Jesse Marsch on when he realised Leeds United job would be tougher than he thought, and the comment he quickly regretted — Yorkshire Post 11/1/24

Jesse Marsch says he realised managing Leeds United was going to be tougher than he imagined when he saw how tired his players look after first meeting them, but he regrets saying Marcelo Bielsa "overtrained" them.

By Stuart Rayner

The American has spoken about his time at Elland Road for William Hill’s Up Front with Simon Jordan podcast.

Marsch spent just over a year in charge of Leeds, saving them from Premier League relegation in 2021-22, but leaving them in a position his successors were unable to rescue them from when he was sacked the following February.

Marsch replaced the legendary Bielsa and reiterated to Jordan how he told Leeds when first approached about the job not to sack the Argentinian, so it saddened him when his assessment of the squad he inherited was taken as a criticism of his predecessor.

Bielsa's training methods were notoriously demanding and fed into the intense style of play that took the club from the Championship to ninth in the Premier League in 2022. But it seemed to catch up with them the following season as injuries mounted.

“Normally when you watch players on television, they look like strong men in the right physical environment, but when you meet them in person you see that they’re still kids and young men at heart – Leeds was the opposite," said Marsch. "When I arrived the players looked gaunt, tired and defeated. They looked like a group that was going to need a lot of help for them to be what I wanted them to be.

"The first feeling I had when I first met them was that it was going to be a much more difficult task than I had imagined.”

Marsch mentioned his reservations in a radio interview that would come back to bite him.

“I think me saying on TalkSport that the team was overtrained was a mistake,” he admitted. “I complimented Marcelo Bielsa a thousand times publicly because I loved the way he played, and I learned from him.

"When I said that the team was overtrained it wasn’t a pure indictment on Marcelo, I just thought of it as a fact. The team had been through a lot physically and there were a lot of injuries.

“Of all the things I said, I didn’t even think that the overtraining was up for debate – I thought it was a known thing. I later realised that I didn’t mean to incite the public in that manner because I never wanted it to be me against Marcelo. I knew the Leeds community loved Bielsa.

"When I was interviewing for the role, I talked about the similarities between Marcelo and myself because, in so many ways at that time, Leeds United was Marcelo Bielsa.”

Marsch has been out of coaching since leaving Leeds, despite being linked with a number of jobs in England and the national team role for the United States.