later when, in 1940, dictator General Franco banned foreign language in club names. But where Athletic Club reverted to their origins when the regime ended in 1975, Atletico Madrid stuck.

At its very core, Atletico started as the Madrid branch of Athletic Club. But although the teams drifted apart once Spanish football became more formalised into the 1920s, with the eventual foundation of La Liga in 1929, their famous colours will always be a symbol of that shared story.