Leeds sold Jesse Marsch as natural Marcelo Bielsa successor, but his vision never clicked - The Athletic 6/2/23


Phil Hay

Jesse Marsch dipped into the commercial world last month by announcing he had joined LinkedIn, an invitation to the real world to make their own jokes about a head coach who might soon be job-hunting.

Quips aside, eyes at Leeds United rolled at an open goal presented so easily. Somewhere down the line, the club knew their hand could be forced. A good PR exercise this was not.

Leeds were trying to stay off that path, to commit to Marsch through thick and thin, but Sunday’s 1-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest was the third time he had heard an away end go for him and no amount of resistance to concerns about him were going to prevent his sacking. At board level, the club convened on Monday morning and pulled the plug. Marsch turned up for work as usual and was given the news by chief executive Angus Kinnear and director of football Victor Orta. Leeds were back in the managerial market as Marsch rejoined the employment market, the two sides splitting as amicably as the circumstances allowed.

As most ultra-threatened coaches do, Marsch cut a beaten figure as he summed up the events of Forest, the position the defeat left him in and the gloom around him. The tone of his answers implied that even with his most positive hat on, he had no wriggle room left.

Leeds had already seen off two vocal mutinies from their crowd, at Leicester City in October and Aston Villa last month. They had committed to £70million ($84.2m) of transfers in January, all supposedly made for Marsch’s tactics. They had given him a new assistant, Chris Armas, who remained in post today as Rene Maric and others departed with Marsch.

They had clung to the idea that the project would work, despite evidence to the contrary.

Marsch exits Elland Road with eight wins from 32 league games and, in effect, leaves Leeds where they were this time last year.

The squad is better than it was, but it is better on the strength of investment rather than en masse development through coaching. Marsch failed to complete a year in the job and there was an unavoidable reality after Forest: that if Marcelo Bielsa was adjudged to be taking Leeds down, Marsch could be viewed no differently.

Leeds were in danger of straying into territory where they gave Marsch more leeway than they did their most successful manager in 30 years. Marsch liked to talk about a winning mentality and vainly tried to stress the value of it to his squad after full-time at Forest, but the word used among Leeds’ hierarchy in the wake of the second half was ‘toothless’, the cause of one poor result too many.

Poor results littered Marsch’s reign and as the next few days offer more time for reflection, the question will be asked about why it was that Leeds — on the basis of the 11 months that followed — ran headlong into appointing Marsch when Bielsa was dismissed with 12 games of last season to go. It was not a marriage of convenience or even a matter of necessity, provoked by the pressure of finding a new coach mid-term. Had Bielsa remained until the season was done, Marsch was in line to take the job from him anyway. To all intents and purposes, that was agreed.

Orta had first made contact with Marsch two years earlier. The story went that Orta, in drawing up a succession plan for Bielsa, analysed more than 40 coaches and, on the merits of Marsch’s performance predominantly as head coach of Red Bull Salzburg, decided he was the outstanding candidate. Marsch did not lack the confidence to say yes to the offer. Confidence was never the 49-year-old’s problem. The two sides were wholly convinced they would suit each other.

Leeds advertised Marsch as a natural transition from Bielsa, someone who would avoid a crunching change of gears tactically and would maintain some of the best of Bielsa’s work. It sounded good, but over time the similarities were hard to identify. Bielsa’s football used width and he craved possession. His team partied hard with the ball and then pressed like hell to win it back when they lost it, entirely with the intention of dominating it again. Leeds would cover huge distances over 90 minutes and at their peak, observers were constantly struck by the ferocity of their patterns of play.

Marsch’s side were able to rack up the metres, energetic in their own right, but while intensity shone from Bielsa’s side, the intensity Marsch laid claim to felt like a more abstract concept. Leeds, under him, might run and run, but they had a habit of looking flakey. They might focus religiously on the press but to what end and with what results? The label on the tin said full throttle but in practice, the team could be brittle and soft. Marsch talked as recently as last week about how cut-throat he was as a player. As a coach, he said, he had toned himself down. His troops, to his cost, were not ruthless enough.

