The tale of one man’s quest to work for Marcelo Bielsa – and how he achieved it - The Athletic 9/2/22

Andy Mitten

The 33-year-old Argentinian dreams big of being a football coach, but the reality is that he’s down to his last €400 and needs to take a job in a Dublin shop selling Argentine foods to expats, locals and tourists.

It’s March 2014, and Diego Flores, a former semi-professional footballer and PE teacher, lives in Ireland with the primary aim of learning English.

It’s his first time outside his home country and he helps coach a junior team and play for Kingswood in Ireland’s capital. Flores knows few people; his family are in Argentina, his father has not long died. Few opportunities knock, but the man who’d published a children’s fiction book about a boy and his donkey that he sold copies of on buses to football matches in Argentina, never gives up hope.

Two months earlier, in January 2014, Flores, who idolised Marcelo Bielsa and had good enough coaching qualifications to take charge of a top-level team in Argentina, had saved enough to take a flight from Dublin to Southampton to see the club managed at that time by his compatriot Mauricio Pochettino.

Not that Pochettino or any of his staff knew he was coming.

“I arrived late in Southampton and the hotels were £100 which was out of my price range,” he tells The Athletic.

“My budget was £40 a day in Southampton and I could hardly speak English.

“I decided to sleep in the street, but it was cold; it was January. A taxi driver stopped and suggested a hostel, so I walked there. The hostel owner wasn’t there, but his father was and I tried to explain my situation in bad English.

“He told me that I could stay without paying, but when his son came back in two days, I’d have to pay around £20 a night. This was great news. I’m not sure I’d get an offer of such generosity elsewhere.”

The next day, Flores made his way to Southampton’s training ground where the security, not surprisingly, told him that he wouldn’t be able to enter. He had a cold and thought about cutting his losses and getting back to Dublin overland but decided to give it another try the following day.

“I saw a big Porsche and the Argentinian player Dani Osvaldo in it,” Flores explains. “He stopped for me and I told him that I was a coach from Argentina and would like to watch training. He listened, I’m not sure what he thought, but he told me to wait. He went inside and told Pochettino about me. The result was that I was allowed to watch training where I was struck by the speed of the passing.

“Later, I was in the club shop. By chance, Pochettino saw me and invited me to attend his press conference and also watch some more training sessions, but not on the day before a game.

“I saw an under-21s game against Manchester United and another two games in total. It was like a dream, my first contact with professional football. I saw that the people involved were human like me and not just robots you saw on television. It was a big motivation for me.”

Inspired, Flores returned to Ireland. He also now had one contact, Pochettino’s assistant, Miguel D’Agostino. And he had an idea about how to get in touch with Bielsa.

Flores had grown up in and around Cordoba, Argentina’s second-most populous city. He played football, rode horses in the mountains and swam in the rivers.

“Everything to make a boy happy,” he explains. “My family loved football, I wanted to be a professional footballer and played it until my parents called me to bed, but when I realised that wasn’t going to happen, I trained as a PE teacher at university and also played (semi-professional) football.

“As a teacher, I also started to coach the school football team when I was 24. I had two very good players and one is now an Argentine rugby international, another a professional footballer. I studied leadership a lot, I was very dedicated. I knew that eventually I wanted to be a coach and read about what made different coaches successful. I dreamed big and wrote that by the time I was 34 I would be a professional football coach and that one of the things I would need to do is speak three or four languages.”

Flores studied the finest Argentine coaches: Carlos Bilardo, Jorge Valdano, Hector Cuper, Cesar Menotti, but most of all he studied Bielsa whom Pep Guardiola described as the best in the world. He also did his coaching badges.

“By 31 I knew I’d need to properly learn English, in addition to the conversational French I had from school,” he states.

“My plan was to save to study English in Dublin for eight months because it was cheaper than England and then French in France for eight months. Four months into my time in Dublin, I needed to find a job. It was more expensive than I’d thought, but the job paid me €1,000 per month. I shared an apartment with seven people and the rent was only €200 a month. After I spent the rest on food and lessons, I was saving money for a trip to France when my English was good enough — and then that trip to Southampton.”

Bielsa, meanwhile, was in between jobs in Bilbao and Marseille.

Flores knew that he was preparing his coaching staff for their next job and that they often prepared in the same town outside Buenos Aires, Maximo Paz.

He asked his friend Camilo to visit the town to try to get a message to Bielsa or his people.

Camilo didn’t meet Bielsa but instead met a volunteer who used to work with one of his assistants Diego Reyes, who was told about Diego Flores.

The links were incredibly tenuous.

In the meantime, the budding manager moved to Paris to brush up on the language.

“Everything was so expensive and I knew straight away that I wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in Paris. Then I read in the newspapers that Bielsa had accepted a job at Marseille and so I moved there,” he says matter of factly.

