How Bielsa became Leeds boss: Exclusive extract from Phil Hay’s new book - The Athletic 24/8/21

This Thursday sees the release of “And it was Beautiful: Marcelo Bielsa and the rebirth of Leeds United“, a new book written by The Athletic’s Leeds United writer Phil Hay and published by Seven Dials.

Chronicling the story of Bielsa’s remarkable reign at Elland Road to date, the book digs into the ideas, methods and idiosyncrasies behind his footballing revolution and tells the story of the club’s promotion from the Championship and their impressive first season in the Premier League.

In this exclusive extract before the book’s launch, Leeds’ director of football, Victor Orta, explains the decision to appoint Bielsa in 2018 — and why he was sure Bielsa would be the right choice.

In the summer of 1986, while my mother and father were busy with work, I spent most of the holidays with my two brothers.

They were older than me, nine or 10 years older, and you know how it is when you’re 16 or 17 and your little kid brother is always with you. He’s annoying, no? In Spain, we have a famous card game called Mus and I would go with them when they went to play it with friends. I annoyed them by ruining the game, by doing the wrong things with the cards.

We were at this kiosk and the guy who owned it saw what was happening and he gave me a box with maybe a hundred packets of football cards in it. I was seven years old and it was the first time I thought about football.

The cards were the faces of the players at World Cup ’86. I looked through them all and started to do a bit of a challenge with my brothers. They would pull a card out, say the name on it and I would try to tell them which nation they played for and which club. So Enzo Francescoli, Uruguay and River Plate; Cha Bum-kun, South Korea and Bayer Leverkusen; Alemao, Brazil, who would go on and play at Napoli. I would do this with their friends too. I was good at it. “You choose a card and I’ll tell you this, this and this.” It earned me acceptance from older people and every kid likes that. I thought then that football could be my passion, something to love.

Am I a football romantic? Absolutely. The day I wake up and don’t feel passion for football, I’ll go home and do something else, like chemistry or something different. I’m still like the young Victor Orta who went to the hotels in Madrid where teams were staying to get their autographs. Lots of us did that when a big team from Europe arrived. It was normal. But sometimes, with smaller teams, I would be the only one there.

One day, Racing Santander arrived to play Atletico Madrid. At the hotel, it was just me. Some of the Racing Santander players recognised me (because they’d seen me before) and said, “Victor, you are always here. Every time we come, we see you. Why?” Because I had an album with a photograph of different footballers with a space for their autograph underneath. I had to fill them all in so I would wait for hours if I had to. It made my day. Sometimes it made my week.

A total passion for football is what many people see in Marcelo Bielsa. I see it too. When I first started to learn about Marcelo, he was a reference for a lot of things that were developing in football. Technical secretaries and scouting departments were not things people spoke about when he was doing those types of jobs at Newell’s Old Boys. It seemed like he was first with things.

I knew Bielsa didn’t have a big career as a player. Yet, he was one of the biggest coaches in the world. He gave me a feeling about the level you could arrive from, the feeling that you could come from nothing. I had a friend, Pablo, who always sent me newspapers from Argentina. He told me once how before Argentina played a friendly against the Netherlands, Bielsa wanted information from the last 20 games the Netherlands had played. I didn’t know why but who knows, maybe there was some information he could get from that.

More and more, I started to think about the game in that way. Then came the meeting at Sevilla. They tried to appoint Marcelo as head coach in 2011. I was working for the club but I wasn’t in the meeting. The chairman, Jose Maria del Nido, and the director of football Monchi were in there and they’ve spoken about it before.

What happened is not a secret. I prepared a report of perhaps 120 pages, with all the information I could give them. The chairman was able to say to Marcelo: “This is what I know about you.”

Marcelo had prepared a report on Sevilla of one thousand pages. One thousand pages long! “And this is what I know about you.” The chairman and Monchi talked about him afterwards in this amazing way, like “Wow!” He impressed them both. Really, really impressed them.

