How the gospel of Marcelo Bielsa made disciples of Leeds United fans and a city

There is a picture of Marcelo Bielsa taken after Leeds United’s 2-0 victory over Huddersfield Town in March, their last match before the lockdown, that captures the manager in a rare moment of rapture. It is their fifth win in succession and the three points has shot them back to the top of the Championship, repairing the damage inflicted by four defeats out of five in January and February.

Yet it is not one of his own players – Luke Ayling, for example, who had opened the scoring with a sensationally balletic volley – who inspires Bielsa’s delight. It is Manchester City’s Aymeric Laporte, a player given his debut by Bielsa at Athletic Bilbao, on a visit to the dressing room. The two are photographed holding a City shirt Laporte has autographed and inscribed with a debt of gratitude to his mentor. Bielsa beams with pride that borders on the paternal. It is an uncommon glimpse of what lies behind the intensity: genuine joy in his work and the fruits of it.

“They call him ‘El Loco’ cos he’s crazy,” Leeds fans sing in their main song dedicated to him. It is another variant of Bad Moon Rising but also a duplication of the theme of insanity that has been casually applied to Bielsa throughout his career. It is there in the title of Tim Rich’s fascinating new biography, The Quality of Madness, in the headlines of newspapers from Santiago to Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Madrid, Paris and London. Indeed Dimitri Payet, who spent a year under Bielsa at Marseille, called the severity of his training methods “like a sickness but it worked”.

The effectiveness of it, as Payet says, is the key. The lyric that follows the El Loco line, “but he knows exactly what we need” is one of the main reasons, along obviously with two seasons of mostly thrilling football, why supporters have embraced him so warmly. Like the old ‘George knows’ and then ‘Arsène knows’ banners at Highbury, there is comfort in having a manager who has an aura of certainty even if that inevitably proves illusory.

This combination of eccentricity, rigidity of focus, his Spartan lifestyle and belief in his system, which creates a tornado of movement, passing, pressing and overloading, has made disciples of them all. Bilesa arrived to a public which was desperate to be charmed and longing for a head coach with vision, someone who could shape a generation and the culture of the club just as Don Revie and Howard Wilkinson once had. As the journalist and author Paul Rogerson, a lifelong fan, says: “In his preoccupation with process and utter lack of pretension, Bielsa resembles the last Leeds manager who raised the club off the floor – Howard Wilkinson. History was bunk for them both - forget Revie and the past. And he has dispelled that myth, beloved of lazy pundits, that a manager needs to ‘know’ the Championship to succeed.“

Fourteen managers have tried to win promotion back to the Premier League in the 16 years of Leeds’ absence, not all without merit. Some battled extreme financial restrictions and had their best players routinely sold but too many made it all about them, characterising a collective quest as a personal mission. In Bielsa they have a man who would be entitled to claim credit for his success and yet he is the one who would never do that.

His modesty – manifest in the patience shown posing for hundreds of ‘selfies’ as he makes his way around Wetherby, the market town he has lived in for the past 22 months in a one-bedroom flat above a sweet shop – simply precludes it. He always takes the blame, never the praise. Even at last season’s darkest moment, when Kiko Casilla’s composure evaporated at 2-0 up against Derby almost three-quarters of the way through the play-off semi-final and a spooked team wobbled, he accepted responsibility, as he did for the preposterously overblown ‘Spygate’, putting only himself in the pillory for the pearl-clutchers to reproach.

He remains an ardent fan of Newell’s Old Boys and his understanding of the irrational fervor we feel translates into the way he works. The least we expect is for players to run their socks off and his way demands sacrifice and hunger, literally and figuratively as every player’s body shape has been transformed into slender and wiry physiques to enable them to maintain the relentlessness of their running until the end. And he always tries to win.

The evidence of his work is there on the pitch: pressing represents a kind of honesty, an appetite for hard work, but the fluency, flexibility, the angle and rapidity of the passes to manipulate defenders demonstrates how much he has educated them. It was only two years ago that the captain, Liam Cooper, was derided as “League One Liam”. His improvement under Bielsa has been almost miraculous.

That is behind the smile he flashes with Laporte by his side. He identifies potential, unrecognized sometimes by the players themselves, and turns it into achievement. So long as the player has the physical stamina to play the Bielsa way, he will help him. He does not demand flashy signings and does not whinge and sulk at injuries, lack of resources or the grisly standard of refereeing in the Championship. There is an engaging purity in the way that if training and facilities meet his exacting specifications, he just gets on with it.

“He gives off this unflappable air of knowing exactly what he’s doing,” says Professor Anand Menon, another fan approaching 50 years of following Leeds. “You can’t help but find it reassuring. And my God, the football he’s got them playing is simply fantastic. The Premier League have got a treat in store.” Given that his system and variations of it have flourished at Tottenham under Mauricio Pochettino and Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, there is no fear that it cannot work but its success will be limited by the quality of the players he can use. Opponents will have more obligation to attack too, giving them more space than they have endured with typical Championship suffocation tactics.  

Whether it thrives or not in the Premier League will not affect how Leeds supporters feel about the kind of manager they’ve been crying out for since David O’Leary was sacked in 2002. With Bielsa the Promised Land is not so much a destination as a state of mind. And Leeds have been there for two years already.