Marcelo Bielsa and Leeds United: It wasn’t meant to end like this - The Athletic 27/2/22
By Phil Hay
On the Sunday after Leeds United’s recent defeat by Everton,
Marcelo Bielsa got out of bed and took himself to mass. As a practising
Catholic and a resident of Wetherby, it was not unusual to see him in his local
church but this particular Sunday called for some soul-searching.
The Premier League season had been gruelling and Bielsa was
bearing the weight of it but a 3-0 loss at Goodison Park cut as deep as most
results.
With hindsight, the game on February 12 came to feel like a
tipping point. Leeds were under pressure to win it and bring their season to
heel but it was lost with a whimper: the wrong line-up, positional errors that
Bielsa owned up to and not enough fight. Over 90 minutes the team looked
troubled.
In the boardroom at Elland Road, the wind was turning
against him; not dramatically or viciously but to the extent that the idea of
replacing Bielsa in the summer was now the prevailing mood. A new season would
most likely mean a new head coach, unless a resurgence changed the landscape
again.
What nobody anticipated was the sharp acceleration of
anxiety that led to Bielsa’s dismissal, a quick fortnight later. One minute
there was confidence that if nothing else, Leeds would have it in them to fend
off relegation. The next minute that confidence had gone.
The murmuring about imminent change began rumbling on
Thursday evening, in the 24 hours after Leeds lost 6-0 at Liverpool.
Removing Bielsa from his position was a public relations
minefield. It went without saying that the finest manager the club had fallen
for this side of Howard Wilkinson, a coach revered in Leeds like almost no one
else, was not a manager the club could sack with impunity. But the
out-of-control concession of goals, the structure of the team, the confidence
of the squad, Bielsa’s judgment itself; all of it was worrying the club’s
hierarchy, compounded by an ever-worsening Premier League table.
Leeds were contemplating ending his reign before Saturday’s
game against Tottenham Hotspur and a brittle, 4-0 defeat led to a parting of
ways by Sunday morning.
Bielsa signed off from his final match, his 170th in charge,
with a respectful shake of Antonio Conte’s hand and a subdued walk to the
tunnel, the silent finish he least deserved. The defiance from the stands in
the second half gave the impression of a crowd who sensed they were nearing the
end of the Bielsa era, though defiance is something Elland Road does well
whenever times are hard.
In exiting like that, the 66-year-old was nothing if not
consistent, taking his leave with as few histrionics as he did on the night
when Leeds were as good as promoted in 2020. “Of course,” he replied when he
was asked if he could yet regain control of the season but his expression
implied that his own concern was growing.
He has been, to the last, a reluctant showman, someone who
could not fathom his own popularity or forgive his own failings, even if they
became more difficult to articulate as results turned sour. People in the
street would call him God and Bielsa would wag his finger at them, unable to
accept the comparison.
To the public, he was private but accessible, low-key but
politely affable, and Yorkshire quickly became his home. He moved out of his
famous flat above the chiropodists this season and into a nearby house
overlooking the River Wharfe, happy in those surroundings. He had a street
named after him, beer named after him, murals of him painted on various walls
and love unlimited.
But for all that, who knows if Bielsa will be back in these
parts or how often? Who will have the chance to say goodbye? It was often said
that when Bielsa moved on, he would rapidly make himself scarce.
The emergence of Jesse Marsch, the former RB Salzburg and RB
Leipzig manager, as Bielsa’s probable successor — an appointment Leeds would
like to secure rapidly, with an announcement due on Monday — shows that a
change has been brewing in the background. Marsch, 48, was a leading candidate
to take the job at Elland Road at the end of this season, if Leeds and Bielsa
parted company, but his out-of-work status and close relationship with director
of football Victor Orta made expediting talks simple.
Marsch’s teams have a reputation for pressing and dominating
possession, two things Bielsa’s squad have been trained for relentlessly. The
American is a close fit in that sense, albeit on the back of an unsuccessful
struggle to inherit Julian Nagelsmann’s Leipzig.
The best-case scenario for Leeds is that Marsch conducts a
quick refresh, extends some warmth to players who need reinvigorating, and
makes enough of the last 12 matches to keep the club safe. The worst-case
scenario is that the transition from coach to coach asks too much in a short
period and fails to halt imploding form, casting the decision as a mistimed
error.
Had Marsch been poised to replace Bielsa this summer anyway,
there might be advantages in him getting his foot in the door before his first
pre-season gets going but sources close to him are clear that he sees himself
as a coach of Premier League standing. The club would be a different
proposition in the Championship. And aside from anything else, succeeding
Bielsa means filling a monumental void, culturally and aesthetically.
Bielsa, as his position weakened, was not dragged down by
outright mutiny. There were niggles and frustrations and a frank conversation
between him and Raphinha after the Brazil forward was substituted at half-time
at Everton but the creep of doubt was incremental. Injuries became a huge
burden on Leeds but at no stage did training ease off. Instead, it intensified,
with murderball, the apple of Bielsa’s training eye, no longer limited to one
session a week.
