BIELSA: SPYING, PEP & FRESH BREAD
LEEDS UNITED BOSS MARCELO BIELSA’S PENCHANT FOR TAKING A SNEAKY PEAK AT HIS RIVALS AND OTHER WACKY WAYS ARE REVEALED IN A BRILLIANT NEW BOOK
DERBY COUNTY’S Moor Farm training ground covers 50 acres of land on the northern outskirts of the city. Opposite is a modern and well-tended housing estate; the sort of place where people look out for each other; the sort of place where they notice people acting suspiciously.
On Thursday, January 10, 2019, someone was seen acting suspiciously around the wire fence that surrounds Moor Farm. Someone from the estate called the police.
The suspect, a 20-year-old intern employed by Marcelo Bielsa, was arrested. The next evening, Derby would be playing Leeds United at Elland Road. Suddenly, football had its own Watergate.
Spygate is the biggest crisis Marcelo Bielsa has faced in his time at Leeds, the one time it seemed he might not survive. It culminated in an extraordinary PowerPoint presentation to journalists in which Bielsa confessed he had spied on every team in the Championship. Leeds, who had been unaware of their manager’s tactics, were fined £200,000. Bielsa paid the fine himself.
Bielsa had often employed someone to spy on opponents. When he was in charge of Chile before the 2010 World Cup, his spy was a friend of his daughter Ines, 17-year-old Francisco Meneghini.
Meneghini would be put to work on the second floor of Chile’s technical centre in Santiago, sometimes providing reports on the lesser lights of the Chilean leagues, sometimes carrying out video analysis, sometimes spying on his opponents’ closed training sessions. Once, Meneghini was spotted halfway up a tree, watching Ecuador being put through their paces.
Before Meneghini, there was Gabriel Wainer, a radio sports journalist from Bielsa’s home city of Rosario, Argentina. Wainer, an urbane man who spoke five languages, would also be employed by Gerardo Martino, who went on to manage Barcelona.
In Martino’s words, Wainer had the ‘ability to make himself unobtrusively at home’. He had an instinctive knowledge of football and his son, Javier, would become a professional scout.
When Bielsa was challenged over his use of Wainer, he retorted: ‘This information has little influence on the result but, if it is a case of having it or not having it, I would prefer to have it.’
This would be Bielsa’s defence during Spygate. The information he received was at best of marginal value. There were some, including Derby chairman Mel Morris, who wondered how small that advantage might be.
‘You could see an intricate setpiece routine on the training pitch that could massively change the face of a game,’ said Morris. ‘Look at the second leg of the play-off semi-final (when Leeds fell apart against Derby). Frank Lampard (then Derby manager) played a diamond formation for the first time. Had someone known, I guarantee Leeds would have set up differently and there might have been a different result.’
Bielsa pointed out that when he was in charge of Athletic Bilbao, all training sessions were conducted in public. Sometimes, knowing his opponents were watching, he would pick out a child from the crowd and ask them to give instructions to the squad. Almost uniquely, he would announce the Leeds team two days before a game.
The fact you would be spied upon was almost accepted in South America. Before the final of the Copa Libertadores — South America’s equivalent of the Champions League — Gremio, based in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, used a drone to fly over the training ground of their Argentine opponents, Lanus.
When the ploy was uncovered, Gremio manager Renato Portaluppi was unrepentant. ‘Every Brazilian club has a spy. The Brazil national team has a spy. The world belongs to those who are sharp,’
he remarked. Lanus mounted no official protest. Portaluppi’s words proved accurate; Gremio won.
There was also the question of how much information Bielsa needed. He and his team had analysed not just the 32 games Derby had played so far that season under Lampard but all those they had played in the previous season under Gary Rowett.
All this would be distilled into two eight-minute segments for the Leeds players to study. Bielsa’s research suggested that was the maximum amount of information a footballer could retain.
Mauricio Pochettino, who played for Bielsa with Newell’s Old Boys and Argentina, remarked that the biggest difference between them as managers was that Bielsa obsessed far more about his opponents.
In the 1990s, Bielsa was working in Mexico, in charge of Atlas Guadalajara. One of the Atlas directors, Samuel Alvo, suggested Bielsa took his family for a break in Puerto Vallarta, the jewel of Mexico’s Pacific coast, made famous as the home of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
As Alvo related: ‘They had barely arrived at the hotel when Marcelo asked for two video recorders and shut himself in his room to watch the last 10 matches of their next opponents, Puebla, on videos which he had packed in his suitcase. He put his father-in-law to work taking notes. His feet did not touch the sand.’
The game against Puebla was a friendly.
When he was accused of breaking the British tradition of fair play by spying on opponents, there were many within the game who thought this was hypocritical. Among them was former Scotland manager
Craig Brown. ‘When I worked in Scottish football, scouts would put on a hat, pull up their overcoat and take their dog for a walk somewhere around their opponents’ training ground,’ said Brown. ‘In sport, knowledge is power.
‘In 1986, I was part of Alex Ferguson’s staff when he was manager of Scotland during the World Cup in Mexico. Our second group game was against West Germany and the big question was whether Gordon Strachan would play. Alex was paranoid about security.
‘Scotland were training in the stadium at Queretaro and Franz Beckenbauer sent his assistant, Berti Vogts, to see what he could discover.
‘As soon as Berti got to the stadium, he was refused entry. Then he saw a guy with a trolley selling Coca-Cola. Berti was wearing an official West Germany shirt and asked the vendor if they could swap.
‘The guy not only gave him his shirt, he let him have the trolley as well. Berti pushed the Coca-Cola trolley past security and watched us train.
‘Afterwards, when the Germans had won, Beckenbauer told us he knew Strachan would be playing and he told us how he knew.
‘For ever afterwards, Alex Ferguson called Berti Vogts the Coca-Cola man.’
On holiday at Mexico’s finest resort, Bielsa shut himself away to study his opponents . . . for a friendly