Jonathan Woodgate tipped to take over.
Bielsa is the best thing ever to happen to English football.
Fat Sam lined up
Fake news.
Jesse Marsch will take over. He was due to take over at end of season but it’s been brought forward now
Niners ownership will want a Ted Lasso style coach alright.
What could possibly go wrong?
Bizarre who the two best managers from that era have turned out to be.
Leeds seemingly doubling down on the hipster front. The new man apparently will be some American chap called Jesse Marsch. No experience of managing in England and has only managed for a couple of years in Europe, full stop, at Salzburg and Lokomkiv Leipzig.
He sounds like a right fellow to be going head to head with Sean Dyche and Roy Hosgson in a relegation dog fight.
A very sad ending but history will be kind to him. Has done more for the club in his 4 years than others would do in a lifetime.
On the Sunday after Leeds United’s recent defeat by Everton, Marcelo Bielsa got out of bed and took himself to mass. As a practising Catholic and a resident of Wetherby it was not unusual to see him in his local church but this particular Sunday called for some soul-searching.
The Premier League season had been gruelling and Bielsa was bearing the weight of it but a 3-0 loss at Goodison Park cut as deep as most results.
With hindsight, the game on February 12 came to feel like a tipping point. Leeds were under pressure to win it and bring their season to heel but it was lost with a whimper: the wrong line-up, positional errors which Bielsa owned up to and not enough fight. Over 90 minutes the team looked troubled.
In the boardroom at Elland Road, the wind was turning against him; not dramatically or viciously but to the extent that the idea of replacing Bielsa in the summer was now the prevailing mood. A new season would most likely mean a new head coach, unless a resurgence changed the landscape again.
What nobody anticipated was the sharp acceleration of anxiety that led to Bielsa’s dismissal, a quick fortnight later. One minute there was confidence that if nothing else, Leeds would have it in them to fend off relegation. The next minute that confidence had gone.
The murmuring about imminent change began rumbling on Thursday evening, in the 24 hours after Leeds lost 6-0 at Liverpool.
Removing Bielsa from his position was a public relations minefield. It went without saying that the finest manager the club had fallen for this side of Howard Wilkinson, a coach revered in Leeds like almost no-one else, was not a manager the club could sack with impunity. But the out-of-control concession of goals, the structure of the team, the confidence of the squad, Bielsa’s judgment itself; all of it was worrying the club’s hierarchy, compounded by an ever-worsening Premier League table.
Leeds were contemplating ending his reign before Saturday’s game against Tottenham Hotspur and a brittle, 4-0 defeat led to a parting of ways by Sunday morning.
Bielsa signed off from his final match, his 170th in charge, with a respectful shake of Antonio Conte’s hand and a subdued walk to the tunnel, the silent finish he least deserved. The defiance from the stands in the second half gave the impression of a crowd who sensed they were nearing the end of the Bielsa era, though defiance is something Elland Road does well whenever times are hard.
Bielsa, Leeds
Bielsa leaves the pitch at Elland Road for the last time (Photo: JON SUPER/AFP via Getty Images)
In exiting like that, the 66-year-old was nothing if not consistent, taking his leave with as few histrionics as he did on the night when Leeds were as good as promoted in 2020. “Of course,” he replied when he was asked if he could yet regain control of the season but his expression implied that his own concern was growing.
He has been, to the last, a reluctant showman, someone who could not fathom his own popularity or forgive his own failings, even if they became more difficult to articulate as results turned sour. People in the street would call him God and Bielsa would wag his finger at them, unable to accept the comparison.
To the public he was private but accessible, low-key but politely affable, and Yorkshire quickly became his home. He moved out of his famous flat above the chiropodists this season and into a nearby house overlooking the River Wharfe, happy in those surroundings. He had a street named after him, beer named after him, murals of him painted on various walls and love unlimited.
But for all that, who knows if Bielsa will be back in these parts or how often? Who will have the chance to say goodbye? It was often said that when Bielsa moved on, he would rapidly make himself scarce.
The emergence of Jesse Marsch, the former RB Salzburg and RB Leipzig manager, as Bielsa’s probable successor — an appointment Leeds would like to secure rapidly, with an announcement due on Monday — shows that a change has been brewing in the background. Marsch, 48, was a leading candidate to take the job at Elland Road at the end of this season, in the event that Leeds and Bielsa parted company, but his out-of-work status and close relationship with director of football Victor Orta made expediting talks simple.
Marsch’s teams have a reputation for pressing and dominating possession, two things Bielsa’s squad have been trained for relentlessly. The American is a close fit in that sense, albeit on the back of an unsuccessful struggle to inherit Julian Nagelsmann’s Leipzig.
Leeds, Marsch
Marsch is expected to take over at Leeds (Photo: Jan Woitas/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The best-case scenario for Leeds is that Marsch conducts a quick refresh, extends some warmth to players who need reinvigorating, and makes enough of the last 12 matches to keep the club safe. The worst-case scenario is that the transition from coach to coach asks too much in a short period of time and fails to halt imploding form, casting the decision as a mistimed error.
Had Marsch been poised to replace Bielsa this summer anyway, there might be advantages in him getting his foot in the door before his first pre-season gets going but sources close to him are clear that he sees himself as a coach of Premier League standing. The club would be a different proposition in the Championship. And aside from anything else, succeeding Bielsa means filling a monumental void, culturally and aesthetically.
Bielsa, as his position weakened, was not dragged down by outright mutiny. There were niggles and frustrations and a frank conversation between him and Raphinha after the Brazil forward was substituted at half-time at Everton but the creep of doubt was incremental. Injuries became a huge burden on Leeds but at no stage did training ease off. Instead it intensified, with murderball, the apple of Bielsa’s training eye, no longer limited to one session a week.
