Goodbye Marcelo Bielsa, hello Premier League - The Square Ball 27/2/22

THE FUTURE

Written by: Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman

Marcelo Bielsa’s impact at Leeds United can be described and measured simply by writing down what he did, assembling the video clips being shared on social media, comparing the before and after pictures of the club, its players, its league position, its bank account, its future.

His departure was always going to be difficult but his mid-season sacking feels like an occasion for grief. Not so much because he’s gone. We’ll always have memories for that. But grief because Leeds United is no longer different, and it was all over before the traditional kick-off time of Saturday, 3pm. I was dragged out of bed by BT Sports and the worldwide broadcasting market for a lunchtime match against Spurs, and sacking Marcelo Bielsa at the end of the game was the moment Leeds United became just another Premier League football club on just another Premier League day.

It is being said that Bielsa transformed Leeds United and gave the club an identity the way he made Kalvin Phillips an international footballer, but neither is strictly true. As Phillips put it on Twitter, ‘You saw in me what I didn’t even see in myself.’ Bielsa’s genius was seeing what Phillips had, and finding ways of putting it to work. That’s why he once said that coaching Pablo Hernandez was making him a better coach: bringing Hernandez’s incredible abilities to the surface required ideas and techniques Bielsa hadn’t thought of before. He doesn’t invent what is within his players. He invents ways of getting it out.

The same thing happened with Leeds United as a club, a fanbase and a city. Leeds came later than almost everywhere else in the world to association football, and never seemed to get used to the idea of it as a viable alternative to rugby. In the 1950s, United had the best player in the world, John Charles, but people wouldn’t go to watch Leeds because they said he made the rest of the team look bad and they wouldn’t pay to watch one player. In the 1960s Don Revie built the best team in the world, but it was his constant frustration that he couldn’t fill the stadium, and if he did, that the crowd would jeer if the afternoon’s 3-0 win wasn’t exciting enough. Howard Wilkinson managed the feat of bringing 250,000 people out onto the the streets of Leeds to applaud his champions, but he was a bit boring and not someone the raving fanbase could feel close to, so Vinnie Jones and Eric Cantona became the symbols of his success. Then they were gone, and half the city’s interest with them.

The city of Leeds was about as disinterested in soccer as it had ever been when Marcelo Bielsa turned up. But he didn’t change what he found. Like he did with Kalvin Phillips, he recognised what was good in it, the hardcore loyalty, the quickly stirred passions that had flashed for Garry Monk and Thomas Christiansen. He had the secret to winning over this old rugby town. The problem for decades was that, for people to give up rugby, soccer in Leeds had to be exciting top quality, but it rarely was. But when Leeds people saw the football Bielsa was putting on in LS11, they went crazy for it.

During our sixteen years away the Premier League was always the great promise and the great danger. Being outside it was the great frustration but also the great anarchic thrill. Leeds, like few other clubs, retained its identity through the first two decades of the 21st century while the Premier League gave in to the transformative weight of its money. Getting promoted to the top flight would mean success. But it was also going to mean the end of a lot of things that were fun.

Bielsa managed to delay that inevitability and he did it by the force of his personality. Spygate was the moment Leeds completely united behind him because it pitted him and his ideas against every simplistic obnoxious trait in top level English football we had disdained from afar. The fairest goal, given to Aston Villa, was another moment when football showed its arse while Bielsa kept his and our dignity. Would we have respected Steve Evans letting the opposition score? I doubt it, but Bielsa hit upon a seam of innate integrity and justice among Leeds fans, a feeling generated by inverting how the 1975 European Cup final still burns us; the only thing Jack Charlton truly hated was unfairness.

Bielsa’s public behaviour in the Premier League, towards his own club, towards officials and towards rules that have often punished him, has been an exemplary contrast to the erratic, disruptive behaviour of Antonio Conte in only the last week. We alone understood that his press conferences were given through a translator because that allowed Bielsa to give extended answers no other manager would dream of giving, clear and straight from the source, because by answering in Spanish he was guaranteeing a full unedited explanation of his thoughts as near to the way he thinks them as language can allow. Even if the translator next to him was struggling, we could work instead with the original Spanish text.

Then there was his football. We know what it was like to watch. And, in the first Premier League season at least, it inspired so much rage outside West Yorkshire that we could enjoy it even more. The rest of the football world was so much more angry about our 6-2 defeat at Old Trafford than any Leeds fan was, and we revelled in the confusion our devotion was causing.

All these things worked at Elland Road because they tapped into a feeling that was always there about what it means to be a Leeds United fan. Bielsa didn’t invent how we felt, he found the feelings in us and brought them out. Many people will have wanted to put tributes up in Leeds to Don Revie or Howard Wilkinson while they were here, but if they’d done one, others would have said they were daft. Only Marcelo Bielsa made people happy when artists went up their ladders with paint. Only Marcelo Bielsa makes fans want to tell the club to shove its planned tribute up its arse.

