How Marcelo Bielsa made ‘personal project’ Kalvin Phillips an England-ready midfielder - The Athletic 13/6/21
Adam Crafton
It is coming up to three years now since the evening at
Swansea, only four Championship games into Marcelo Bielsa’s reign at Leeds
United, when the coach decided to take drastic action. Leeds won the first
three games of the season but after 28 minutes, they trailed Swansea and
holding midfielder Kalvin Phillips was on a yellow card. Phillips was hooked
and, considering these were the early and uncertain days of the Argentinian’s
reign in Leeds, it would only have been natural for the player to wonder what
may lie ahead.
As he sat on the bench at the Liberty Stadium, alongside
Patrick Bamford and Jack Harrison, a serious leap of the imagination would have
been required to think that Phillips could soon be a leading contender to
anchor the England midfield at a major tournament.
Yet here he is, judged by Gareth Southgate to possess the
quality in possession and dynamism without the ball to help make England tick.
Much, of course, is down to Phillips’ own determination and dedication but this
is a transformation turbocharged by the inspiring Bielsa. The Argentinian’s
fingerprints are seen elsewhere in Gareth Southgate’s squad — Ben White was
plucked from relative obscurity at Brighton to spend a season under Bielsa’s
tutelage at Leeds and, one year on, now finds himself in contention for a place
in the England defence. Elsewhere, it is only an embarrassment of riches in the
right-back position and up front that has seen the consistency of Luke Ayling
and Bamford overlooked after hugely impressive first seasons in the Premier
League.
When White first stepped into the facilities at Leeds
United’s Thorp Arch training ground two summers ago, he was pointed in the
direction of the under-23s dressing room. Leeds’ sporting director Victor Orta
had spotted him in a domestic cup fixture against Newport County and identified
him as being capable of replacing Pontus Jansson, who was considered to be too
disruptive by head coach Bielsa.
The coach challenged White, making him sharper, fitter and
in the defender’s own words, to train “like it’s a game, like it’s the final of
the World Cup”. At set pieces, Bielsa almost always charged White with marking
the tallest opposing player. In training, he spent a couple of days a week
performing drills in central midfield, learning from Phillips, to the extent
that he coped admirably when Brighton manager Graham Potter asked him to play
central midfield against Manchester City in a particularly impressive display
this past season. White’s versatility, enhanced by the innovative Potter, was a
major factor in ensuring he replaced Trent Alexander-Arnold in the England
squad for Euro 2020, as he has experience across the back line and in holding
midfield.
Those close to the Bielsa regime say that the coach finds
time for every member of his squad. In the team hotel before a game, he holds a
15-minute individual meeting with each player but in Phillips, a source
explains, “Marcelo saw a personal project.” He continues: “Marcelo views his
players as buildings, or palaces, and he is the architect behind them.”
One coach who observed Phillips closely in the pre-Bielsa
period at Leeds simply says the Argentinian has overseen a “transformation in
the player’s mentality and understanding of the game”.
Leeds fans know by now that their players are weighed every
morning, using a DEXA scan machine, which clearly details lean mass, fat mass
and bone mass. Bielsa encourages a protein-heavy diet for much of the week,
then ramps up the carbohydrate intake in the 24 hours before match day, and
those who Bielsa does not consider fit enough simply do not play. One player
who arrived several kilograms overweight into Bielsa’s first pre-season
training camp never recovered his place in the Leeds team. In the case of
Phillips, he had to work hard to conform to Bielsa’s demands for his physique.
The odd beer or quick bit of fast food was quickly off the menu.
“Kalvin was on the end of maybe one of Bielsa’s most
aggressive approaches,” one well-placed source explains. “The coach is
exceptionally demanding, particularly about his weight, and he pushes him very
hard every day. If a player edges over the precipice of the manager’s required
average, he is sent to do extra work on a bike with a sport scientist.”
The fitness requirements extend beyond the vanity of a toned
physique and rippling biceps for Phillips. Bielsa believes that his ideal
player in the No 4 position must have both the endurance to cover significant
ground but also the capability to perform the many short sprints required to
receive the ball and add pace to Leeds’ build-up play. Bielsa told his players
that Leeds’ “offensive game changes” when Phillips receives the ball. That is
why the analysts in the Leeds backroom staff have been ordered to produce
numerous clips specifically for Phillips each week, aimed at enhancing the
midfielder’s movement and positioning.
Indeed, Phillips is one of the few players for whom Bielsa
sometimes hosts more than one meeting in the pre-match hotel. During those
conversations, Bielsa explains, in intricate detail, the runs, movements and
vision Phillips must demonstrate to dictate, break up and switch the play, drop
in between the two centre-backs and take risks in possession. There are still
moments when Bielsa becomes frustrated, such as that evening against Swansea,
and it is because he has repeatedly explained what the player needs to do and,
as human beings, sometimes even Bielsa’s machines falter. “But even that night
against Swansea,” a source explains, “it was clear that Bielsa forgets about it
by the next day. It is not about holding grudges.”
