Jesse Marsch interview: ‘To grow up as I did and where I did, to be here now feels almost impossible’ - The Athletic 24/3/22
Phil Hay
Chicago is where Jesse Marsch discovered the sport that
would take over his life.
He was five years old and visiting an older cousin in the
Windy City. They spent a pleasant afternoon kicking a ball around in the
backyard, losing track of time.
“This is football,” his cousin told him.
The next morning, back home in the neighbouring state of
Wisconsin, Marsch woke up and asked his parents if he could join a football
team. “They were like, ‘OK’, but they had no idea what the sport was, or how to
get me signed up,” he says. “There was no internet, so we drove to the YMCA at
a local recreational centre and asked them at the front desk — ‘Do you guys
have a league?’.
“They said they did and they told us that sign-up would be
in a week or so. That was it for me.”
Marsch is thinking back to the late 1970s and America’s
Midwest, a time and a place where football was an incredibly niche hobby.
He and his friends played baseball, ice hockey, basketball
and golf, but it was unusual to be drawn to football and Marsch cannot pretend
that, as a schoolboy, he saw any semblance of a career in the game.
“That was never on my radar,” he says. “Even when I chose to
go to Princeton (a prestigious Ivy League university in New Jersey), it was
based solely on the fact that I could use football to get in the door.
“I was a good student but not good enough based on grades
and tests, not good enough on merit — I wouldn’t have got into Princeton
without being an athlete. Football meant that I did.”
Yet here he is today, Leeds United’s head coach in the
Premier League, sitting at the club’s training ground on a day that has the
first hint of spring to it. We are discussing his childhood and his path in
life because, last week, after Leeds’ exhilarating win from 2-0 down against Wolverhampton
Wanderers, Marsch said something interesting at his post-match press
conference: “With where I’m from, I should never be here. Really, I should
never be here.”
Marsch has a long history in the game, building himself up
through the US college leagues, then as a professional footballer for a decade
in his homeland’s MLS and as a coach in New York, Salzburg in Austria,
Germany’s Leipzig and, after his appointment last month, Leeds.
So in saying that he should not be here in Yorkshire, what
did he mean?
“In one of the first interviews I did in Austria, they asked
me if I’d dreamed of coaching in the Champions League,” he says. “I said no
because that wasn’t possible for someone like me to dream about. I’d dreamed of
living in Europe so I could watch the Champions League at night! That was all.
“Where I come from, this sport isn’t huge. To grow up as I
did and to grow up where I grew up, to be here now in this situation feels
almost impossible.
“What does that mean for me? It means that in some ways I’ve
got nothing to lose and nothing to be afraid of. If I’m here then I’ll go for
it and do everything to make sure I’ve got no regrets.
“Do whatever it takes and don’t look back. That mentality’s
worked well for me.”
Growing up in Racine, a small industrial city (population
77,000 — about the same as Scunthorpe) 70 miles north of Chicago on the banks
of Lake Michigan, all Marsch could say about his aspirations was that had no
desire to work in a factory.
His father did long hours on a production line, making parts
for tractors. Marsch admired his work ethic and it was not unusual for his dad
to do the “third shift” — the night shift — and push on through to the early
hours of the morning.
“He had accidents, like when he lost half a finger,” Marsch
says. “He still makes jokes about how his hands look and we always thought of
him as a very hard worker. My mum too.
“My dad would say to me and my younger brother, ‘Don’t do
anything halfway. If you do it, do it right’. He talked regularly about hard
work and it was clear in our house that hard work meant a lot. It was
instilled.”
Racine was a fairly safe environment for kids — “Big enough
that there were things to do but small enough that it was hard to get yourself
into any major trouble,” as Marsch remembers it.
He did well for his first football team, Dynamo, and after a
few years, he was chosen for a more prominent local side, a team that travelled
further away from home for matches. Through that development, he met one of his
closest friends, Alex Seidel, who is now a chef and runs various restaurants in
which Marsch has invested.
“The funny thing is, we played against each other for three
years and hated each other,” Marsch says. “He was tall, he was blond, he was
this really good player and yeah, we hated each other.
“Then for the first time, they started what we called a
travel team in the city and they wanted to put us both in the same team. We
were the two best players in town but I said, ‘I’ll play as long as that
blond-haired kid isn’t on the team’. They told me he had to be on it so we
started playing together.
“Now he’s one of my best and oldest friends and we’ve got
restaurants together. I’ve invested and he’s been named as one of the best
chefs in the country. All this from when we were five years old in a rec
league, playing against each other and hating each other.”
For all the talent he had as a midfielder, Marsch envisaged
going to college and then heading on to business school. Something like that.
His grades would have gained him entry to various
universities — “I was offered a full ride to Duke, Indiana, Virginia, some
really good schools” — but as soon as he visited Princeton, he was sold. “I
came home and told my parents that was where I wanted to go,” he says.
