Get ready to go mad for EL LOCO!
Punch-ups with his players. Threats with a grenade. Yet Pep says he’s a genius. Is Leeds boss Marcelo Bielsa the coach’s coach or just a man with unbeatable PR?
He’s obsessed with making all his players the best players that he can
KALVIN PHILLIPS wasn’t entirely aware of the significance of the gift when Marcelo Bielsa first presented it to him last week, as he became the first Leeds player to be picked by England since 2004. Bielsa had called him into his office at Leeds’s Thorp Arch training ground. His elevation to the England squad was worth marking.
The mood wasn’t entirely celebratory, however, as Leeds have to prepare for their first Premier League game in 16 years this week, against champions Liverpool, without a number of international players, including Phillips, because of the condensed football season.
‘He was pulling his hair out because there were quite a few lads going off,’ said Phillips. ‘He was thinking he didn’t have enough time to prepare for Liverpool. But once he settled down he gave me a gift.’
Bielsa handed across a plain, old-fashioned collared T-shirt with red-and-black halves. ‘I didn’t really know what shirt it was, I just thought it was a random polo T-shirt,’ said Phillips.
Slowly it dawned on Phillips just how precious the gift was. It was a Seventies Newell’s Old Boys shirt, one worn by Bielsa in his brief professional career at the i conic Argentine club for whom he played 25 games, the peak of his professional playing career.
There was also a written message for Phillips, his mum and his grandma. The Leeds player was visibly moved when talking about the ceremony. ‘I’ve seen him wearing that shirt and it’s obviously a very nice touch for me,’ he said.
And he has plans for his first England shirt, should he make e his international debut against Denmark t his week. ‘I’m giving it to the manager, Marcelo,’ said Phillips. ‘I thought I’d give him a trade.’
The Premier League has waited long enough for this 65- year-old, described by Pep Guardiola as the best coach in the world, who inspires s such devotion from players. Next weekend he finally arrives, after two o years in the Champion- ship when Leeds United, d the Cinderella club of English football, finally y get to go to the ball for the he first time since 2004.
On trophies alone — three Argentine league titles and an Olympic gold medal — Bielsa doesn’t get near the likes of Guardiola, Jose Mourinho and Jurgen Klopp. Yet he is arguably the most influential coach in the 21st century. Manchester City wouldn’t play the way they do were it not for him; video analysis of games would probably not have become so complex had his near-neurotic desire for detail not made it standard; and his old-school faith in scouting youths now defines the modern academies.
Phillips is a typical example of a Bielsa protégé. Like Johan Cruyff, Bielsa refuses to accept traditional positional definitions, so took a typically English box- to- box midfielder and made him a cerebral holding player.
‘He knows exactly what he wants and if he wanted me to play centrehalf, he’d coach me to play centrehalf,’ said Phillips. ‘He videos every minute of every training session and will just tell us what we need to do i n specific moments. He’s obsessed with making all the players that he’s got the best players that he can.’
For a man who refuses to grant one-on-one interviews, says he can’t speak English and struggles to look inquisitors in the eye, his charismatic appeal may seem baffling. But Bielsa does connect. When Leeds’s promotion was confirmed, he emerged from the small flat he r ents above a s weet s hop in Wetherby and, as he bumped elbows with children and apologised for his English, the bond was apparent. ‘You are God!’ shouted one admirer, t o which Bielsa wagged an admonishing finger.
His passion, intensity and fierce sense of what is right was evident in another public meeting, less benign, when a group of well-conne nected hooligans at Newell’s Old Bo Boys turned up at his house to de demand his resignation after a 6-0 de defeat. Bielsa emerged with what h he says was a live hand grenade, an and approached the hooligans.
‘If you don’t go now, I will pull t the pin!’ he threatened. One witn ness spoke of the madness in his e eyes .‘ Nobody could look at Bielsa, only the grenade.’ The fans backed off. And Bielsa, a already nicknamed El Loco for h his crazy, fast- paced tactics, would carry The Madman moniker for life. ,
So, for every f Kalvin Phillips, there is a player ready to reveal an another side to the Bielsa enigma. Like Jose Luis Calderon, who in 1999 was top scorer in the Argentine league and fully anticipating a fruitful Copa America tournament with the national side managed by Bielsa.
Calderon didn’t merit a single minute in the tournament, which saw Argentina eliminated in the quarter-finals by Brazil. At the airport, Calderon did a standard posttournament radio interview from a disappointed player, in which he said Bielsa had toyed with him by not using him.
Bielsa was informed and reacted with volcanic rage, storming over to the player and gathering the rest of the senior players, like Diego Simeone and Roberto Ayala, around for a public confrontation.
‘Calderon! You didn’t deserve to have come! How could you have said publicly that you were here just to complete the squad? You have shown disrespect to t he group,’ he fumed.
Calderon was unimpressed. ‘It is what I said it was,’ he replied. ‘I was a just a decoration. Admit it. Why the f*** did you bring me?’
Bielsa’s rage was uncontainable by now, according to eyewitness. ‘You’re talking rubbish,’ he yelled. ‘And you’re the son of a bitch,’ shot back Calderon.
It is said Bielsa flew at the player, ready to fight, only to be restrained by the rest of the squad.
But as Bielsa’s translator, Fabrice Olszewski, once told him: ‘You are like Van Gogh: a genius. But in terms of human relations, it is a bit complicated!’
Former Argentina coach Alfio Basile, who won two Copa Americas with Argentina — a better record than Bielsa’s — considers the whole fuss to be a fraud perpetuated by the media. ‘I do not want to talk about Bielsa, because he is surrounded by a vast marketing machinery,’ said Basile.
‘I can’t understand how they televise an England second division match in Argentina. He never takes a big t eam, with pressure to win trophies.’
