Marcelo Bielsa: Brilliant, brutal, bewildering… and back with Uruguay — The Athletic 24/6/24

By Adam Crafton

When Marcelo Bielsa was fired by Leeds United in February 2022, even those who had grown close — or as close as one can ever be to football’s most mercurial manager — were unsure where he may next wind up.

His style of play and results attracted widespread acclaim in securing promotion for Leeds in summer 2020 as he returned the Yorkshire club to the Premier League for the first time in 16 years. But he also swept into Leeds’ home stadium of Elland Road and the club’s Thorp Arch training ground like a human hurricane, disrupting an environment that had, for too long, tolerated mediocrity at one of English football’s most popular clubs.

His idiosyncrasies are now the stuff of legend. Replicas of the Bielsa Bucket (an upturned one was his preferred seat on the sideline during matches, which has been swapped for a cooler box in his current job as Uruguay coach) became a collector’s item in the club’s merchandise store, the “murderball” training sessions pushed Leeds players to the brink of their physical capacity and a spy was dispatched to secure snippets from an opposing team’s training session. The detail was obsessive; having a bed and kitchen installed for himself at Thorp Arch so he didn’t have to go home, building dormitories for players to sleep between double training sessions and suspending goalposts off the ground to try to ensure every piece of training field turf received the same amount of sunlight.

Brilliant, brutal and bewildering in equal measure, Bielsa commands extraordinary respect among his managerial rivals. When now hugely successful Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola began studying for his coaching qualifications in 2006, he traveled from Spain and spent 11 straight hours in Bielsa’s company in Argentina, while Zinedine Zidane, who won three Champions Leagues in as many years as Real Madrid coach from 2016-18, also studied Bielsa’s sessions. He is, however, extraordinarily hard work and by the end of his time at Leeds, with them leaking goals and sliding down the table towards relegation, plenty of those who reported to the coach were exhausted by his intensity.

As with any idiosyncrasies, they are venerated in the good times and chastised in the bad, so it was little surprise to see many clubs and nations tempted by Bielsa after his Leeds exit. Time and again, those moves did not quite materialise.

Bournemouth and Crystal Palace of the Premier League gave consideration. Returning to Spanish La Liga club Athletic Bilbao, where Bielsa had been coach for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons, was a possibility. Most memorably, Bielsa came close to replacing Frank Lampard as Everton manager in January 2023 with the club battling relegation from the Premier League, only to leave Everton perplexed when he suggested he would prefer to take charge of their under-23s side until the end of that season and then start afresh with the senior squad in the summer, with his coaches running the first team for those early months. Everton instead appointed former Burnley manager Sean Dyche, despite Bielsa rocking up at London’s Heathrow airport unannounced to try to thrash out terms.

Another option came along the following month when Leeds sacked his replacement, Jesse Marsch, and considered reappointing Bielsa. The parties held an exploratory video call. By that point Bielsa had decided on a different route altogether: Uruguay, the South American nation of 3.4 million people, sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, whose national football team craved revival after exiting the 2022 World Cup at the group stage the previous December.

As always, Bielsa did not come cheap.

He was the best-paid manager or head coach in Leeds’ century-plus history and is the highest-paid coach at this year’s Copa America after negotiating with Uruguay for three months before signing a contract that ties him to the job through to the end of the World Cup in summer 2026. As part of the deal, he agreed to coach Uruguay’s under-23s team during the Olympics this summer, 100 years on from the first of the nation’s back-to-back gold medals in the tournament, when the Games were also hosted by Paris. Bielsa, now 68, won Olympic gold as Argentina coach in Greece’s capital Athens 20 years ago but his Uruguay under-23’s came up short in the pre-Olympic tournament in January and therefore he missed out on a chance for a repeat.

The more pressing task is Copa America, and in just over a year, Bielsa has transformed Uruguay so dramatically that they entered the tournament as even more likely challengers to Lionel Messi’s defending champions Argentina than an out-of-sorts Brazil. First, though, the United States will face Bielsaball in Group C, along with Panama and Bolivia.

His pre-match press conference before Sunday’s opening 3-1 victory against Panama in Miami, Florida, was prototypical Bielsa fare. He barely made eye contact with journalists, started flicking his way through a copy of the match programme halfway through and doused the flames of Uruguayan confidence by saying he could not predict the future when repeatedly asked whether Uruguay could break a tie with Argentina by winning a record 16th Copa America (albeit, only two of them have been in the 14 times it has been played since 1987).

Since arriving, there has been no shortage of classic Bielsa. The Uruguay team has swiftly adapted to his demands on the field, even without the daily exposure to his intensity that Leeds players enjoyed and endured.

Uruguay’s progress was most devastatingly exemplified when they followed up October’s creditable 2-2 away draw against Colombia in qualifying for the 2026 World Cup by beating Brazil at home and then Argentina away at ‘La Bombonera’, Boca Juniors’ intimidating 54,000-capacity ground in Buenos Aires, in successive matches late last year.