The problem was Princeton is an Ivy League institution,
along with the likes of Yale and Harvard, and expensive to attend.
His parents pulled the money together and Marsch worked to
raise some himself.
“Nowadays these schools have grants,” he says. “They have
endowments worth billions but back then, my parents had to make big sacrifices
for me to go there and pay that sort of money. It was a big development in my
life, for sure.” His career owes much to it.
Playing football for the Princeton Tigers opened up the
wider world to him. He would travel to Europe for youth tournaments, some of
them in the UK, and the culture on this side of the Atlantic drew him in.
“We’d got to England, to France, to Germany, and it sparked
my interest about what it would be like to live in Europe,” Marsch says. “I
wasn’t even thinking about football so much. I was thinking about life. When I
came over here to manage, part of the excitement was about introducing my
family to something different.”
Marsch is grateful for the fact that his coach at Princeton
was Bob Bradley, who has gone on to be one of America’s most successful and
recognisable football managers. They would later work together when the latter
was in charge of the US national team but in the college setting, Bradley
(below) was a forward thinker who brought numerous new ideas to his Princeton
side. He was easy for Marsch to respect and full of lasting lessons for him.
“He’s a big reason I am where I am,” Marsch says. “I learned
the business from him. He ran our university team like it was professional. He
held us to standards of nutrition and wanted good habits on the pitch and away
from it. He was very tactical and we were one of the first university teams to
play with a zonal back four.
“That group of people who played with Bob, we’re all still
very close. Some went into football, some went on to other things but all of us
took a lot of Bob’s leadership and mentality with us.”
That leads us onto Bradley’s own brush with British football
and the Premier League — an 11-game managerial stint at Swansea City from October
to December 2016 that was over as soon as it began.
Bradley was said to have interviewed extremely well, but Swansea’s players struggled to take to him and all around him was a stigma that Marsch is only too happy to talk about: the trope of whether Americans and football were ever supposed to mix.
“I was angry about it, honestly,” Marsch says of Bradley’s
Swansea sacking, having won two of those 11 games and lost seven. “I knew how
hard he’d worked to get himself there and watching it crumble was awful.
“Maybe a couple of results go differently and the momentum,
the way he was treated, could have been different too but to see that happen to
someone I knew had invested his entire life in the sport… to be rejected in the
way he was, it was hard for us Americans to swallow.”
There is something odd about the way Americans in football
are exposed to ridicule and tarred by a broad brush that would be frowned upon
if it was applied to other groups en masse.
Marsch is not blind to the stereotypes and, as he said in
his very first press conference at Leeds, he understands it to a point. It was
his choice to bring up Ted Lasso and make light of the TV series about a US
coach in charge of a fictional English club, preempting questions about it
before they came his way.
Is it not unfair, though, that a coach who has worked to
school himself, as Marsch has, should have to bat away a fairly old-fashioned
stigma?
The 48-year-old says he began looking into coaching at the
age of 26, while he was still playing in MLS, and he qualified for his UEFA Pro
Licence in Scotland, flying back and forth from the States during international
breaks when he was head coach of New York Red Bulls in MLS. After taking over
at Red Bull Salzburg in summer 2019, he became fluent in German in the space of
two years, preferring not to rely on English.
“I was studying for 10, 15 years, long before I finished
playing, keeping journals and training manuals,” he says. “I came to Europe to
see how other environments were run. I wanted to be as prepared as I possibly
could be before I actually became a manager.”
Which surely makes his nationality irrelevant? “There are
far more unfair things in the world than me being ridiculed for my accent,” he
says. “I’m aware of the way Bradley (now coach and sporting director at MLS
side Toronto) was treated but I’m a different personality. I might be made fun
of but I don’t take it personally.
“I wasn’t picked apart in Austria or Germany for speaking
German and becoming fluent in German in two years — for an old man, believe me,
that wasn’t easy! But again, a lot of what’s going on in the world is so much
more important. As long as I have an environment where the team respect the
work that’s done and commit themselves to it, I’m happy. My way is to laugh at
myself. I can laugh about Ted Lasso. It’s funny.”
I ask Marsch if succeeding at Leeds might open the door for
more American coaches to come to Europe. It is the second time he has had that
question put to him in the space of two days. “Yesterday, I was asked about me
carrying a torch for football in America and, listen, I get it,” he says. “It’s
a big deal in the US, but I can’t think about that. I appreciate the support
and the interest and if thousands of Americans become Leeds fans then that
would be awesome. But I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to focus on what my job
here actually is.”
This is Leeds, after all, a job that does not take
prisoners.
And after a short-lived, four-month reign at RB Leipzig in
Germany’s Bundesliga earlier this season, Leeds represent a second chance for
Marsch.
Marsch does have some happy memories of Leipzig.
