Leeds United head of medicine and performance sets Marcelo Bielsa injury record straight - Leeds Live 28/9/23

Leeds United head of medicine and performance Rob Price has lift the lid on working at the club under Marcelo Bielsa's intense training regime

Leeds United head of medicine and performance Rob Price has lifted the lid on the methodical way his department coped with the rigours of Marcelo Bielsa's training and way of playing. There was plenty of criticism aimed at the Argentinian head coach during his Elland Road tenure, with his sides having a history of burning out as the season approached its climax.

Whites supporters saw that first hand with Leeds missing out in the Championship play-offs, but a year later they win the title and then finished in the top-half of the Premier League on their return to the top flight.

Price told the Official Leeds United Podcast: "When any manager comes in, we have a discussion about what the risk parameters look like, we also look at what they want to achieve. Now Marcelo's style of play, the players had to be phenomenally fit.

"You saw our sprint distances, [they] were off the chart. So, to gain that, you have to really, really push the players into areas no other club does and nowhere else goes. We accepted that as a club.

"That was a discussion, Marcelo said 'this is how I play, this is what I do.' We accepted the risk, the club accepted the risk, there was never any disharmony within the club from the board to the medical department, to the science department, to Marcelo.

"We knew how we had to train to achieve how he wanted to play. Now to work at those thresholds, there's a risk that you get more injuries.

"Again, we accepted that and were able to push through. What we generally did, he also ran with a really small squad, he didn't want too many players available so you didn't really have the opportunity to take players in or out to protect them.

"So what we focussed on a lot with Marcelo, was okay we did pick up a few more injuries but not anything that's out of this world. Again, coming back to lets make sure we can get them back quickly and lets make sure when they come back, they're fit to keep going and they're ready to go, as in our rehab processes were of the same level and intensity as his training so they could just fit in and go from there.

"Before Marcelo arrived, we'd done quite a bit of research and looked at what injury patterns he'd had at his previous clubs. We them put in a prevention programme that was focussed most around those areas.

"We found that when he was in Spain they had a lot of injuries around the pelvis, the hips and the abdominals. So we did a lot of work to prevent that.

"It's almost impossible to know if what you did was successful because you never do a control group. You don't go to half the team we're going to do this and the other half, just get on with it and see how you get on.

"Also, Marcelo had never been four years anywhere before. That intensity for that period of time is difficult for anybody to sustain.

"We're in a really difficult place in football, we have to peak every three days or every seven days. If you're an athlete you peak for the Olympics every four years, if you're a tennis player you've got four majors that you need to peak for a year, so you can actually take people in and out.

"Every game is three points so every game is as important as the other. You don't get more points if you beat Man United than you do if you beat someone else.

"Every game is still of the same importance. The philosophy under Marcelo was you're just as likely to beat Man United as you are to beat whoever was bottom of the table so we don't treat any game differently.

"It's not that we're going to rotate and change things to make sure that they're ready in the next week. Some of the indicators for does somebody get injured, age and previous injury are two of the highest predictors of someone getting injured.

"Our squad gets older and they've picked up a few injuries along the line because of the way we train and play. A lot of those injuries weren't necessarily overuse injuries.

"Everyone thinks 'ah Marcelo we got loads of hamstring injuries.' We didn't, we got a lot of contact injuries because we used to go and press the death out of people and we used to go and run into them.

"We just got contact, contact, contact. We probably got more fractures, more knee injuries, ankle injuries than anything else. It wasn't the soft tissue injuries that you can avoid.

"Then pretty similar under Jesse [Marsch] as well. Jesse was high press, all in and we picked up again, more contact injuries. Unless you change your style of play they're not really avoidable."