A late bloomer with ‘fast feet and a fast brain’: Klich’s path from Poland to becoming Bielsa’s lynchpin — The Athletic 6/2/20
Phil Hay
In an Italian cafe on the outskirts of Krakow, Mateusz
Klich’s mother and father have brought together three of his story’s leading
lights.
There is Orest Lenczyk, a doyen of Polish football who is
into his 78th year and could kill hours with anecdotes about Jock Stein, Kenny
Dalglish and the night he and Slask Wroclaw were beaten by the wind at Dundee
United.
To Lenczyk’s right is Marcin Sadko, who managed Klich in
Cracovia’s reserve team.
And across the table, dressed in a smart jacket, sits Marcin
Gedlek, the youth coach who was on hand when Cracovia paid the equivalent of
£400 to bring a 13-year-old Klich to Krakow from Tarnovia Tarnow, a provincial
team an hour to the east.
Pizza is laid out in front of them but when they get talking
about Klich they ignore their food.
Lenczyk has seen it all in Poland, coaching for almost five
decades, and he reminds Klich’s mother, Malgorzata, of Leeds United head coach
Marcelo Bielsa: thinning hair, a measured tone, a life dominated by football.
He likes to fist-pump when memories please him and he has plenty of Klich, the
midfielder with “fast feet and a fast brain” who Lenczyk gave a chance to at
Cracovia.
“He was a player who could see the fourth or fifth pass
ahead of him,” Lenczyk says. “To be as young as he was and playing in the
senior team, he had to be better than almost everyone else. As a thinker, he
was ahead of his age.”
Klich’s sharp mind compensated for a stature which everyone
remembers fondly. As a boy, Klich was not advanced. He was small and slim and
his body shape counted against him. Malgorzata recalls how other boys avoided
playing with him because they thought he would not be up to it. Later, they
avoided playing with him because they discovered he was too good for them.
Klich was felt worthy of a call-up by Malopolska, his
regional side, but deemed too weak to actually play. “The coaches preferred
more physical, stronger players,” Gedlek says. “He used to cry because they
wouldn’t give him many minutes. He loved football but with Malopolska he’d tell
me, ‘I don’t want to go with them.'”
At SMS Krakow, the boarding school for promising sports kids
where Klich was educated in his teens, Katarzyna Gubernat, his old chemistry
teacher, signals with her hand when she is asked about him, indicating how tiny
he was.
Later, we drive to Cracovia’s training ground and find Pani
Bogusia, the club’s laundry lady since time immemorial, down in the basement
organising the kit. “Ah, little Mateusz,” she says, thrilled to learn that
Klich recently became a father. “He was so small but at the same time, he was
kind, clever and ambitious. You don’t forget boys like that.” He was one of her
favourites at Cracovia? “No, no, he was my favourite.”
It is not the history you expect of Klich, the irrepressible
midfielder Bielsa cannot bear to be without and who has earned admirers in
Leeds with his effort, his stamina, his spectacular goals and, for want of a
different phrase, his shithousing. Opposing players have no means of bullying
him but it was not always like this and a phrase Lenczyk uses over our lunch is
repeated more than once during The Athletic’s two days in Poland, his way of
describing Leeds’ omnipresent No 43: a late bloomer.
As Malgorzata and Klich’s father, Wojciech, walk into
Cracovia’s training complex — soon to be replaced by a fresh out-of-town
facility — they bump into Marcin Cabaj, the club’s former goalkeeper. He is 10
years older than Klich and about to run a coaching session for Cracovia’s
younger keepers but they played together for a short time after Klich finished
school and moved into digs at the training ground. He and Klich’s parents
recognise each other instantly.
Klich shared a room with his dad, who worked with the youth
teams at Cracovia, and Malgorzata has not forgotten the mess she would find
whenever she came calling. “Two beds, one television and things everywhere,”
she says. “It was always the same.” Cabaj had no idea how good Klich would be —
“we played together for only half a season and it wasn’t long enough to be
sure” — but Klich was not intimidated by older players or lacking confidence
around them. “He’d annoy them in training by knocking the ball through their
legs, things like that,” Gedlek says. Wasn’t that asking for trouble? Gedlek
smiles. “It was talent. On the pitch, he was very brave. But yes, some of the
older guys didn’t like that.”
