‘Failure forms us’: an imagined video call between Bielsa and Pochettino
Topic: Mauricio Pochettino’s Zoom MeetingMon, 13 Jun 2022 01:51 AM (CET)
[Marcelo Bielsa’s iPad has joined the meeting.]
Pochettino: Hello? Hello? Marcelo? Bielsa: Mauricio? Can you hear me? Pochettino: Yes, I can hear you now. You were … muted for a while.
Bielsa: Then that makes two of us. Pochettino: Is this a good time? Bielsa: Well, St Kitts and Nevis against Saint Martin in the Concacaf Nations League won’t watch itself. But don’t worry, I’m recording it. So, Paris. Is it done? Finished?
Pochettino: Almost. The severance terms have already been agreed. We’re just waiting for Kylian’s people to approve the messaging.
Bielsa: I read about his contract. Is it true he now chooses the initiation song for each new player?
Pochettino: It’s true. Nuno Mendes had to perform a profane French rap. It embarrassed him greatly. But when you have a player like Mbappé …
Bielsa: … you play him as a centreforward in 72% of your fixtures and as a left-winger in the other 28%. Overall your most common formation is an inverted 4-3-3, but when Neymar is available you switch to a 4-2-3-1. When Icardi plays with Mbappé you prefer a midfield diamond. With Messi and not Mbappé, you go 4-2-2-2 with Di María slightly withdrawn.
Pochettino: What does that tell you? Bielsa: It tells me nothing. It is useless. But out of respect to you, I wanted to prepare for this call in the correct manner.
Pochettino: I expected nothing less. Bielsa: Nevertheless, you did not contact me to talk about tactics or French rap. You called out of some ridiculous notion that I would be able to advise you. And you called to ask for forgiveness.
Pochettino: Forgiveness for what? Bielsa: For forsaking your sporting principles and joining a leisurewear company masquerading as a football team. You don’t need me to tell you what a bad idea that was. You know it already.
Pochettino: Do you judge me for wanting to win?
Bielsa: I judge nobody but myself. Regardless, I suspect you did not make this move with your heart, or even your head, but with – and I apologise for my coarseness – with your balls. You thought you could tame the untameable. You thought you would succeed where Blanc and Emery and Tuchel all failed, and bend this godless sideshow to your will. What did you learn, except for the fact that Messi is worse than useless out of possession and Neymar prefers to enjoy himself?
Pochettino: I went to one of Ney’s parties. Never in my life have I seen anything like it. There was a champagne whirlpool, a glass dancefloor, a laser archery range, miniature drones carrying trays of snacks. One of the guest suites had been turned into a petting zoo. I saw Marco Verratti riding a pig. Neymar himself was wearing a turban studded with emeralds. Eventually I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. There was a Tesla in it.
Bielsa: What about training? Pochettino: What about training? Once I tried to organise a rondo. But Leo refuses to go in the middle. And if Leo won’t go in the middle, then neither will Ney or Kylian. And then nobody wants to go. Eventually me and Jesús had to go in the middle. We were there for 45 minutes. Another time, I was explaining to Leo the concept of defensive transition. He had to fetch his translator.
Bielsa: I make no boasts about my time at Leeds. It was a failure, just like all the others. But for a time there was cohesion and respect. I won’t say love, because it’s hard to love someone who has just made you vomit on a treadmill. But one morning at breakfast, Luke Ayling brought in a painting that his daughter had made at nursery. A painting of me. “Uncle Marcelo,” she called it. Pochettino: Aaah.
Bielsa: Overall the painting was not of a high quality. The brushwork was vague and the application of glitter left much to be desired. But over time I have learned it is better not to say these things.
Pochettino: Is this what makes you happy? Building a project? Building a family?
Bielsa: Happiness is the wrong word. There is no happiness in football, only winning and losing. Winning delays the anxiety for a few minutes, maybe more. You tell me. You won more titles in 18 months than I did in 30 years. Did any of it give you the same stimulation you felt at Southampton? At Espanyol? At Newell’s? In the fields, with your friends, when you learned to solve a problem for the first time?
Pochettino: I’m not really detecting any advice here.
Bielsa: That’s because there is nothing useful I can say to you. Certainly nothing I can teach you on a sporting level. What would I know about coaching Juventus or Chelsea or Bayern Munich? Or getting your agent to plant stories in Marca? All I know is that no project is perfect. No job is secure. No club is immune from greed and dishonesty and disrespect. But still we return, because this is the nature of our obsession. And every failure forms us. It builds us. It brings us closer to the truth. Pochettino: Which is?
Bielsa: I don’t know. But if you ever discover it, tell me.
[Marcelo Bielsa’s iPad has left the meeting.]
was. I have lived with that lie for many years. I can’t tell you how much I regret that.”
And he felt shame. “It was: ‘What are people going to think about me? They see me as a strong man, as a captain, as a leader. When my teammates know, what are they going to think about it?’”
For years, rather than allowing himself to open up, “the way I coped with it was I had to shut down all my emotion”, he says. “I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t show if I was too happy. I don’t want kids to live the same way I lived for so many years.”
