netminder Unai Simon has now taken his place in history, thanks to his team’s magnificent march to their second world title.
As if tasting global glory were not enough, the Athletic Club man now owns the longest-ever streak without conceding at the competition, having kept the opposition at bay for across his first six and a half matches of this year’s event and his final two outings at the 2022 tournament.
Furthermore, Simon also set new records by racking up seven clean sheets and letting in a solitary goal in his side’s eight games in North America en route to making the his own. No goalkeeper has registered more shutouts at any instalment of the World Cup – or indeed shipped fewer goals at a single edition, and this despite him playing an extra match due to the tournament’s expansion to 48 teams.
Simon was born in 1997 in the Basque village of Murgia, a little over half an hour’s drive from Bilbao. A youth player with Aurrera de Vitoria, Simon signed for Athletic Club in 2011. The Bilbao outfit’s head of goalkeeping at the time was Pello Aguirreoa, who still remembers when the current Spain No1 pitched up at their Lezama training ground: “We’d heard from the scouts that there was this useful keeper who was just the kind that Athletic were looking to develop,” said Aguirrreoa. “He had the physique for a start. He was a big lad for 14 and you could see he was going to get to 1.9m [6’2].
“Unai also stood out because he had good hand-eye coordination, a safe pair of hands and a good dive,” added Aguirreoa, a former Athletic keeper himself and the man who took over between the posts from the legendary Jose Angel Iribar. “He projected a real sense of calm and security, and he was a shot-stopper too. He had a lot of potential.”
“After that came many years of hard work, day after day. It’s a very long process, one that takes many hours and days and involves a lot of happiness and suffering, laughter and tears.”
As Aguirreoa recalled, Simon, like many others, found it hard to settle in at the Athletic academy: “The first year is usually pretty tough because they go into a professional environment and it’s difficult for them to adapt. Unai struggled and had his ups and downs, with quite a few tears along the way. I remember him crying whenever he made a mistake because it hurt him. He’s a real perfectionist and very stubborn, and he’s really demanding and methodical too. He’s a keeper who asks a lot of himself day after day, sometimes too much.”
Aguirreoa went on to say that when it comes to the development of young keepers, big mistakes are more important than big saves: “The key thing is not the mistake in itself, but how you react to it. It’s what comes next, the next passage of play, the next training session, the next match, whether it affects you or you let your head drop. But even back then, he was just as he is now. His next step after a mistake was always forward.”
One of Simon’s fellow keepers in his early days in the Athletic first team was Iago Herrerin, who noted that they used to call him Gallo, a reference to his reputation for ruling the roost. “It was because of the way he would strut around the pitch and his character,” explained Herrerin. “He was always self-assured and you never saw him looking sad. If he messed up, he’d just pick himself up and move right on. He’d analyse his game too and try to correct the mistakes he made. He was anything but cocky, though, especially off the pitch.”
“By the time he broke into the first team [when Kepa Arrizabalaga was Athletic’s first choice], he was already a great keeper,” added Herrerin. “He had so much potential. He was a very big guy but very agile and fast too. He also worked very hard on different parts of his game, like playing the ball out with his feet. He’d often stay back on his own to work on and improve things like that.”
Herrerin, who has lined up over 100 times in the Spanish top flight and plies his trade for Colombian club Deportivo Pasto at present, revealed to FIFA that he sent a message of congratulations to the adidas Golden Glove winner and had just received a reply. “He’s one of the smartest keepers in the world. I’m delighted for him because he went into the World Cup with the media putting all this pressure on him and he’s come out even stronger.”
Now a World Cup, 2022-23 UEFA Nations League and UEFA EURO 2024 winner, is a vital cog in Luis de la Fuente’s side, having also claimed under the current coach at U-19 and U-21 levels in 2015 and 2019 respectively, albeit as an understudy to Antonio Sivera at both those tournaments.
The 29-year-old has made 264 appearances for Athletic and won the Supercopa de Espana in 2021 and Copa del Rey in 2024, not to mention a Trofeo Zamora, awarded each season to the keeper with the best goals against-to-games ratio in La Liga. The last Athletic custodian to pick up that accolade was Iribar in 1970, a legend even in the heyday of Lev Yashin and a figure whom Simon is moving ever closer to emulating.
“Iribar is the greatest there’s ever been and the greatest there is, and we’ve helped Unai to become his mirror image,” added Aguirreoa with a smile.
Sources: FIFA Official