It was a trait of Klich’s when he was young, the
tunnel-vision of a footballer who was still to fully mature. Sadko watches him
from time to time with Leeds and sees a contrast between the player he knew and
the player as he is now.
In his teens, Klich had obvious talent but would frustrate
observers by “attacking too aggressively with the ball” as Sadko puts it. “He
would never pass it,” Sadko says. “Other players couldn’t get it from him and
they got angry about it. Some trainers didn’t like him for that reason. They’d
stand shouting, ‘Pass! Pass!’ but Mateusz liked to keep it.”
Gedlek recalls Klich, after an appearance at the national
youth championship where he was named player of the tournament, being told by
an official from the Polish FA that he would never make it as a professional
“because he was selfish with his ego” and played too much for himself. “There
was a time when it was all about him and the ball,” Sadko says, “but now when I
watch him for Leeds, he’s a team player. It’s all about the team.”
It was Lencyzk who blooded Klich properly at Cracovia and
when I tell him his old student has started every league game under Bielsa, 78
and counting back-to-back, he is not surprised. “He was always seen as better
than most of the footballers at Cracovia,” Lencyzk says. “He was intelligent
and I agree with Bielsa — you would build a team around him.”
When Klich signed for Cracovia in 2003, it caused a bit of
light-hearted friction in his family.
Krakow, in a footballing sense, is like most cities in that
it has two major clubs and if you live there, you support one or the other.
Cracovia and Wisla Krakow were both founded in 1906 and have neighbouring
stadiums separated by a park, similar to Liverpool’s Anfield and Everton’s
Goodison Park, the concrete of Wisla’s ground facing the modern facade of
Cracovia’s. The slogan on Cracovia’s stands — ‘Cracovia Pany!’ (Cracovia
Rules!) – is just about visible from enemy territory.
Klich grew up 90km away in the pretty city of Tarnow and
favoured neither team over the other but his granddad, Malgorzata’s father, was
an avid Wisla supporter. “He was a bit angry when Mateusz went with Cracovia,”
she says, “but for us we were thinking about who would give the best training
and the best chances for him.”
Malgorzata and Wojciech show me the interview room at SMS
Krakow, a building with a very Eastern Bloc air, where they discussed their
son’s admission to the school as a teenager, his first move away from home.
“I think we asked more questions of them than they did of
us,” Malgorzata jokes. “He was leaving home and he was only 13 so, you know, I
was a typical mother, a bit worried. It was a risk.”
How did he feel about going? “Oh, he was fine. He was quite
happy about it. He’s good at making new friends anywhere and for him it was
football.” Gubernat, who has run the school for the past six years, echoes
that. “He was a happy student,” she says. “There was never any problem with
him.”
Malgorzata and Wojciech were inclined to motivate Klich as
much as they could. Sadko worked with numerous young players at Cracovia but
felt Klich had the advantage of “parents who pushed him” at the right times.
“He has a lot to thank them for,” Sadko says. “He came from
a very sports-orientated family and he had so much support. I saw a lot of
players who were as talented as him but weren’t pushed like him so didn’t carry
on in the sport. His parents gave him as much of a chance as they could.”
“Sports-orientated” understates the make-up of the Klich
family.
Wojciech was a professional midfielder and a free-kick
specialist until he broke a leg, making close to 100 appearances in Poland’s
top flight, the Ekstraklasa. There are photos in a scrapbook at their house in
Tarnow of Klich riding on the shoulders of a bare-chested Wojciech after a game
for KSZO. Later, he coached his son at Tarnovia Tarnow and also worked for
several years with Cracovia, in a small office which is still there inside
their training ground.
As Klich’s first coach, there were natural father-son
differences of opinion. “He never listened, or not as much as he should have
done,” Wojciech says. “He liked to think he knew best.”
On occasions, Malgorzata could feel the tension in the air.
“There was one time when Wojciech went to practice free kicks with Mateusz,”
she says. “They came home separately.”