Bielsa’s quest for perfection is by now legendary, for a man
who has a bed and kitchen installed for himself at the training ground, who
obsesses over the length of grass on the training pitches and who, for a while
in his first season, had the goalposts suspended off the ground as he argued
this would provide a more equal distribution of sunlight across the turf.
This summer, Bielsa has remained in Yorkshire, often
stopping by the Leeds training ground to check in on the building developments.
In his spare time, he popped along to coach a local under-11 team in Leeds and
introduced the kids to his unique brand of “Murderball”, a high-octane training
drill.
Bielsa has been known to make similar selfless gestures
before, such as in March 2008, when he was Chile manager heading to a match
between Universidad Catolica and River Plate to watch Alexis Sanchez. As he
walked to the stadium, he saw two children playing football on the street and
gave them his tickets. When Bielsa commits, he goes all-in, builds authentic
bonds with his local community. He makes a point of ensuring that either he or
his assistants respond to letters from admirers around the world. When a Jewish
Leeds fan wrote to invite Bielsa to a traditional Friday night dinner at their
family home, Bielsa phoned up, politely declined, but then spent time discussing
football with the supporter’s Spanish-speaking nephew.
At Athletic Bilbao, he visited a local nunnery as part of
his research into creating tight-knit groups between footballers — many Bielsa
players will attest that their monastic abstinence is required to cope with his
demands — and on his way out, Bielsa is said to have asked the nuns to pray for
his team.
When not training Yorkshire’s next generation of talent,
Bielsa is building up a dossier of information from Euro 2020. Following the
World Cup in 2018, Bielsa asked his staff to study every goal scored in the
competition, and then demonstrate training drills that could directly relate to
both creating and preventing the goal.
The idea is that players can relate more closely to goals
scored in a major tournament and it demonstrates the potential final product of
the drills. By keeping sessions fresh, innovative and relatable, Bielsa has
maintained standards for three seasons and the progression was underlined by
the way Leeds finished the campaign: of their final 11 games, they won seven
and lost just one. They conceded only eight goals, averaging 0.72 per game,
after averaging 1.7 goals conceded per game during their first 27 matches of
the campaign.
In the case of Phillips, however, the challenge extends
beyond video analysis and attention-to-detail as Bielsa’s man-management
encourages his player to imagine the game differently, and imbues the player
with fresh belief.
Speaking to The Athletic last summer, Phillips explained:
“When the manager first came in, we had a meeting where he went through the
names of each player telling us which number we’d be wearing. Obviously, I
thought I was going to be No 8 or something like that, but when he got to me he
said No 4. It surprised me because it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might be
playing there. After that meeting, he told me he wanted me to be a
defensive-mid and that I’d have to get better defensively and in the air. I
started working on it straight away. Up until then, I probably thought of myself
as box-to-box. If you’d asked me, that’s what I would have said. I wasn’t a
defender and I didn’t think of myself as one. I’d scored a few goals in the
previous season. So when I first got told to play defensive-mid I thought,
‘What’s going on here then?'”
Phillips worked on his game: during Leeds’ promotion-winning
season he recorded the squad’s most tackles per game and was highly ranked for
interceptions, passes, touches and pass accuracy. It speaks volumes for his
form in the Championship that England manager Gareth Southgate had first
considered calling Phillips up in February and March 2020, shortly before the
COVID-19 lockdowns put paid to international football.
In the Premier League, he formed a crucial cog in the Leeds
midfield and he is now an established part of the England squad. Off the field,
his development continues apace. He is not one of the most vocal forces in the
Leeds dressing room — Liam Cooper, Stuart Dallas and Ayling remain the figures
most likely to provoke their team-mates into improvement — but his attitude and
positive personality are infectious. Bielsa particularly values the role he
plays in encouraging the many young players who participate in first-team
training sessions, where Phillips, as an academy product, takes it upon himself
to welcome newcomers into the group. There’s often a significant number of
under-23 or under-18 players involved, as some Bielsa sessions require 33
players spread across three playing pitches.
As for White, his evolution continues to accelerate. After
an authoritative display in the warm-up win over Romania, White was under
consideration to start the first game of the tournament against Croatia in the
absence of Harry Maguire. Despite signing a new contract at Brighton last
summer, serious interest remains. Arsenal would like to wrap a deal up for a
fee between £40-50 million in the coming weeks, but Manchester United, Chelsea
and Leicester have all already watched the defender closely. Liverpool scout
Andy O’Brien, formerly a player at Newcastle, Bolton and Leeds, spent several
months observing White in the Championship for Leeds but the club’s deal for
defender Ibrahima Konate would make a deal unlikely for Jurgen Klopp’s side
this summer.
It must all feel a world away from that first week at Leeds
when White briefly feared he would not be able to rise to challenge. His mum
Carole explained: “The first week, he was on the phone to me saying, ‘I don’t
know if I’m going to be up to this, Mum’ but he kept saying he was determined
to do it. He does not give in. His centre-back partner, Liam Cooper, spoke to
him and said, ‘Dig in and you’ll be fine’.
A source close to Bielsa recalls of White’s progress: “He
was not struggling but learning. There is no better finishing school than
Bielsa’s.”