Ibán Espadas
Spanish footballer

Ibán Espadas Zubizarreta (born 4 August 1978) is a Spanish former professional footballer who played as a forward.
Across the two major levels of Spanish football, he appeared in 104 games and scored 14 goals over nine seasons. In La Liga, he represented Zaragoza.
Club career
Espadas was born in Tolosa, Gipuzkoa. During his career, spent mainly in the second and third divisions, he also made seven La Liga appearances with Real Zaragoza, all in the 2003–04 season – he had previously contributed 18 and four goals to the Aragonese club's previous top-flight promotion.
An unsuccessful Athletic Bilbao youth graduate, Espadas also represented FC Cartagena, Recreativo de Huelva, Cultural y Deportiva Leonesa, Zaragoza B, Cádiz CF, UD Almería, Ciudad de Murcia, Orihuela CF (two spells), Pontevedra CF and Arroyo CP. He retired in June 2014, at the age of 35.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ibán Espadas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.