The club suggested loan signings like Donny van de Beek in January, a way of fleshing out a depleted squad, but Bielsa knocked them back. In a month like this one in which Leeds conceded 20 goals, unflinching tactics became a bone of contention for the board too. A source close to one of the players described them as “exhausted” by the pressure of a system which was no longer functioning consistently.
Very little of this was new and Leeds had spent the previous three years extolling the virtues of Bielsa’s single-mindedness — the fastidious commitment to specific methods, a picky approach to the transfer market, a refusal to flip-flop. Single-mindedness was the basis of his impact at Elland Road but his reluctance to adapt when results suggested that adapting was necessary posed the question in the boardroom of whether the decline in form might take them down; about whether deference to Bielsa was leading to paralysis.
There was very little point in challenging him on specific principles because challenging principles was the equivalent of telling Bielsa that faith in him was waning, a strategy akin to nudging him out of the door. Voicing a loss of confidence meant doing what Leeds eventually did and removing him from his post.
Bielsa, Leeds
Single-mindedness underpinned Bielsa’s regime (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
The irony for Bielsa is that he was convinced last summer that he and the squad were in ideal shape for his fourth season at Leeds. He lost weight and took on a personal training programme, deciding that the stress of the Premier League and coaching in general demanded a stricter focus on his own fitness.
The physical data produced by his players in pre-season was better than in any previous summer. He pushed again on the infrastructure front by convincing Leeds to match a new state-of-the-art pitch at Elland Road by laying the same surface at their training ground. Very few of his proposals for improving facilities were resisted. The suggestion that Leeds create a small putting green for the players at Thorp Arch was one of the few things the club declined to do. In return, Bielsa spent more than £100,000 building a gym for non-playing staff at Elland Road.
The football, though, regressed this season, to the naked eye and statistically. Leeds were no longer the same attacking machine and no longer able to compensate for porous defending by scoring goals. Injuries ravaged their squad and did not relent, a brutal strain on resources which took out three pillars of the team in Kalvin Phillips, Patrick Bamford and Liam Cooper. Their last clean sheet, at home to Crystal Palace in November, is one of only three to date.
Bielsa was drawn into ideological arguments over his choice of line-ups and substitutes, manifested in his regular use of Tyler Roberts over Joe Gelhardt. All of Bielsa’s final four fixtures saw at least two substitutions before the start of the second half, the mark of a team which would not pick itself. The effort of the players encouraged him but tactically he could not deny that his plan was falling short. “Positive things are contagious,” he said after full-time against Spurs. “So are negative things.”
The dismissal of a coach who was untouchable for so long will pose awkward questions of the directors at Leeds. Were they right to assume that the investment they made in new signings on the back of their promotion season would largely see them through two years? Was last summer as busy as it should have been and did drawing a blank in the search for a central midfielder set the tone for a dressing room which clearly needed one? When they spent, did enough of the signings work? Should they have argued more vociferously for Bielsa to take on extra resources if they thought more resources were needed? And ultimately, could this premature conclusion have been avoided?
Bielsa regularly answered those questions by fighting the club’s corner. They had invested sufficiently, he would say, and more than enough for him and the team to be doing better. They had backed him on cosmetic and structural changes to the training facilities and his authority as head coach was absolute, free of interference from above.
But over time a gap developed in the peak-years zone of the dressing room, with an old guard growing older and a younger core too far away from their prime, and the priority for Leeds if they do stay up will be to build a squad more suited to the Premier League than this season’s has been. They have known all along that any transition from Bielsa would involve substantial recruitment on the playing side, providing his successor with a different hand to play with, and that fact is staring them in the face.
With Bielsa, it was as he promised: Plan A to the last, even when his man-to-man set up came under the most severe pressure. The players stuck at it because in so many cases, Bielsa’s football was the making of them: athletes who thought they had a low ceiling inspired to smash it spectacularly. Some made it into international football on his watch. Many saw their earning potential rocket and most experienced technical and tactical improvement, punching above their perceived weight.
Leeds, Bielsa
Elland Road did not turn on Bielsa (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
The personal gains filtered down to others outside the dressing room, like the security guard who won a Fiat 500 in Bielsa’s last Christmas raffle. So many people owed him something, not least a crowd who never turned on him. They valued the drive and immersed themselves in the education, hoping the ride would continue forever.
The partnership between Leeds and Bielsa was built on the quality of his football but there was more to it than football alone and if that sounds twee, ask the people who followed it from start to finish. Walk around the city and look at the imprint he is leaving on it or wade back through the years when the only direction Leeds were going was straight over a cliff. Much of his work was art and brilliantly conceived.
Bielsa and Leeds were almost the definition of chaos theory: a coach who some considered to be unmanageable colliding with a club who many considered to be unmanageable and both of them finding glory in each other.
It is ending like this, in a manner nobody wanted, because as Bielsa would say, perfection is reserved for God. The congregation, to a man, are mortal.
(Top photo: Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)
Not looking great for the Leeds
The new manager sounds a ham.
Hello darkness my old friend
You kissed the sky my friend, never regret that
They should have let Bielsa go out on his shield
The bottom 3 are so bad i think Leeds and Everton will stay up.
It’s only Burnley really who might escape.
They had a bit of a burst a few weeks back but poor since.
At current rates of scoring 35 points would see you safe.
Burnley have 12 games to get 14 points.
Leeds have 10 games to get 12.
Everton have 13 games to get 13
I think they will too.
Dyche will find a way.
They’ve Brentford, Norwich and Watford in their fixtures left (all aways I think). Only top team they’ve left is City.