Wojciech, though, insists he was never harder on Klich than
he was on the other players. “No, because a father obviously wants his son to
be the best that they can,” he says. “It also depends on the listener!”
Malgorzata is a PE teacher who specialises in swimming. In
her younger years, she won a bronze medal in 800m freestyle at the Polish
championships “with stamina like Mateusz has.” Her father, Andrzej
Kielbusiewicz, was a highly-decorated swimmer who trained Polish athletes for
the 1976 Olympic Games. He died in 2011 and the local pool in Tarnow was named
after him last year.
Both tried to steer Klich towards the pool but Malgorzata
found her son to be “the worst swimmer of them all. The other children would
laugh at him but he learned to take it. He told himself he would be good at a
different sport.” As Klich’s grandfather once said, to watch him swim made you
realise he was a footballer.
Klich’s sister, Maja, excelled in the pool though, and her
trophies are on display as proudly as her brother’s in the family living room
in Tarnow. Maja’s partner is Bartosz Kwolek, one of Poland’s best volleyball
players. Sporting DNA and no end of it, going back a few generations.
Kielbusiewicz reluctantly gave in to his grandson’s desire
to play football on the proviso that Klich continued to swim. “To my father,
swimming was purity,” Malgorzata says. Andrzej Kot, head teacher at Klich’s
first school in Tarnow, saw Klich commit himself to 20 hours of sport a week
and was not surprised to learn that he was thriving after he left for the SMS
academy.
“Mateusz was very focused on his plans,” Kot says. “Friends
of his (at SMS) would go out into town and do things which lost their focus or
distracted them from studying. The students are away from home for the first
time and some of them forgot how to be sensible. Mateusz had self-discipline.”
One conversation stuck in Kot’s head. A few years after
leaving for Krakow, Klich told him how influential Wojciech had been in honing
his ability in the modest surroundings of Tarnovia Tarnow’s stadium, a venue
with rusty gates and — in the awful January weather when The Athletic visits —
waterlogged pitches. Irrespective of their little arguments, no matter the
banging of heads, Wojciech had seen him right.
“What he told me was that his father was the one who made
Cracovia possible for him,” Kot says. “I knew then that he had not changed or
forgotten about what was important. It told me he was still the same boy.”
For all his quirks and self-confidence, Lenczyk says Klich
was incredibly easy to manage, a footballer who needed no strict discipline and
very little advice from the touchline. The Polish game expected players to be
aggressive and Klich stood out to Lenczyk as someone who “never fouled anyone
and was never fouled by anyone.”
“Back then he was soft,” he says, the last thing anyone
would say about Klich now, “but he was intelligent. He could decide how a game
was going to go, how it was going to be shaped.” He was a player who, in the
estimation of Lenczyk and now Bielsa, needs to be there in the centre of the
pitch.
Gedlek and Sadko both mention the joker in Klich and are
amused to hear about the talent he has shown in England for winding opposition
players up.
Malgorzata re-enacts the memorable moments: his ‘Spygate’
gesture in celebration after a 2-0 win over Derby County, him starting a
touchline brawl by squirting water down the back of Bolton Wanderers’ Joe
Williams, the subtle finger to the lips at Hull City’s bench as they moaned at
him during a game before Christmas.
The Elland Road fans love players with personality and Klich
has it in spades. Does Gedlek recall that streak in him as a youngster? “Maybe
not to that extent,” he laughs, “but he liked a joke.”
Even at Leeds, though, Klich has had his troughs.
He was bombed out completely by Thomas Christiansen in his
first season, sent back to Holland on loan just six months after signing from
FC Twente and without anything like a definitive run of appearances. “He didn’t
really understand it,” Malgorzata says, “but he told Victor Orta that he would
be back.”
There are comparisons between that time and his days at
Wolfsburg, the German club who tempted Klich away from Cracovia in a £1.5
million transfer in 2011.
Wolfsburg were managed by the eccentric Felix Magath, who
refused to give him a look-in. His parents speak about a game away to Borussia
Dortmund where Klich, believing he would be in the match day squad at last, was
instead left to watch from the stands. Magath, quite seriously, told him that
the trip to Dortmund was a reward for committed work in training. Wojciech
shrugs with bemusement.
