What next for crazy Marcelo Bielsa following Marseille walkout?

Even by the standards of a man known as El Loco (“Crazy”), Marcelo Bielsa’s resignation from Olympique Marseille on Saturday was a surprise.

The brilliant Argentine coach, 60, had agreed a new contract to keep him at the stunningly redeveloped Stade Velodrome, where crowds had surged past the one million mark last season to make them France’s best-supported team and the ninth best in the world. Only two days before his side’s opening Ligue 1 game at home to Caen last weekend, he talked with enthusiasm about the deal which was set to keep him in France’s second biggest city until 2017.

Having arrived in Provence a year ago and won eight of his first ten games, he was popular with the 51,000 fans who made their home one of the most atmospheric in Europe. Top of the league at the half-way point, OM tired and finished fourth, missing out on Champions League qualification. No French club can compete with the riches of champions PSG, but Bielsa was seen as a coach talented enough to push them, just as he pushed his players to breaking point.

“Bielsa is the most original, different, singular, person that I’ve ever met,” recalled one of his former players, Ander Herrera, the Manchester United midfielder who played under Bielsa at Athletic Bilbao. “He’s got an amazing mind, an incredible intellectual capacity outside football. Nothing is ever left to chance; everything is studied to the finest details. Everything he does or says, he does it for a reason. He knows what every player can and can’t do. He makes sure that everyone is on their toes, from the man who cuts the grass to players. I’ve seen him speaking to the groundsman for 45 minutes. I’m sure he would have studied ground keeping before that chat. He demands of others what he demands of himself. I’ve never seen coaching staff work as hard as under him. He’d go crazy if a cone was half a metre the wrong way.”

Bielsa’s exacting demands were legendary.

“When he got the Chile job in 2007, he gave the Chilean Football Association a list of 30 or 40 things which had to be right,” explains Diego Forlan. “He said: ‘if you want me to come then this has to be right’. There weren’t conditions attached to his contract, but about the conditions so that he could make the perfect football team. He improved Chile in four years there and helped them towards the team that they’ve become now, the South American champions. He is completely obsessed by football.”

Bielsa inspires awe among fellow coaches. Pep Guardiola drove 300 kilometres to meet him in his home city of Rosario. The meeting lasted 11 hours as they discussed tactics, techniques, and positions which, at one point, featured Guardiola’s friend marking a chair in Bielsa’s home. As Pep took notes, Bielsa told him that ‘teams can play badly or well, but talent depends on the inspiration and effort depends on each one of the players: the attitude for them is non-negotiable’.

Before he left, Bielsa said to him: “Why do you, as someone who knows all about the negative things that go on in the world of football, including the high level of dishonesty of some people, still want to return and get involved in coaching? Do you like blood that much?”

“I need that blood,” replied Guardiola.

Guardiola would use many of Bielsa’s ideas when he became a manager of Barça B in 2007, including never giving a one-on-one interview to a journalist as it was wrong to give priority to a big television company over a small newspaper. He said it invoked favouritism.

Bielsa had been a moderate footballer but retired at 25 and concentrated on coaching. After working with youth players, he took Newell’s Old Boys, the team he’d supported as a child, from Rosario, to the league title. He took Newell’s to the final of the Copa Libertadores two years after taking charge. It was his first job.

After a spell coaching in Mexico - and he’s now being linked with the Mexico job – he returned to Argentina in 1997, managed Espanyol in Spain in 1998 before taking control of the Argentina team, where he was in charge for six years. In 2007 he took over Chile and masterminded their first ever win over neighbours Argentina. He also led them to the 2010 World Cup after they’d missed out on two previous finals. He was loved in Chile for the attacking football his teams played, but resigned because of the politics above him.

Next stop was Athletic Bilbao, where he signed the young Herrera, but let him stay at Zaragoza until the end of the season to battle relegation. Herrera joined Athletic in 2012 and what a first season he had. The Basques reached the final of the Europa League, beating Manchester United home and away en route by playing some of the best football seen at Old Trafford.

“Everything came together on the night,” recalled Herrera, one of the star Athletic players. “We were winning 2-0 and Bielsa would not let us stop. We thought he wanted to close down the game. No, Bielsa wanted a third and a fourth. He could live with conceding a goal from a counter attack because that meant we’d have been attacking. He’s a football romantic, Bielsa. He thinks that football should be a spectacle.”

Athletic won 3-2 playing great football.

“It was a watershed for Bielsa,” recalled Herrera. “He was a lover of Barcelona’s style and a lot less of Madrid. He knew Barça speculated more. He’s meticulous, honest, studious. He lives for football.

“Bielsa’s personal style was direct. If we didn’t do well, he’d tell you to your face straight. Players appreciated that, though at the time it could bother you. If he didn’t take a shine to you, you would be in for a month of suffering. Every training session, he’d be on your back. He’d insult me in every training session until I improved. His rows were aggressive, but not insulting.”

Marseille offered him a new contract worth 25% more than his current deal. Bielsa, in a letter circulated by the Argentinian media, put his side of the story across, claiming the club had changed agreed conditions in his contract, saying that trust had gone and that he’d written his resignation letter before the Caen defeat. OM countered it, releasing a statement accusing him of holding the club hostage and putting his “personal interests well above those of the institution”.

Bielsa will find work at a high level again and, wherever he goes, it’s not going to be dull. This is a man who, confronted by angry fans at his Argentina home, grabbed a hand grenade and threated to pull out the pin.

“He was murder to live with in the days before the game,” smiled Herrera. “He was nervous, a perfectionist. He made us play football in a form Athletic had not played before. Football needs him.”