Inaki Williams Shares Incredible Family Story With His Parents Trekking From Ghana Through The Sahara To Reach Spain

'It's incredible,' says Inaki Williams, and he's not just talking about the new LaLiga record he set last week for not missing a game in five-and-a-half years.

He's talking about the whole story. His story, one that begins with his parents crossing the Sahara desert to reach Spain as immigrants from Ghana, and ends with him establishing himself at the only club left in Europe that doesn't allow players born outside the region.

'It just makes me very proud to wear this shirt,' Williams says. 'And for people to feel proud that I am part of Athletic's history.'

In one of the family pictures he shares with us, he is already in an Athletic Bilbao shirt aged three posing in front of a beaten up television perched on an industrial cable reel that's being used as a makeshift table.

Life was tough growing up but any hardships pale into insignificance when compared with what his mum Maria and his father Felix went through.

For many years they were reluctant to share too many details with him, believing the harrowing story would be, as the Spanish phrase has it 'like stones in the backpack' weighing him down as he tried to make it as a professional.

It was after he had made his debut at Athletic that his mum sat him down and told him the full story.

'It didn't completely surprise me when they told me, but hearing the story in detail still left me cold,' he says. 'It was the kind of thing you imagine only happens in films.

'They crossed the Sahara, in part on foot and in part on the back of a pick-up truck with forty other people.