“Wolfsburg was not a good time,” Malgorzata says. “He’d
phone us and say, ‘I want to commit sporting suicide. I want to leave
football.’ He wasn’t going to do that but he couldn’t understand what was going
on there. Before Leeds, his happiest times were always in Holland. He won the
[Dutch] cup with Zwolle [who he joined in summer 2013 after an initial loan the
previous season] and of all the places he’s been, I think Holland is where he’d
like to live most in future.”
Utrecht offered Klich a temporary escape after Christiansen
made it clear the Pole would not play for him but Bielsa came to Leeds in June
2018 and spotted gold where Christiansen saw nothing. Klich is the only player
to have been ever-present in the Championship under Bielsa, a famously loyal
coach.
In the hands of the Argentinean he has produced the form of
his career, one of many players who benefited from Bielsa cracking the whip.
“He’s tired a lot,” Malgorzata says, aware of how hard the players at Leeds are
pushed, “but in the past Mateusz would say that after a game he needed two
days, maybe three, to feel good. Now he feels like he can play again tomorrow.”
In Poland, Klich’s stock is surprisingly low. He has been
criticised here in his homeland for talking too much, for speaking his mind too
freely, and many doubt he is good enough for the national team despite the
evidence of what Bielsa has done with him.
A year ago he was back in the international fold after a
four-year hiatus but some quarters of the Polish press think coach Jerzy
Brzeczek is making a mistake by selecting him. Lenczyk clearly believes Klich
should have more than his current 23 caps but stops short of saying so. “I look
at the trainers of the national team and I have an opinion about it,” he says.
“But I want to keep that opinion private.”
There is no such dissent about Klich in Leeds. In November,
the club gave him a new four-and-a-half year contract and it remains to be seen
if the day ever comes where Bielsa decides that his midfield can cope without
the 29-year-old in the thick of it.
Klich is a proud son of Poland, with a tattoo of Krakow’s
skyline on his right forearm, but Leeds and Harrogate, where he lives with his
partner Magdalena and daughter Laura, have become happy homes.
“They love it there,” Malgorzata says. “He’d say these have
been the best times of his career I think. And he tells me he wishes he’d been
coached by Bielsa 10 years earlier because if he had, he would be a better
player.”
Malgorzata and Wojciech have a tradition in their house.
When they sit and watch Leeds play, they have a drink every time a goal goes
in.
The small bar in their front room is well stocked with
whisky and homemade wine and Bielsa’s squad have been responsible for some
heavy nights in the past few months: 3-3 against Cardiff City in mid-December,
5-4 against Birmingham City after Christmas, 3-2 against Millwall last midweek.
The club have turned a standard drinking game into a genuine test of the
Klichs’ constitutions.
“I say to Mateusz when he phones, ‘At this rate, your father
will be an alcoholic!'” Malgorzata laughs. “Some of the games, I can’t take
it.” They are evidently kicking every ball, like the crowd at Elland Road — and
keeping Jack Daniel’s in business in the process. “I get so nervous when I
watch,” Malgorzata says. “I do cleaning and tidying, just to make the time
pass.” Wojciech nods. “They have to win promotion,” he adds. “They have to do
it this season.”
Others whose paths Klich has crossed follow his career with
intrigue.
Tarnovia Tarnow rate him as their best ever product and he
regularly buys boots for the club, supplying the children who train there.
They, in turn, take pride in signed photos of him. He had the pillars for a
successful sporting career — a good attitude, a good family and very good genes
— and they have helped him through the best and worst years.
On my last night in Tarnow, we travel to a gym on a side
street in the city, Unit 37, which Klich part-owns.
It has next to no treadmills or standard gym equipment and
consists of climbing ropes and yellow monkey bars, looking like a Polish
version of obstacle-course TV game show Ninja Warrior. The members attack this
apparatus with all the energy Leeds have come to expect of Klich.
And on the wall, in white letters, is a slogan to match:
“People come in asking where are the machines? I tell them — we are the
machines.”