There was a clear tactical aspect to that: the narrow structure, the pressing and counter-pressing which never bloomed beyond a flawed or limited system. Perhaps it might work elsewhere but the Premier League too often had it sussed. One agent, who asked not to be named to protect the player he represented, said this morning he no longer thought the players “really believed” in the model, and the board felt the same. There had been thin ice under Marsch since a 2-1 defeat at Villa on January 13. It was the first time Leeds felt obliged to actively consider Marsch’s position. But from there, support for him grew. New signings materialised, the last of them Weston McKennie from Juventus. Armas came in as Marsch’s new assistant head coach a mere 13 days ago. Orta was prominent in insisting Marsch should get as much time as possible.

Leeds had been so resistant to outside pressure on him that at the point where it first surged in October, after defeats to Leicester City and Fulham, some of their players came away from an address by chairman Andrea Radrizzani believing that far from being sacked, Marsch might actually be offered a new contract, the ultimate show of faith. Leeds were conscious of looking like their support for him was unequivocal. But they were also aware that Marsch had never truly linked arms with the club’s support, that the relationship between them was awkward. Part of that came down to the manner of Marsch’s communication and aspects of what he said, the LinkedIn effect.

More than once it was suggested to him — particularly when results were a problem — that he say less and put himself out there less; fewer press conferences, fewer interviews, fewer podcasts. Marsch had a bubbly personality and was unusually accessible by Premier League standards, a coach who engaged with the media happily. There was brief tension when Marsch said at the end of the summer window that Dan James had been loaned to Fulham because Leeds were operating a one-in, one-out transfer policy. He clarified that comment the following week. References to Mother Teresa and Gandhi last season, at a time when the club looked like they were about to be relegated, left him open to ridicule and created unwanted headlines. Leeds took him to task about his demeanour on the touchline, which brought him a red card and contact from the Football Association after a 5-2 defeat to Brentford in September.

All the same, they respected the way in which he held the dressing room together en route to a very narrow survival. Owing to public anger over Bielsa’s sacking and the tension of a fraught relegation fight, it took leadership to stop it from splintering. Bielsa’s success cast a long shadow and it was often said that the man who replaced him would potentially be on a hiding to nothing with no chance of matching up. For a while, it felt as if some criticism of Marsch was fuelled by the comparison, but latterly, and as this season developed, most criticism was based on what the naked eye was seeing: a style specific to Marsch which wasn’t working and had sucked Leeds into 17th place. Favourable data, for as long as it provided grounds for optimism, was overwhelmed by results. By Sunday, Marsch was admitting a result had to come at Manchester United on Wednesday. Something in his voice said he had no expectation of making it that far.

Leeds was Marsch’s second seriously big job after RB Leipzig, where he lasted less than six months. In isolation, Leipzig could have been — as he has said — the wrong fit or the right club at the wrong time, but with his time at Elland Road to dwell on, his impact in the high-level positions offered to him begins to look like a trend. Today’s sacking will hurt him because whatever else can be said about Marsch, it was glaringly obvious that he wanted to do well in England. It was obvious he wanted to prove himself here. And deep down he would have liked the image of an American coach mixing it successfully in the world’s most popular league.

Leeds, most likely, will try to do what they attempted to do a year ago: appoint a coach who can both keep them up and carry them beyond this season, a decision they have to nail. They might be firefighting again, but it is not really in their nature to appoint a firefighter, and in Marsch they thought they were getting so much more, shown by their willingness to go all-in on him with recruitment right to the very end. A bright future was promised when Marsch’s team routed Chelsea in August, vindication at the club’s fingertips for an instant, but just as quickly the buzz was gone; king for a day.

In an interview with The Athletic shortly after he joined, Marsch reflected on how unlikely his appointment was; the boy who grew up in Wisconsin, where football was soccer and the average person had no idea what it was, becoming manager of one of England’s most recognisable clubs. “To come from where I come from, I shouldn’t be here,” he said, and while this was plainly not what he meant, the pool he was in proved too deep, drowning a vision which never clicked.

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