The latter result makes them the only team — besides Saudi Arabia in a group game at the most recent World Cup — to beat Argentina this decade and their World Cup-winning coach Lionel Scaloni praised Uruguay’s performance, saying his team “never felt comfortable”. Messi, who played the whole game, said Bielsa’s impact was palpable and that Argentina struggled to handle the “fast pace” of Uruguay’s approach.

Bolivia coach Antonio Carlos Zago, speaking after Uruguay dismantled his team 3-0 last November, said Bielsa’s side are the standout team during CONMEBOL (South American) World Cup qualifying. They are second in the group of all 10 South American nations, two points behind Argentina but six points clear of Brazil, after six of the 18 games. The top six sides are guaranteed places in the 2026 tournament co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Bielsa’s Uruguay players have begun to speak in reverential tones about their new leader. Federico Valverde, the relentless Real Madrid midfielder, said: “He deserves so much respect for what he believes; it is a different style, a different game and a different intent. I have greatly improved my psychological equilibrium playing under him. Although football with him seems crazy, we are working a lot on defensive and attacking balance and it has helped us know how to think in difficult moments on the field.”

There is no shortage of hard-working and technically-gifted players in this Uruguay setup; the perfect blend for Bielsa’s unique brand of football. There is the direct chaos of Darwin Nunez up front, the honesty and guile of Facundo Pellistri and Maximiliano Araujo stretching play on the wings, and the tireless quality of Valverde and Manuel Ugarte in central midfield.

All of a sudden, a nation that appeared to be at the end of a cycle in 2022, the curtain closing on the gilded careers of Diego Godin, Edinson Cavani and Luis Suarez, now appears to be on the crest of a wave. Striker Suarez was excluded from Bielsa’s first squad but has now been recalled at age 37, albeit in a support role for the leading act, which is very much Nunez. Of the 12 teams who have competed so far in Copa America, Bielsa’s squad is the fourth-youngest at an average age of 25.91, behind only Ecuador, Canada and the United States.

Uruguay were deserved winners against Panama, and really ought to have been out of sight during a dynamite opening 35 minutes in which they had 12 shots but somehow only built a one-goal lead. When a Bielsa team is ‘on it’, as Uruguay were in Miami, there are few more exhilarating sights in football. Yet, as ever, there were vulnerabilities too: they struggled to maintain such intensity in the second half but saw out the game late on, as Nunez and Matias Vina added to Araujo’s first-half strike.

Bielsa’s attention to detail has been as intense as ever; after just over a year in the job, he has already called up more than 50 players, including a series of youngsters. He has shaken up what he perceived to be a comfortable culture within the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF). Argentinian newspaper La Nacion reported that Bielsa made clear federation directors were not to be popping along to observe training.

Sebastian Abreu, who won 70 caps for Uruguay between 1996 and 2012, has criticised Bielsa’s approach. He told TyC Sports that everyday employees were experiencing demands that they had not been exposed to in 15 years under Oscar Tabarez from 2006-21, claiming that up to eight workers had simply walked away. Goalkeeping coach Carlos Nicola did depart last month after disagreements with Bielsa, while ESPN reported that Alberto Pan, chief of health at the AUF, left because he would not comply with Bielsa’s wish for him to be present in the office every day.

Other departures have included Richard Lopez, the team’s kinesiologist, and video analysts Andres Paysee and Marcelo Mayor. On one occasion, Carlos Manta, an executive board member of Uruguay’s federation, drove 125 miles (200km) to the training complex unannounced but Bielsa decided not to greet him, instead focusing on other tasks he had organised that day. “I’m going to see if he will return the gas (money),” Manta later joked.

As ever with Bielsa, his high-maintenance, and sometimes impolite, approach to officialdom is the opposite of how he interacts with supporters of his team. He regularly watched from in and among ordinary fans at Uruguayan league matches during the previous season, shunning the smart seats. After taking the job, he said he had been taken aback during a visit to Uruguay with his wife Laura by the politeness he had seen from citizens on public transport. He praised their “civility” and the respect shown towards women, saying this weighed heavily when he decided to accept the job.

A 36-year-old Uruguayan — Federico Vera, who works at a hotel in West Palm Beach, an hour’s drive to the north — went to try to watch Uruguay training in Miami this month. Training was temporarily suspended due to rain but Vera came across Bielsa and asked if he could stay. Bielsa calmly explained that the security team had decided it should be behind closed doors but requested Vera’s phone number. Later on, he telephoned personally, apologised, talked through what the team was up to in training and explained the reasons why supporters were not permitted entry.

Vera said: “Even now, I am still wondering, ‘Who would take that time out of their day to do what he did?’. A famous person, of such magnitude, taking time out for little old me. I am nobody, just a Uruguayan far from his country.”

To Bielsa, however, everybody is a somebody.