The club suggested loan signings like Donny van de Beek in
January, a way of fleshing out a depleted squad, but Bielsa knocked them back.
In a month like this one in which Leeds conceded 20 goals, unflinching tactics
became a bone of contention for the board too. A source close to one of the
players described them as “exhausted” by the pressure of a system that was no
longer functioning consistently.
Very little of this was new and Leeds had spent the previous
three years extolling the virtues of Bielsa’s single-mindedness — the
fastidious commitment to specific methods, a picky approach to the transfer
market, a refusal to flip-flop. Single-mindedness was the basis of his impact
at Elland Road but his reluctance to adapt when results suggested that adapting
was necessary posed the question in the boardroom of whether the decline in
form might take them down; about whether deference to Bielsa was leading to
paralysis.
There was very little point in challenging him on specific
principles because challenging principles was the equivalent of telling Bielsa
that faith in him was waning, a strategy akin to nudging him out of the door.
Voicing a loss of confidence meant doing what Leeds eventually did and removing
him from his post.
The irony for Bielsa is that he was convinced last summer
that he and the squad were in ideal shape for his fourth season at Leeds. He
lost weight and took on a personal training programme, deciding that the stress
of the Premier League and coaching in general demanded a stricter focus on his
own fitness.
The physical data produced by his players in pre-season was
better than in any previous summer. He pushed again on the infrastructure front
by convincing Leeds to match a new state-of-the-art pitch at Elland Road by
laying the same surface at their training ground. Very few of his proposals for
improving facilities were resisted. The suggestion that Leeds create a small
putting green for the players at Thorp Arch was one of the few things the club
declined to do. In return, Bielsa spent more than £100,000 building a gym for
non-playing staff at Elland Road.
The football, though, regressed this season, to the naked
eye and statistically. Leeds were no longer the same attacking machine and no
longer able to compensate for porous defending by scoring goals. Injuries
ravaged their squad and did not relent, a brutal strain on resources that took
out three pillars of the team in Kalvin Phillips, Patrick Bamford and Liam
Cooper. Their last clean sheet, at home to Crystal Palace in November, is one
of only three to date.
Bielsa was drawn into ideological arguments over his choice
of line-ups and substitutes, manifested in his regular use of Tyler Roberts
over Joe Gelhardt. All of Bielsa’s final four fixtures saw at least two
substitutions before the start of the second half, the mark of a team that
would not pick itself. The effort of the players encouraged him but tactically
he could not deny that his plan was falling short. “Positive things are
contagious,” he said after full-time against Spurs. “So are negative things.”
The dismissal of a coach who was untouchable for so long
will pose awkward questions of the directors at Leeds. Were they right to
assume that the investment they made in new signings on the back of their
promotion season would largely see them through two years? Was last summer as
busy as it should have been and did drawing a blank in the search for a central
midfielder set the tone for a dressing room that clearly needed one? When they
spent, did enough of the signings work? Should they have argued more vociferously
for Bielsa to take on extra resources if they thought more resources were
needed? And ultimately, could this premature conclusion have been avoided?
Bielsa regularly answered those questions by fighting the
club’s corner. They had invested sufficiently, he would say, and more than
enough for him and the team to be doing better. They had backed him on cosmetic
and structural changes to the training facilities and his authority as head
coach was absolute, free of interference from above.
But over time a gap developed in the peak-years zone of the
dressing room, with an old guard growing older and a younger core too far away
from their prime, and the priority for Leeds if they do stay up will be to
build a squad more suited to the Premier League than this season’s has been.
They have known all along that any transition from Bielsa would involve
substantial recruitment on the playing side, providing his successor with a
different hand to play with, and that fact is staring them in the face.
With Bielsa, it was as he promised: Plan A to the last, even
when his man-to-man set-up came under the most severe pressure. The players
stuck at it because in so many cases, Bielsa’s football was the making of them:
athletes who thought they had a low ceiling inspired to smash it spectacularly.
Some made it into international football on his watch. Many saw their earning
potential rocket and most experienced technical and tactical improvement,
punching above their perceived weight.
The personal gains filtered down to others outside the
dressing room, like the security guard who won a Fiat 500 in Bielsa’s last
Christmas raffle. So many people owed him something, not least a crowd who
never turned on him. They valued the drive and immersed themselves in the
education, hoping the ride would continue forever.
The partnership between Leeds and Bielsa was built on the
quality of his football but there was more to it than football alone and if
that sounds twee, ask the people who followed it from start to finish. Walk
around the city and look at the imprint he is leaving on it or wade back
through the years when the only direction Leeds were going was straight over a
cliff. Much of his work was art and brilliantly conceived.
Bielsa and Leeds were almost the definition of chaos theory:
a coach who some considered to be unmanageable colliding with a club who many
considered to be unmanageable and both of them finding glory in each other.