It was only after stepping back from elite sport – when the potential knockon effects would be less – that he was able to speak out.
“It’s something that has to come from yourself; not because someone pushed me,” he says. “For me it was because I was watching a paedophile programme. [Margaux] saw my face change and said: ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said: ‘Nothing,’ and she said: ‘Come on, we don’t lie between each other. What’s the problem?’
“Then I opened myself because I felt safe. I felt like I couldn’t lie. She didn’t force me. And we had this conversation. So that’s why I say: ‘It’s tough to open [up].’”
Even now, looking back, he isn’t sure speaking out while he was playing would have served him well. “I was thinking to myself: ‘Would the Patrice right now – where he’s more open, emotional, more feeling – succeed in the same way that I succeeded as a robot?’ With that robot, with that machine, winning winning winning was all that mattered.”
To encourage more reporting of abuse, and to lessen the stigma, it isn’t simply a case of telling victims to speak up, Evra says. Instead, it is a matter of educating people and creating an environment where they can talk publicly. The same applies to encouraging footballers to come out as gay, and being open about other personal things, he says.
But that doesn’t mean it’s straightforward, or that everyone will be accepting straight away, he says. “I can promote [homosexuality] because I don’t follow any book,” he says. “I just follow myself. I follow my heart. But I think we can’t be too harsh to people that say: ‘I can’t because of religion,’ or whatever.”
He adds: “It’s really tough. For example what’s happening with the player with PSG,” referring to an incident involving Paris Saint-Germain’s midfielder Idrissa Gueye, who allegedly refused to play in a match to avoid wearing a rainbow symbol in support of LGBTQ+ rights. “He didn’t want to wear that shirt, you know. But it doesn’t mean he’s against it. He just don’t want to promote it.”
Problems in football are problems in society, he says. “I always say we like to point the finger at football or whatever. But it’s the society. It’s about education. No one is born as a racist person. It’s not a baby, I wake up and I’m racist.
All those footballers are human beings.”
Even so, since retiring from the sport, he has discovered a life beyond the football “bubble” and the “toxic masculinity” he says surrounded him. “A lot of people said: ‘When you stop football it’ll be hard. You’ll be in depression.’ But actually I’m more happy than ever. I’m free. I’m not in that box. I can do everything. If I want to be serious, if I want to be a clown, if I want to motivate people. This is life. I can be whoever I am.”
Most of the time, being whoever he is means being a joker. On Instagram, he has accrued 10 million followers and near cult-like status among young fans for his infectiously cheerful videos, from motivational clips on Mondays to videos of him impersonating Tina Turner and seductively caressing a raw chicken. “Before, all the managers were against social media,” Evra says. “So I wouldn’t be able to do all those crazy videos.”
He is so relentlessly positive online that even the racist trolls got bored. “If someone puts a banana emoji I’m like: ‘I love bananas,’ and they delete it straight away,” he says. “When they send the monkey I say: ‘Send the gorilla. The monkey is fragile. The gorilla is strong.’ And they delete it.”
Beyond giving him more comedic freedom, “retirement” has allowed him to let down his guard. Although he’s “busier than ever” with work – from campaigning to appearing on the BBC’s Freeze the Fear – he is less stressed. He spends his free time at home with
Margaux, playing board games, changing nappies and cooking dinner. “I’m a homely guy,” he says.
And he cries often – even at little things. “Before if I was crying I was like straight away: ‘No, what are you doing?’ But Margaux was like: ‘No, you have to let it go. You have to open yourself. Anything you have got inside your chest you have to let it out because it will burn you.’”
Today, if he saw that Juventus teammate crying at a film, rather than teasing them, “the Patrice now would be like: ‘Oh, let me watch the movie and let’s cry together,’” he says. “I can cry [from] happiness. I can cry if I watch a movie. It’s not being soft. That’s the way I’ve been educated; my dad and people like men around me, crying is a sign of weakness. But no. Crying is a sign of strength.”
Opening up about the abuse in particular has been cathartic. He tries not to dwell on the abuser. “When people talk about this, I don’t even know the face of this person. I don’t know if he is still alive, if he died. Someone asked me: ‘Do you hate that person?’ I said: ‘No.’ Actually, because I don’t have any hate in my heart. Do you want that person to be arrested? Yes, but not for me. To make sure he doesn’t do the same things he did to me to other children.”
But, he says, blocking it out over the years has been destructive. “[Speaking out] made me realise that for so many years to not open myself, it killed a lot of my feeling. A lot of my emotion.”
He doesn’t want to be known as a “victim”, or thought of as “courageous” or a “hero” for sharing his story, as some have described him. But he hopes that it may encourage someone else to take steps toward reporting an abuser. “They might think: ‘If this player, captain of this team, he opened himself up, I can do it,’” he says.
Since his book was published, he has been approached by people in the street who thanked him for speaking about his past, and said they had been abused too. “My mother always said: ‘The more you give the more you receive.’ And the feedback I have received from people in the street is: ‘Thank you,’” he says.
“It’s made me think: ‘Wow, Patrice. It was fine kicking a ball around. But you can do more than that.’”
• In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
I was taught crying is a sign of weakness. But no. It is a sign of strength
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