How to lead Leeds United - New Statesman 19/1/22
By Jonathan Liew
Historically speaking, Leeds really isn’t much of a football
city. This might sound counter-intuitive, but for much of the 20th century
rugby league was its sport of choice. Leeds Rhinos can trace their origins back
to the 1870s; Leeds United was only founded in 1919, and the club has spent
much of the intervening period mired in mediocrity: bobbing between the top two
divisions, struggling to fill its stadium, occasionally flirting with
extinction.
Twenty-four clubs have spent more seasons in the English top
flight; ten clubs have won more league titles; 23 have won more FA Cups.
Meanwhile, almost all of Leeds’s tangible success came in a white-hot streak
between 1968 and 1974 that brought six major trophies. The other 96 years of
its existence have brought one. And so when people speak of Leeds as a giant of
English football, what they are really referring to is one fleeting era of
dominance. They mean the Leeds of Don Revie.
When Revie took over in 1961, Leeds were a struggling Second
Division team with no money, few devoted fans and no pedigree to speak of.
Within eight years of his departure in 1974, Leeds were back in the Second
Division, restored to their natural state of mediocrity. By rights, his
biographer Christopher Evans contends, Revie should be remembered alongside men
such as Bill Shankly, Matt Busby and Alex Ferguson as one of English football’s
greatest ever managers.
And yet to many he will be remembered as a mercenary, a
cynic, perhaps even a cheat. His early Leeds sides were brutal, physical and
often negative. Unproven but persistent accusations of fixing and financial
irregularity continue to tarnish his reputation. His unhappy three-year tenure
as England manager between 1974 and 1977 ended with Revie resigning to take a
lucrative job in the United Arab Emirates, a betrayal for which he was never
really forgiven.
Evans, the Labour Co-operative MP for Islwyn, in south-east
Wales, sets out to redress the balance. His book is impeccably researched,
based on dozens of new interviews, and attempts to recast Revie as a visionary,
a trend-setter, the ultimate professional who reinvented the game for the
modern age. Players such as Billy Bremner, Peter Lorimer and Norman Hunter were
plucked from obscurity and transformed into world-beaters. Scouting was taken
to a new level, with opponents analysed in painstaking detail and thick
dossiers issued to players. Time-wasting, gamesmanship, rough-house tactics:
virtually nothing was off-limits in pursuit of a competitive edge. In one game
against Leipzig, played on a treacherously icy pitch, Revie ordered his players
to file down their studs to expose the nails underneath, giving them a better
grip. Before long, the shins of the outraged Leipzig players were dripping with
blood.
Underpinning all this was Revie himself: a proud, driven,
superstitious and avaricious man whose footballing credo essentially derived
from fear. Born into poverty in Depression-era Middlesbrough to an unemployed
joiner, that haunting sense of insecurity and mistrust never really left him.
Defeat was death. Ruin lay around every corner. Revie lived like a man who
could feel the breath of poverty on the back of his neck. As a life and times,
Evans’s account is immaculate. What it lacks – in comparison to books such as
The Unforgiven (2003) by Rob Bagchi and Paul Rogerson, another history of
Revie’s tenure at Leeds – is wider context, the sense of romance and fierce
fragility that the club under Revie embodied, how he changed the city and the
game around him.
Revie died from motor neurone disease in 1989, revered in
Leeds but nowhere else. After a brief flurry of success under David O’Leary
around the turn of the century, the club sank to its lowest ebb: relegated in
2004 and again in 2007 after going into administration. A conveyor belt of
hapless owners oversaw a conveyor belt of hapless managers. Attendances at
Elland Road sank to about half what they were in the Premier League. The soul
of Leeds United was in the gutter, and it took a mercurial Argentinian named
Marcelo Bielsa to restore it.