Leeds United’s return to the modern Premier League was always going to be difficult, a football club out of its time landing in an era that prospers by making you hate it. Every Premier League commentary and post-match discussion is a breakdown of why the game you were excited to see has let you down. Winning has become so consuming that managers get blamed, abused then sacked for finishing second in the league. Written apologies are extracted from players guilty of scoring own goals or conceding penalties as if they’ve committed terrible crimes. The intensity makes everyone, owners, managers, players, agents, fans, miserable and angry. Somehow, so far, not at Leeds. Even after an extraordinary 14-2 aggregate week, there are fans at Leeds regretting that Bielsa is being sacked over something that should not be as important as it’s made out to be. Bielsa’s obsessive practice of his life’s work gives football the true seriousness it needs for us to remember that it’s only a game.

It is sad that Bielsa couldn’t hold the modern Premier League off for longer, to preserve the graceful anarchy that defines Leeds United for a few more seasons. There was talk last summer that this season might be Bielsa’s last, whatever happened, but it was hard to see the rationale for preempting his future. What if Leeds had improved on last season’s 9th place? What limit would you put on Bielsa’s time? Since promotion, Leeds have spent around £150m in two seasons without significant player sales as part of a two-year strategy to keep the club in the Premier League. Over the next two years what could another £150m, perhaps spent better, produce in combination with Bielsa’s football? Nobody can name another coach Leeds could attract who could have done what Bielsa did with the squad and the funds he was given. Who would you pick over Bielsa to take the next influx of resources to the next level?

Leeds United had a chance to keep resisting the ordinary, to buck the short term sack ’em trend. Perhaps some players were tired after four years of the same instructions. But when the instructions worked so well, replace those players and build a club to dominate a decade like Revie, or Ferguson or Wenger. It was to the Leeds board’s credit that Bielsa had stayed at Elland Road longer than at any other club. When he arrived his explosive departures from Lazio, Marseille and Lille were hot topics on his record. Leeds found a way to please him, and stood to be the first club to truly benefit from what he could, given time, be capable of building. One bad season swayed them from the possibility of ten years of the best coach they could hope to hire.

It’s absurd that the most significant cause of our diversion from that path was beyond Bielsa’s control. During BT’s coverage of his last game, the screen showed Liam Cooper, Kalvin Phillips and Pat Bamford slumped together in the West Stand. The team’s record with and without Phillips speaks for itself. At Liverpool, injury to Virgil van Dijk changed their fortunes from champions with 99 points to a 3rd place finish with 69. This season, with him back, their points per game average has them on course for 87 points, enough to win last season’s Premier League. One bad season of injuries wasn’t enough to dislodge Jurgen Klopp, nor even four consecutive defeats, 10-3 on aggregate, culminating in a humiliating derby at Anfield; or a 7-2 capitulation to Villa with van Dijk on the pitch. After all the arguments about Bielsa’s systems and ideas, when it comes down to it, the difference between Leeds’ current position of 16th and the desired mid-table finish could just be the moment Bamford’s hamstring gave way when he celebrated his equaliser against Brentford. That’s not Bamford’s fault, but it’s not Bielsa’s either. And it’s a small reason for throwing away so much.

It’s a shame how everything collapsed so easily. Maybe the Premier League really is too strong. After the Spurs game, I walked home north along Woodhouse Lane, against a stream of Otley Runners heading south. I’m sorry if my face ruined the vibe for any of them. What struck me about the fancy dress, as I ticked off countless Marios, Spice Girls/Boys, Austin Powers outfits and Smurfs, is how often I kept seeing the same outfits. The point of fancy dress is to stand out in an outrageous costume. But everyone was dressed the same as anyone else. What does it feel like to spend hours painting your body blue and your hair white, then going down the pub to show off your craziness, and realise you’re just one of a hundred all doing the same?

Maybe it feels good. It’s fun as FOMO. The Otley Run has rules, as does the Premier League, as does everything else. Premier League sackings happen by the opened damful for a reason: because once one club does it, everyone else thinks they should too. It’s an easy way of pretending you’re thinking for yourself, when actually you’re just joining in, hoping not to be left behind. If Aston Villa’s chief executive started dressing up as Ginger Spice, Angus Kinnear would too.

Sacking Marcelo Bielsa means Leeds United are already just another Premier League club, now. The one thing we dreaded back when promotion was still the aim. Bielsa’s football wasn’t perfect and his ideas weren’t perfect, but with his faults he gave our football club to us exactly how we imagined its best version could be.

What the new manager is like and how long he lasts isn’t the issue. The grief is because the club as it was is gone. Premier League football might be vital to pay for a new, enormous, money-spinning West Stand, but will Bielsa-less football still bring 50,000 Leeds fans to watch it? Maybe it will be the new home for 50,000 Premier League fans instead. Leeds have stepped onto the merry-go-round now, of media games between manager and owner, incessant transfer speculation, complaints about referees, running the clock down to take a point. Press conferences might be in English but they won’t explain half as much. Our managers might win games but they won’t get from Leeds supporters the same love Bielsa made us realise we had within us to give.