It was while living in a hostel in Marseille, he received an email.

“It was from Diego Reyes. They knew I could speak French and he invited me to come and see them. I cried when I received this email and the girl on the reception in the hostel asked if I was OK.”

The two Diegos met and got on. Reyes was one of Bielsa’s trusted lieutenants and asked Flores to come in, help and learn.

“I’d help a little with translation, I was prepared to do anything just to be in the world of professional football. I wasn’t paid, I just wanted to help, to be in an environment where I could learn. I’d do anything, but while I wasn’t directly with the first team, I was always there if needed. I hardly spoke to Marcelo.”

Money ran short again, and with his visa running out, he had to return to Argentina.

There, he saved enough money for a flight back to Europe, then flew to Madrid — the main European hub for flights from South America — and into trouble.

“Spanish officials wouldn’t let me back into Europe because there was an issue with my visa. They put me in a little prison in the airport and sent me back to Argentina the next day. It was there that my old boss in Ireland offered me a job. I needed the money. After one week, I decided to push again to get back to Europe and went to Dublin where I worked. I still felt I still needed to improve my English too by studying, so that would help. After six months there, I asked if I could go back to Marseille because some of the staff had left and maybe they needed my help as a volunteer.

“I worked more closely with Marcelo and had more of a relationship with him. I’d also translate the French newspapers and scout opponents — not that mine were the only reports they would use. I still felt like a student in the university of Marcelo Bielsa.

“One day, the staff were talking about needing to speak to Mauricio Pochettino but had no way of contacting him. I said that I had the number of his assistant and they looked at me surprised.

“I was asked to analyse opponents while all the time Marcelo was analysing me. One day he asked me when I’d last been in Argentina. It had been a while and he offered to pay for a flight so that I could see my family for eight days. I appreciated this.”

Marseille’s assistant manager was the Belgian, Jan Van Winckel. He’d been impressed by Flores, his diligence and his reports on opponents. Van Winckel was offered a senior role of his own as the technical director of the Saudi Arabian Football Association and offered to take Flores with him.

“It was a very good offer and a chance to earn some money but I felt I had so much to learn under Marcelo. I knew little about professional football, my knowledge was empty. You can do all your coaching badges like I did, but then you see the real world, the day to day and every day was an education.

“I was only concerned that I had enough money to eat, I didn’t need any more. I felt like I would be betraying Marcelo if I left because I only had this chance because of Marcelo. I think Marcelo found this out and appreciated it. My relationship changed with him after I started to work closer with him.”

Bielsa resigned from Marseille in August 2015 and went back to Argentina.

Flores, by now part of his team, went with him.

“We, four or five of us, would look at teams who had maybe contacted Marcelo and evaluate them. Swansea City was one.

“We soon knew all kinds of detail about every player at Swansea. We would even look at what part of the head a player headed the ball. We would reach conclusions whether the player was good enough or needed to be replaced. At all times, Marcelo was there to correct us.

“I might think that a player is fast because he looks like he’s running fast, but Marcelo would explain how he was actually slow. Or that a player who I thought was slow because he looked it and his stats said so was actually fast as footballer.

“We would build up a huge bank of knowledge about players, and under him, I felt I was at the best football university in the world. When he had all the knowledge he would accept or reject a job off the back of his information.

“Then it was Lazio, who Marcelo agreed to join and but only for two days as he felt that promises were quickly broken. Then it was Lille in France. I went to Lille as part of his team in 2017 and lived there — a great experience. I was analysing teams, coaching, translating.”

Flores had been single; he could dedicate his entire life to football, living in hostels or wherever he needed to lay his head without worrying about a family to support. He would meet his wife, from Argentina, in 2017. He was back home in 2018 waiting for the next job — that’s when Leeds United made contact with Bielsa.

“We set to work. We would work from 8am until 11pm if needed. We put hundreds of hours into studying Leeds United. We’d look at how players reacted in one on ones when defending, we’d go deep into all their statistics. And then Marcelo would ask us to go deeper.

“By the time Victor Orta and Carlos Corberan (a Spanish speaker then in charge of Leeds under-23s, now first-team boss at Huddersfield Town) came to see us in Buenos Aires, we could tell them everything about Leeds United. When they asked Marcelo what he knew about the Championship, he could tell them everything about the Championship and every team in it, the way they played and how Leeds played them. I remember myself doing Sheffield United, who would be a rival for us.”

Bielsa also made suggestions about some of the things he wanted to change such as beds at the training ground so the players could rest. It was as if Leeds had to convince Bielsa why he should take the job.

For Flores, it was a continual learning experience. “I could see my dream of becoming a coach getting closer. We won the Championship and I was very happy with that amazing group of players.