I was in football professionally by then but the period that first made me fascinated about Bielsa was the World Cup in 2002. All the games were free on TV in Spain so I watched the whole qualifying stage. Argentina were top of their group and had something like a 15-point difference over Brazil. They were incredible.

Brazil won the World Cup but for me, I felt it with Argentina. I watched the Olympic Games as a pundit when Argentina won the gold medal in 2004. In one game they beat Serbia and Montenegro 6-0. What energy! More and more the thought in my head was, “Imagine the level of work of this man in charge — even when you get knocked out in the group stages of a World Cup.”

My opinion was that Marcelo could jump into Europe as a club manager. His football would work here, I thought. But if you ask me why I believed he would be perfect for Leeds United three years ago, my view is that the English environment is really coachable. When you are a coach in England, the players come to you and you can say, “Jump off this bridge.” They will jump and when they are in the cold water, they will ask why you wanted them to jump.

My feeling about Latin football is that you say, “Jump off a bridge”, and the players stop and ask why first. They don’t just jump into the water. Whatever Marcelo asked for, I knew the players here would try. They would have the trust in this incredible coach.

The summer when he came to Leeds was after the first year of Andrea Radrizzani’s project here. The project was not bad, in my opinion, but that year taught us something. I said to Andrea that Leeds United did not have the capacity to support a medium-term project because the historic pressure for promotion can’t be appeased. We can’t be a medium-term project in the Championship.

Other teams can be but not us. So either we change the club we are at or we change the project.

At that time, I had an offer to go to a different job in Spain. I had dinner with Andrea where we had lots of conversation and lots of arguments — but arguments in a good way. I thought that to reduce the gap in the league we needed to make a really good investment in a top-class coach. Maybe one who is outside the budget. It was the day after when we were in a car and we had that famous conversation where Andrea asked me to tell him my favourite. The report I made in Sevilla about Marcelo was still on my hard disk so I updated it and presented it to Andrea and our chief executive, Angus Kinnear. “This is who I am talking about,” I said. “This is why he could be so amazing.”

The Championship was difficult to offer to Marcelo. I thought Leeds was a good environment for him but my feeling was that he would say no, that he would have something better to consider. That, to me, is why I think he made the challenge for us: to meet him in Buenos Aires. If we were brave enough to travel to Buenos Aires to meet him, we were serious. We had to prove that we were. I was excited on the flight down there but there was one crazy moment.

When we landed I called Marcelo and I didn’t get an answer. We had spoken the day before and I was worried that I had said something wrong, something to upset him. The chairman had travelled from Europe for this so I was nervous. At the hotel, I asked the guy at reception which meeting room we had hired.

I remember the name perfectly: Salon Tilos.

I opened the door expecting, well, I don’t know what. Honestly, it was like NASA. There were about five computers spread around. There was a big board with all the names of our players. Marcelo was there ready to start. My first thought was, “Help us!” After a second meeting with Angus and me, I thought it was done.

I thought Marcelo would be our head coach. But I knew some people in football would say to Andrea, “You are crazy, crazy, crazy.” When we landed, I talked to him and told him we had to be brave and have passion. “Give me this responsibility and I will assume all of it, in a good way and a bad. If it fails, fire me. Fire me and get a new director of football. Put me out as if that was my last chance. But until then, be brave.”

Andrea will tell you he had at least 20 messages saying, “What are you doing?” But before we fail, have passion first. Angus helped me a lot in these discussions. You don’t need me to tell you what a success Marcelo became at Leeds. I’ll let that speak for itself. But what we did was change the strategy at the right time.

The thing that made me proudest of all about Leeds was the way everyone at the club felt involved and relevant as we tried to win promotion. From Mandy in ticket sales to Patrick Bamford scoring the goals, everyone had the same sense of what we were doing. Everyone made a difference. I have a friend, Alberto Garcia, a goalkeeper at Rayo Vallecano who has won four promotions in his career. I’ll never forget something he said to me once: “The management and the office help win promotion, not just players.”

Get it right everywhere in a club and it will work. For sure, we got it right with Marcelo.