When Leeds first approached Bielsa in 2018, he arrived armed
with detailed research on all the club’s Championship rivals, lists of the
players he wanted to sell and keep, and Land Registry drawings of the club’s
training complex, annotated with improvements that had to be made as a
condition of his appointment. This was Bielsa in microcosm: a manager whose
fascination with football often veered into obsession, even absurdity; one who
inspired an almost religious devotion among players, fans and fellow coaches,
but hadn’t won a club trophy in more than 20 years.
For Bielsa, football is something to be lived completely or
not at all. No compromises. No shortcuts. Players who displease him or who fail
to meet his exacting physical standards were jettisoned without remorse.
Training games unfold at bone-shattering speed. This is why his teams play with
a stirring, hyperactive intensity, ripping sides apart with beautiful high-wire
football. It is also why he had never previously spent more than two years at
any club.
Like Revie, he studies opponents in ridiculous detail and
compiles extensive dossiers on every player and situation. Unlike Revie, he
does not share them with his players. They are for his consumption alone: a
form of penance, something to help him sleep at night. “It allows me to keep my
anxiety low,” he says in Phil Hay’s And It Was Beautiful. “Why do I do it?
Because I’m stupid.”
Bielsa isn’t stupid. But nor is he the wizened sage or
philosopher-king that so many of his posturing disciples think he is. Raised in
an upper-middle class family of politicians and lawyers in Rosario, Bielsa has
encountered enough real intellectuals to know that he’s not one of them. And
yet such is the solipsism and self-seriousness of the modern game that footballing
genius is often confused for the real thing. (Arsène Wenger, too, was a subject
of the fallacy that coaching football and sounding gnomic in press conferences
qualifies you as a public intellectual.)
Perhaps Bielsa and Leeds saw a little of themselves in each
other: tortured, misunderstood but nonetheless convinced that grace is at hand.
In Bielsa’s first season, Leeds narrowly miss promotion. In his second, they
return to the top tier for the first time in 16 years. His third season is
covered in And It Was Beautiful: part footballing chronicle, part enthralling
character study, part reflection on what football means to a place.
Now at the Athletic after 15 years covering Leeds for the
Yorkshire Evening Post, Hay has long been known as one of the best-informed
local correspondents in the country. Here, he blends excellent reportage with a
keen eye for detail and deeper thoughts on Bielsa and the city that embraces
him with unfettered love. Murals spring up around the city. Fans glimpse him in
the coffee shops and supermarkets of Wetherby. Though he is a private man,
Bielsa is always generous with his time, aware that football is played not for
sponsors or owners or television executives, but for the people. One of his
first moves is to make Leeds players pick litter for three hours, because
that’s how long the average fan has to work to buy a ticket.
Of course, there’s a natural dissonance here. Bielsa earns a
handsome salary (much of which he gives away), but makes even more money for
others. The Italian media mogul Andrea Radrizzani bought Leeds in 2017 for £45m
and now wants to turn it into a £1bn asset. Bielsa’s face is used to sell
season tickets, satellite packages, even Hay’s book. Replicas of the blue
bucket upon which he sits to watch Leeds matches have been sold in the club
shop at £80 a pop. While extolling football’s idealism and purity, Bielsa helps
to sustain the very system and structures he detests.
Revie understood this dichotomy perfectly. One of the most
poignant moments in Evans’s book is in about 1963, when Revie takes his son
Duncan out onto the Elland Road pitch and explains his vision. “One day, son,
there’ll be boxes there,” he says, pointing across the weathered terraces.
“There’ll be people coming for lunch at 12, not five to three. There’ll be
sponsorship on the shirts. There’ll be television worldwide. It will be a
complete revolution.” If Bielsa sees football as it can be – its beauty, its
purity, its possibility – then Revie saw it as it really was. The irony is that
in a way, both were men out of their time.
Don Revie: The Biography
Christopher Evans
Bloomsbury Sport, 384pp, £20
And It Was Beautiful
Phil Hay
Seven Dials, 288pp, £20