The contradictions are part of the fascination. In the same season that an intern working for Bielsa was caught spying on Derby’s training — which resulted in Leeds being fined £200,000 (Bielsa paid it himself) and EFL rules being rewritten — he ordered his team to concede a goal to Aston Villa because Leeds had scored after playing on after an injury. He received a FIFA Fair Play award for that, which Chelsea manager Frank Lampard, who was at Derby at the time of Spygate, said was ‘ironic’.
‘Possibly for the first time in their lives in the last couple of years Leeds have become people’s second team,’ says Jamie Carragher: not a sentence anyone who grew up with ‘Dirty Leeds’ in the Seventies could have thought credible. ‘People have been intrigued by Bielsa, they want him in the Premier League. I want to analyse his teams. This is one of the managers who some of the best managers in the world look up to.’
Bielsa might have obsessed about football from infancy but it is not the profession into which he was born. His grandfather served on the Argentine Supreme Court and was a Professor of Law at the University of Buenos Aires and an honorary professor at the Sorbonne in Paris.
His father, Rafael , was an eminent lawyer in Rosario and his brother, also Rafael, was the Argentine foreign secretary who held talks with Jack Straw over normalising relations with the Falkland Islands and is now ambassador in Chile.
Yet politics has been a dangerous passion in Argentina. Rafael, an
I wanted the portrait to be a symbol of how football can change places
opponent of the junta, was among the ‘disappeared’ political activists of that era. Blindfolded, he was interrogated by the man who oversaw a reign of terror in Rosario, General Leopoldo Galtieri, later infamous in the UK for ordering the invasion of the Falklands when he became president. Rafael was one of the lucky ones: he was released and fled to Spain to live in exile, escaping the fate of the thousands who were murdered and dumped in the Rio de la Plata.
Older brother Rafael negotiated his Leeds contract and while Bielsa remains one of the best- paid managers in world football, the sweet shop flat in which he lives is typical of a man whose first act as a manager was to stop pre-match stay-overs at a luxury hotel.
Bielsa himself wears the mantle of outsider easily. Rosario, three hours north of Buenos Aires, perched on the edge of the mighty Parana River, may be a major conurbation and the hometown of Lionel Messi, but is seen as something as an afterthought in football terms by Buenos Aires residents.
Yet Rosario boasts a fierce rivalry. Whole blocks are painted either red and black for Newell’s Old Boys (Bielsa and Messi’s favoured team) or yellow and blue for Central.
The central park in the city is dominated by Newell’s stadium: El Estadio Marcelo Bielsa. More than any individual, he is regarded as the man who built the club in the modern era. He and Jorge Griffa were the architects behind a brief period when the club were the envy of all Argentina, including, grudgingly, the capital city.
Understanding that they could never compete with River Plate and Boca Juniors for money, Griffa and Bielsa, who was initially the academy coach, made it their mission to scout every single youth player in the Argentine outback.
Their obsessive scouting, done in a pre-digital age, was reliant on road trips across the pampas in a Fiat 147. They discovered Gabriel Batistuta and Griffa would later discover Carlos Tevez. On one of their expeditions, they diverted to the one-horse town of Murphy’s because they had heard a local teenager, Mauricio Pochettino, was worth signing. Arriving at the farmhouse at 2am, they talked their way in to see the sleeping Pochettino and to persuade his parents he should sign for Newell’s — after viewing his stout ‘footballer’s legs’.
Pochettino was at the heart of a home-grown team when Bielsa was elevated from academy chief to first-team coach. They didn’t just enrapture Argentina but all South America. ‘He took Newell’s to a higher level than any other team and our tactical variations changed the structure of Argentine football,’ said Pochettino. They won two Argentine titles and reached the final of the Copa Libertadores, the South American equivalent of t he Champions League, where they lost to Brazilian powerhouse Sao Paulo.
In truth, that would be the peak of Bielsa’s coaching career. He would win the Argentine title again in 1998 with Velez Sarsfield but winning the Championship with Leeds this year was his first trophy since winning the Olympics with Argentina’s national team in 2004.
Yet his influence has burgeoned through world football since then. Before Bielsa, Argentinian football was played somewhat languidly, with the iconic No 10 the focus. Bielsa took the technical prowess associated with Argentine players, added lung-burning conditioning training so they could press opponents all over the pitch and play at 100 mph. Hence, the‘ Bi e ls a burn-out’ trope.
But what extended Bielsa’s influence in Argentina into a global phenomenon was a meeting with a disciple in 2006 at a convent where Bielsa had moved to reboot after quitting the Argentina job.
Guardiola was in Mexico playing for Dorados de Sinaloa in the twilight of his career. Travelling with film director David Trueba, he made the pilgrimage to Bielsa’s refuge: they talked for 10 hours and Bielsa’s ideas had a huge impact on the man who was to take over as Barca’s B team coach.
In essence, Guardio la took Cruyff’s Total Football and injected it with Bielsa rocket fuel to reboot it for the 21st century. The result was the extraordinary Barca team of 2008-12 and the sight of perhaps the world’s greatest No 10, Lionel Messi, backtracking and pressing, thus adding intensity and energy to his genius.
Phillips grew up in the Leeds suburb of Wortley so it is fitting that the most powerful artistic depiction of Bielsa can be found there. It is a mural painted by Leeds fan Nicolas Dixon, showing Bielsa as Christ the Redeemer.
‘ I wanted the portrait to be of Bielsa as a symbol of how football can change places,’ Dixon said. ‘He has changed everybody’s perception of Leeds, the club and the city. What he has done will resonate for years here because being part of the Premier League will bring millions into the city and make us a proper European destination again.’
And therein lies the Bielsa enigma: false Messiah or genuine revolutionary?