Over to Jesse Marsch. Who is he, and what does he do? - The Square Ball 28/2/22
THE NEW GUY
Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
Jesse Marsch, Princeton Class of ’96, author of the senior
thesis ‘Shaken, Not Stirred: An Evaluation of Earthquake Awareness in
California‘, should be well prepared for stepping into the seismic crack
created from Beeston to Wetherby by the Leeds United board’s decision to
replace Marcelo Bielsa with him.
“Believe it or not, I love this passion. There’s a lot of
clubs in this league that would have none of this. I know how privileged I am
to be the coach of this team. I’m excited to be here. I know I have a huge
challenge ahead of me.”
That was Marsch in January 2015, with New York Red Bulls
executives alongside him, addressing a crowd of angry fans demanding to know
why he was taking over from just-fired Mike Petke. Feelings were running so
high that supporters were guerrilla streaming the event on the UStream.tv
platform, a cute reminder of when Leeds fans used to smuggle phones and use the
same service to broadcast Ken Bates’ closed door meetings back in the League
One days. I don’t really understand anyone having that passion for a team that
only plays so it can advertise an energy drink, but after winning over the fans
in New York and moving onto the other franchises in Leipzig, then Salzburg,
then Leipzig again, maybe Marsch can tell me.
“I’m a Red Bull guy,” he told The Athletic last April. “I’m
a company man. I never thought I’d really say that, but that’s the truth. The
people are amazing, the football is amazing, the whole idea of what we are —
I’m totally bought into it.”
Not any more he’s not. He’s back where he was in 2015, the
Aser Ventures and/or 49ers Enterprises company’s outsider choice to replace a
coach whose relationship with supporters wasn’t enough to protect him from the
sack. In New York, Petke’s popularity was easy to explain: he was winning
trophies. Bielsa’s popularity in Leeds can’t be defined so simply, or merely as
popularity. Marsch’s best plan might be what worked in New York. “Ultimately,
what’s going to matter is, ‘What are the results?'” he told that angry meeting.
“If we lose, you’re going to hate me. If we win, maybe you’ll learn to put up
with me.” The joy of Bielsa was that he made football feel like it could be
about much more than that, but Marsch has been selling soft drinks for the last
seven years so he should probably just do the football and leave the culture to
us.
He seems willing to learn. In Germany and Austria he learned
the languages, and their differences, and their cultural meanings. He travelled
around sightseeing and ate local, conducting media interviews over bratwurst.
After a rough season in charge of Montreal Impact back in 2012, he and his
family took a long round the world trip. “I almost feel like I’m an
anthropologist or a sociologist,” he has said, which is nice, but also quite
stereotypical of an old grand-tour American view of the world. Anthropologising
in the wrong Yorkshire pub could get you a slap.
For the football, he has plenty of ideas but at Leeds he
won’t be working from the same toolkit as other coaches when they’re brought in
to save the day. Marsch isn’t being brought to Leeds to burn everything down,
Allardyce style; he’s been chosen because his football should be a good fit
with Bielsa’s. After the Spurs game, Bielsa said many of our defensive problems
had been starting in the attacking half, where our press wasn’t stopping the
other team’s defenders playing quality passes to their attackers. Marsch is all
about pressing, and not just to defend. Writing about Marsch’s team in New
York, The Athletic’s Sam Stejskal said:
If a team that presses as high as New York did from
2015-2018 isn’t incredibly fit or on the exact same page, they can easily get
picked apart. That almost never happened under Marsch, who helped turn the Red
Bulls into one of the best teams in MLS despite having one of the lowest
payrolls in the league.
And at the start of his work as head coach in Leipzig last
year, Marsch said his team would, “be aggressive to win balls in the attacking
part of the field and will be aggressive to convert those turnovers into goals
and big chances.” He uses an acronym with some German words, S.A.R.D., to break
it down: S for sprinting; A for ‘alle gemeinsam’ or ‘all together’, players
pressing the ball together instead of man to man; R for ‘reingehen’ or ‘going
in’, to attack the ball completely into the tackle, not stop short of an
opponent; then D for dazukommen, ‘the second wave of the press’, backing up the
first.