“We had a good team. I lived in an apartment in Leeds (Bielsa lived closer to the training ground and walked there), but I was hardly there. I would work almost every day.

“Marcelo has a small staff around him and we each had duties. Some would be more on the administration side; I would help a lot at the training ground. I’d also translate for Marcelo with the media. I would interpret what he was saying and explain it to the media.” He didn’t have to translate Bielsa’s long justification about why he’d spied on Derby County.

In July 2019, Leeds flew to Australia and played Manchester United in front of 60,000 in Perth. Leeds had a huge travelling following in Western Australia and Flores was the man charged with speaking to the media — not as a translator but as a coach who’d just seen his team beaten.

“I was just honest — I explained my interpretations of the game like I was qualified to do. I felt the journalists who covered Leeds really cared for the club, too. They were on this fantastic ride, just like we were. I liked living in Leeds. Sometimes I’d get recognised, but people were always respectful. We had a team which was winning matches, the stadium was full, the fans passionate and they would follow the team in huge numbers.”

Leeds were about to play in England’s top flight for the first time since 2003-04, but Flores, much to the surprise of Leeds, wasn’t going to be a part of it.

“I’d felt uncomfortable when there was no reason to feel like this,” he explains. “Something inside me told me that I needed to change, that I was ready to be a coach myself and wanted to make the next step. I didn’t want to be disloyal to Marcelo or accept another offer, so I took the risk and left Leeds. I wanted to end on good terms with him after what he’d done for me, giving me not just a professional but human education. This was a man who was like a father to me in Europe after I’d lost my own father. It had been an intense few years with Leeds and I had given everything I had, but I was confident that another offer would come when I was home in Argentina, but I also wanted to spend some time with my family.”

And family life was busy.

“Marcelo got in touch with me last year (2021) when I was really ill with COVID-19 and our first child was about to be born,” he says. “I had bacteria in my muscles and couldn’t even stand up. He sent me a voice message and I started to cry. It was important to me.”

They have not forgotten Flores at Leeds. A few months ago, staff at the club’s training ground came across a small box containing a Championship winner’s medal. Closer inspection showed it to be the medal Flores was awarded with the rest of Bielsa’s staff after promotion in 2020, accidentally left behind when he said his goodbyes at the end of that season.

Plans are now afoot to return the medal to him in Argentina, giving him a lasting memento of his achievement at Elland Road and one of Bielsa’s finest hours. COVID-19 has made travelling to South America difficult but it will be delivered to him in person once someone finds a window in which to make the trip to Mendoza themselves.

Flores started to be sounded out and in August 2021 he accepted the job of manager at Godoy Cruz, a small club but long a stalwart of Argentina’s top flight, from the beautiful city of Mendoza near the Andes. Young managers get a chance there, Martin Palermo in 2012, Gabriel Heinze in 2015.

Godoy Cruz had never been champions of Argentina, though they finished second to Boca Juniors in 2018. But when the 2019-20 season was ended because of the pandemic, they were bottom of the league.

“It’s a historic club in Argentina in an area famous for wine; I had the interview and was offered the job on the same day.

“By this time, I had my own staff to prepare, just like I’d prepared with Marcelo. It was our turn to learn everything about new players. We didn’t have much time, it was mid-season and we had days to prepare for our first game.”

Godoy Cruz were 21st in the league, had won one in seven, leading to the dismissal of their previous boss. They were facing the relegation that COVID-19 had saved them from in 2020 while their Uruguayan striker Santiago Garcia who’d scored 17 when they finished second, took his own life aged 30.

Flores started well, his team scoring four in his first game, a 4-0 win over Gimnasia La Plata, who Maradona managed until his death in November 2020.

Flores’s team pressed high and they won their second game 4-1 when Flores controversially took a tearful winger off after 30 minutes as he wanted more dominance.

They drew their third league game under their new boss 1-1, then scored four for the third time in four league games with a 4-1 away win at Independiente.

Seven league games into his first job as a manager, his previously struggling side were unbeaten and relegation fears vanished. In the cup, Godoy eliminated Racing Club, one of the biggest teams in Argentina, then Tigre, to reach the semi-finals against Talleres from Flores’ home city Cordoba. They lost 1-0 to the team that eventually won the cup.

Flores is optimistic about the imminent new season. “We have very good young players. That can lead to some inconsistency as we saw last season, and with young players, you have to work more on the emotional side, but last season was the first in the top division for 10 of them. Now they’re in the second season and they all have 30 games of experience.

“I want my team to play aggressively and high, to play the ball on the ground, to attack with six players. I want them to grow as players and people.

“I didn’t reach my aim of becoming a professional coach by 34, but I did become a coach and I’m determined to be a successful one. If I am, maybe I’ll go back to Europe.”

If he does, he’s unlikely to need to work in a shop this time because he’s running out of money.