In the 2018-19 season, between managing New York Red Bulls
and taking over at Salzburg 11 months later, he accepted the role of assistant
to Ralf Rangnick at the German side. Walking into Rangnick’s world was an
education for him, like nothing he expected.
“The first thing I learned was how specific and detailed the
Germans are in the way they think and talk about football,” Marsch says.
“They’re lasered-in on the smallest of details. It’s a quality of Germans, I
think. They’re very detail orientated and specific.
“I thought I was detail orientated about football until I
met Rangnick. Then I knew I wasn’t.
“This was a guy who worked through a system, a vocabulary and methodology that I never even thought was possible. I called it an explosion in my head because it taught me a new way of thinking. From there, I was learning more and more and detailing things more and more. It was an important moment for me.”
When he returned to Leipzig as their manager at the
beginning of this season, after a two-year stint at Salzburg, the reality was
far less positive.
Marsch has explained several times why he thinks it went
wrong for him there and why he was sacked in early December after only 21
matches. His tactics were not right for the squad he inherited and the
environment never felt comfortable. It was apparent in the space of a few
months that he and Leipzig were not going to click, lacking the chemistry he
believes he has already found at Leeds.
Away from work, Marsch’s wife, Kim, had been diagnosed with
breast cancer. She has since made a good recovery — “we’re in a great place but
the three-month checks are always a bit shaky” — but Marsch says that had her
condition required more invasive or draining treatment, he would not have taken
the Leipzig job. Professional football rarely allows for a good work-life
balance and the worry about his wife’s condition was intense.
“It affected us in a lot of ways, you can say that,” Marsch
says. “When someone you know has breast cancer, you realise how many other
people are affected by it. You quickly develop empathy. One of the things I
learned is the words we use — survivors, fighting, winning the battle — but
strong people live and strong people die from this situation.
“It was a big shock to us because in many ways, with our
lifestyle you consider yourself invincible — willing to try new things, joyous
in life. We were lucky that the variant wasn’t so dangerous. If my wife had
needed chemotherapy, I wouldn’t have gone to Leipzig.
“It affected my job at Leipzig, for sure. Often I had my
mind in two places and in this job, you have to be laser-focused. But while it
made things hard, it created some clarity too. When I wasn’t happy and when
Leipzig wasn’t going the way I wanted it to go, life was too short to fight for
something that wasn’t making sense to me.
“Things happen for a reason and that situation reinforced what’s important to me — belief in yourself and belief in people. I didn’t feel that at Leipzig, so it was time to leave.”
Kim flew to England to join Marsch on the night of his
second game in charge, when Leeds were beaten 3-0 at home by Aston Villa — a
match that taught Marsch that the role he has taken on can age a manager
dramatically overnight.
But then came Norwich City and Wolves away, two
stoppage-time victories that kept Leeds’ head above water in the Premier
League’s relegation fight and, for the first time since his appointment on
February 28, gave Marsch a chance to breathe.
The more he travels in and out of Leeds, the more Marsch
will digest the unshakeable link that developed between the club, the city and
his predecessor, Marcelo Bielsa.
In replacing Bielsa, he has succeeded a coach with almost
unrivalled popularity among the fans, a coach with numerous murals dedicated to
him across Leeds. Arriving mid-season to inherit a team in trouble, Marsch
could have been forgiven for feeling some trepidation about how he would match
up and how he would be received.
He agrees the impression Bielsa made in nearly four years at
Leeds was extraordinary. “Oh yeah, it really was,” he says. “He’s had a massive
impact. There was talk about me possibly doing this in the summer (to build for
2022-23) and even then, I knew it would be difficult replacing a legend like
him.
“It was never going to be easy, but I believe strongly in who I am. There were challenges, but there were major opportunities too. That’s the way I looked at it.”
So what is Marsch’s vision at Leeds? What does he think the
club’s vision is, assuming they stave off relegation over the next two months?
And when he arrived, what needed to be fixed?
“I wouldn’t say ‘fixed’,” he says. “I wouldn’t use that
word. I wanted to build on the intensity of the play and open up the
environment to more communication because, through those channels, I felt I
could clear the air and move forward, taking all the fantastic things Marcelo
established with us.
“My aim is to build a playing philosophy similar to what
I’ve developed over the years and to integrate the academy in a way that can
impact our playing model as well as our business model. Year by year, step by
step, I want to take the club closer to competing for trophies. That has to be
our goal.
“It’s not easy, especially in a league like this, but that’s
at the core of every decision we’re making. So, in the short term, stay in the
league. Then, long term, build it piece by piece. And by that, I mean continue
to build because a lot of really good things were done before I came. I
wouldn’t want it to seem otherwise.”
Marsch has made a life and career of going wherever his life
or his career takes him.
He was in Glasgow this week, visiting his daughter at
university, and as we finish he says he has York on the list of places he wants
to take a stroll around soon.
