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Revealed: The extraordinary Marcelo Bielsa coaching family tree
It was Sir Terry Pratchett who once wrote that no-one finally dies until the ripples they have left fade away. Apply that to football management and, beyond all the traditional judgements about trophies and win percentages, there is surely no living coach with a better shot at immortality than Marcelo Bielsa. A man with two daughters, but a professional offspring of footballing sons who, at the most recent count, totalled 163.
That’s how many of Bielsa’s 280 retired former players are currently working as football managers or coaches.
It is an extraordinary statistic - the result of painstaking research by the Argentinian journalist Carlos Arasaki - and one which becomes yet further magnified when you add in disciples like Pep Guardiola and Jorge Sampaoli, who never personally played under Bielsa but became captivated by his entire footballing outlook. “I spied on Marcelo for 10 years - I reached a point where I became dependent on him,” said Sampaoli.
Bielsa and Guardiola go head to head when Leeds United face Manchester City on Saturday lunchtime, but their friendship famously dates back 15 years when the older man was visited at his remote ranch 50 miles outside Rosario by the recently retired former Barcelona midfielder.
Guardiola, who sought out Bielsa on the recommendation of former team-mate Gabriel Batistuta, was so excited following the day they spent talking football that he texted a friend to announce that he had just met the world’s most knowledgeable coach.
Javi Martinez, who played under Bielsa at Athletic Bilbao before joining Bayern Munich, says that Guardiola would constantly pepper him with questions about the Argentinian when he was managing in the Bundesliga. Following Leeds United’s promotion last year, Guardiola described Bielsa as “absolutely at the top of the list” among football managers.
Mauricio Pochettino and Diego Simeone speak with comparable reverence, even if the subject of such praise appears almost perplexed by all the fuss. Asked by The Telegraph why so many of his players had gone into management and what wider legacy he might leave, Bielsa’s first reflex was to cower from any reflected glory. “You have to look at this in the right way,” he said. “Pochettino has his own ideas which, from my point of view, are better than mine. [Gerardo] Martino [the former Barcelona and current Mexico manager] is a great coach worldwide. He has manifested himself in a similar way to Pochettino.
“[Eduardo] Berizzo [the Paraguay manager] is a player I admire a lot. He’s always been clear, even to myself, that he doesn’t practice my ideas. Those that leave a legacy, generate a desire in the other coaches to reproduce a style.
“I always put the case of Guardiola. He has generated a system. It emits such superiority from the teams he manages [that] opponents think the best way to avoid being defeated, or lose by a small number of goals, is to start the recovery of the ball 10 metres from your own box. That’s a real praise to the style of the man.”
And what of Bielsa’s assessment of his own job at Leeds? “I have not triumphed,” he said. “Triumph is something that evades me. Promoted? It was very difficult not to achieve this. The level of the team deserved it.”
It all feels impossibly modest until you remember what are surely Bielsa’s defining qualities.
And they are not an obsessive attention to detail which, in his early years, would see him spend 14 hours a day studying videos of football between travelling the length and breadth of Argentina in a Fiat 147 to personally watch thousands of players live. And they are not the extraordinarily varied training sessions, a propensity to convert midfielders into defenders or the relentless high press which has certainly influenced a generation of coaches.
The defining characteristics are actually the personal humility of a man who still prefers to walk to work in his Leeds tracksuit allied to an utterly infectious enthusiasm and fascination with football. Like the best teacher, they are qualities which connect on a very deep level and ignite a flame. What his pupils then do with that fire is down to them.
That is why Bielsa’s alumni might share certain characteristics in terms of pressing and work-rate but ultimately do play a relatively broad range of styles. And they are also drawn from a completely varied cross section of personalities.
Tim Rich, who wrote Bielsa’s biography The Quality of Madness, says that he would use a thesaurus to make his sentences simpler and ensure that he could reach everyone in the group. Rich was especially intrigued by how he so inspired Berizzo, “a rough hard centre-half” from Argentina who was sent off four times in one season for Celta Vigo but then led Chilean club O’Higgins to their first ever league title and is now managing Paraguay. “Just about all the managers Bielsa has coached do admit to wondering at some time what he would do,” says Rich.
Some of their personal testimony is instructive. Roberto Ayala, the former Argentina defender, pinpoints Bielsa’s empathy and respect “for what the footballer was giving”. Christian Bassedas, who played under Bielsa for Velez and Argentina, was himself deeply emotional last summer while watching the celebrations for Leeds’ promotion to the Premier League on television. “Bielsa is a guy who reaches out to you and who catches people who are outside of football - to my wife, for example, and even my grandmother,” he says.
Benjamin Mendy, who played under Bielsa at Marseille, says that he would initially fall asleep during the group video sessions but that the manager was never deterred. “When I would open my eyes, Bielsa was still there, with the same serious look on his face, and he would say, ‘I am waiting for you to be interested’,” he says.
Former Espanyol midfielder Iván Helguera tells a story of how Bielsa began talking to him, Pochettino and Juan Esnaider about football in a sauna. After 30 uninterrupted minutes, it was the three players who could literally no longer stand the heat.
Pochettino's personal reservoir of anecdotes starts with the day his ‘football father’ arrived unannounced at his parents house after driving through the night to first inspect his legs and then sign him for Newell’s Old Boys when he was 14.
And, in explaining how Bielsa “motivated us to be able to follow this path as coaches”, he provides what is ultimately the most telling explanation of all.
“He made us love football,” Pochettino simply says.
