He plays and plays and plays. Inaki Williams hasn’t dropped out of La Liga since April 2016, which kind of makes sense when you look at his life.
“I don’t know exactly what it is, but there’s something in my genes,” explains Inaki Williams after 203 La Liga games in a row, as he really reveals his family history to the Guardian for the first time on the occasion of his endurance record.
It begins long before 17 April 2016, when the darting attacker last missed a league game because team-mate Yuri Berchiche injured his ankle in training. Of course, he hasn’t forgotten that. It’s a story of perseverance that lasted far longer than five and a half years – and it wasn’t written on grass.
“If I had known I was pregnant, I would have stayed. “
INAKI WILLIAMS’ MOTHER MARIA
Maria is pregnant with Inaki but doesn’t know it when she leaves Ghana with her husband Felix. “Otherwise I would have stayed,” she says with a mother’s unequivocalness that leaves no room for interpretation. What the couple put at risk when they left their homeland in the early 1990s is equally unequivocal. Everything.
To the left and right, Maria and Felix see people failing, marching through the Sahara with them but without food or drink. Barefoot. Felix still has problems with the soles of his feet because of this. But the two (or three) make it, it must be these genes that make them last until Melilla.
A lawyer and a priest
The Spanish enclave in northern Africa is the gateway to a better future, or so it is supposed to be. But on the ground, climbing the fences towards a new life, they are arrested. It is a lawyer who helps the family and advises them to pose as political refugees from Liberia so that the fairy tale story does not have to end at this point. To this day, the Williams’ do not even know his name, which Maria regrets very much.
Mother and father come to Bilbao, where Inaki sees the light of day. His namesake is a local priest who helps the new arrivals build their new lives, not least by donating clothes. The 27-year-old describes the place of his birth as “fate”, which (through the club’s policy) allows him to play for Athletic today.
But he grew up in Pamplona, where he had “food and something to wear”, but no father for a long time because he lived in London for years to earn money. So Inaki’s little brother Nico didn’t really get to know him at first. Professional footballer, that’s what Inaki wanted to become above all, to get his father back, to bring his family together.
At this point he doesn’t even know their whole story, his mother tells it to him for the first time, when he is 20 and already part of Athletics’ first team. “It left a deep impression. It’s like a film, and my parents experienced it,” reveals the young man, who becomes only the second black player to play for the traditional club in his “homeland”. And the first to score a goal.
One international for Spain, none for Ghana
The concept of home plays a weighty role in Williams’ life, but he is clear about that. After just one international match, a friendly in 2016, he disappeared from the Spanish national team’s haze; Ghana’s has long since come knocking.
“It wouldn’t be right to take the place of someone who feels Ghana 100 percent. “
INAKI WILLIAMS
“I appreciate and love Ghana, the culture, the food, the tradition,” says Inaki, whose mother always switches to her mother tongue when scolding him. “But I was neither born nor raised there, my home is here. I would also be comfortable with Ghana, but there are players to whom it would mean more. It wouldn’t be right to take the place of someone who feels Ghana 100 percent and deserves it more. “
Sepp Maier probably uncatchable
Williams has long deserved his place in Bilbao. He could become one of those players who play exclusively for Athletic – and without interruption. Even if Sepp Maier’s 442 consecutive games between 1966 and 1979 are still a long way off, the Spanish record is now his. Although he went into the last few matchdays with four yellow cards twice (“Fortunately, I hardly ever kick and protest”) and, according to his own statement, had to get himself fit every now and then.
And if he wanted someone to break the record at some point, “it should be my brother,” says Inaki, who now plays together with 19-year-old Nico. The Williams’ story is a family story and a success story rolled into one.
That’s why the defeats in two consecutive cup finals in the spring of 2021 due to Corona don’t matter so much in the end. Williams has long since celebrated his greatest success. Which for the resilient Inaki means being able to say to his parents, “We did it. “