At Leipzig he was taking over from Julian Nagelsmann, a
coach with a very different style, and that undid him. The players were not
suited to Marsch’s ideas. A bout of Covid for Jesse, and for his wife a
frightening but thankfully operable breast cancer, made everyone involved
realise there was a simple solution to the clash of playing styles and staff:
for Marsch to walk away this past December and let a more appropriate coach
take over. But in his first optimistic blushes in Germany, he was sure he could
get Leipzig working, starting by taking things up a notch:
“The first weeks of training were immediately physically way
more intensive than they were the last two years. And, typically, that’s what I
like to do. I like to kind of hit them in the face quickly with intensity in
training, and then to also build a mentality of what that training is and feels
like. I’ve even challenged them in the gym to be more aggressive, to focus more
on physical development, to make sure that we’re strong and fit and that we’re
explosive. So, it’s everything from the training, to the training methods, to
the work in the gym, to what we emphasise on a daily basis. Most of them know
this, but now they’re feeling it at my intensity levels. And again, I think
they will be incredibly rewarded.”
Hitting players in the face with more physical intensity
doesn’t feel like what’s needed at Thorp Arch after a winter of cranked up
murderball, so Marsch will have to use something else to give Leeds a quick
fix. His other selling point, he has said, is him. At Leipzig, he was eager to
talk about his “energy, leadership style, communication style and investment in
the players and in the team”:
“I believe that what makes me a little bit different is my
idea of leadership and my idea of communication. I say it’s not one thing, it’s
everything. It’s the energy when I show up here, the smile I have on my face
when I say good morning to the guys, when I ask them how they’re doing, when I
check in about their families, when I tell them how I thought the training was
yesterday or how they did in the last game, what I think the next steps are for
them, when I joke with them. It’s the overall interaction process in the
training centre that’s about how we work together, what our idea is of a
workday, what our idea is of a real team. It’s how I give them room, how I give
them positive feedback, how I encourage them to give and give and give and give
… And, honestly, it just winds up being more fun.”
At Salzburg, every training session would start with the
whole squad in a circle, their arms around each other. And it worked. His win
percentage in Salzburg was 68% — although it helped to have Erling Haaland
scoring the goals in a comparatively weak league. But in New York, where he was
working with Mike Grella and Lloyd Sam, he still won 49.6% of the time, winning
the Supporters’ Shield in 2015, aka the league title.
Energy, smiles, jokes and group hugs might be what’s needed
at Leeds, especially after this weekend’s events plunged Thorp Arch into two
days of tearful mourning. I don’t think Bielsa ran a sad club — Henry Winter’s
story of him writing a card in Spanish to congratulate Pat Bamford for his
daughter’s birth, saying he was doing it because he knows Pat understands his
language, is typical of Bielsa’s kind of well-chosen gesture: occasional but
significant, and personal, and something nobody else would think of. But his
warmth was rationed and at work he was omnipotent from an awkward
near-distance. The watchful scowl and repetitive instructions might become a
barrier over nearly four years.
Marsch believes more in empowerment. At Salzburg he told his
players that ‘all in’ was going to be a core part of their team philosophy,
then asked them to define it so it was their phrase, not his, so they would,
“hold each other to their own standards, and they will be disappointed in
anyone who does not stay true to what they created.” After his pre-season at
Leipzig last summer, he said:
“We still have a long way to go with a lot of different
things, but even when we have something like a leadership council meeting in
training camp, they have the chance to express opinions, to say what they
think, to have their voices heard. And at the end of that meeting, at the end
of the two hours, I think they all walk away feeling like, ‘Okay, this is a
group project. It’s not just us being told what we’re supposed to do.'”
Bielsa knew his leaders, senior players he would listen to.
But I think Marsch will have reason to be grateful that he is empowering Kalvin
Phillips, Stuart Dallas, Liam Cooper and Mateusz Klich in 2022, not their 2018
versions.
As Marsch is coming off a bad time in Leipzig, we have to
hope that following Bielsa at Leeds suits him better than following Nagelsmann
there, and that he learned a few things from a rare adverse season in his
upward coaching trajectory so far. One thing Marsch suggests he took from his
experience of the last year sounds a lot like something the old boss stuck to
until his last day in charge of Leeds. Marsch says:
“Maybe that is a lesson I learned — that you have to stick
to the things you believe in, from a leadership and training perspective.
Everything you do, you have to be fully convinced.”