On Losing Bielsa Again

It’s a balmy afternoon in late February and I’m mourning Marcelo Bielsa again.

The first time I mourned Bielsa was another balmy afternoon, this time in July. Leeds were playing their first game after confirming their promotion to the Premier League after a 16-year wandering in the diaspora of the football league.

I’ll never forget the feeling. The team sheet drops and there it is. His name. At the top of the sheet. Kiko Casilla.

Four months earlier, the Leeds United goalkeeper had been suspended for eight matches with immediate effect, fined £60,000 and obliged to attend face-to-face education after an independent Regulatory Commission found him in “aggravated breach” of FA Rule E3(2), having made reference to “race and/or colour and/or ethnic origin” of Jonathan Leko during an EFL Championship fixture against Charlton Athletic on Saturday 28 September 2019.

Now, in July, having served his suspension, he was the first name on the team sheet in the game that was meant to be the celebration of a long-anticipated promotion.

That day I mourned Bielsa.

Why the grief? It was more than just a sensitivity to the nature of the scandal that had occurred — although I still rank the Casilla incident as one of the worst days in the history of Leeds United. Perhaps through no fault of his own, the Argentine had come to represent something for me that was all too rare within modern football: a person of principle.

Caught between a love of the beautiful game and an emerging awareness of the gradual moral degradation of modern football, I’d always been drawn towards Bielsa as someone who offered a preferential option to the fan. In press conferences, he was undeniably on the side of the people; he saw his responsibility as being to provide entertainment for the match-going fan who spent hard-earned money to come and watch his team play. There can be little doubt that this attitude is responsible for the profound love the Leeds fanbase has had for Bielsa almost since the day he arrived.

But in my head, I had built him up further. He had become a paragon of virtue, the living instantiation of my own ethics within an increasingly corporocratic footballing reality. A genuine leftist role model in a world where such a thing seemed almost perversely contradictory.

In hindsight, this was unfair on my part. Marcelo Bielsa didn’t purport to be any of these things. The more I researched the Leeds United manager for a book I was writing on him, the more I became aware that, for the most part, Bielsa eschews the overtly political. Coming from a family of lawyers and politicians in the Peronist mold, the youngest Bielsa stands in contradistinction to his siblings — he is almost the overcorrection to their political excesses. Yes, there is still the Peronist preferential option for the working person vis-a-vis the football fan. But I became increasingly aware that there was also the inherent Peronist proclivity to allow a space for the corporate as well. And in a footballing hinterland, this attitude starts to look very laissez-faire indeed.

Playing Kiko Casilla on that July afternoon, then, was the final straw. The edifice came crashing down.

But my love for Bielsa was not merely extrinsic to what was happening on the pitch. In the course of the Bielsa era at Leeds, I learned more about the mechanics of the game than I had in the preceding 30 years. He made me fascinated about football tactics precisely because his football was so different. And against the background of Bielsa’s football, the whole world of football tactics was thrown into sharp relief.

Even at the end, I still believe in Bielsaball. Okay, I may have questions about the ceiling that a team prioritising physical over technical attributes might reach. Okay, I may have questions about the players he chose to play in the system. But I never for once doubted that the system was a legitimate way to approach the game and give you an upside in an increasingly professionalised sport.

Football remains a form of entertainment. And Bielsa certainly gave us that. Of course, when things were waning at the end of the cycle, there wasn’t much to bring us joy. But the waning of a cycle should not cause the whole process into question. Perhaps Bielsa would never be able to oversee the gradual churn of a squad that is necessary to retain competitiveness during a managerial tenure. But that doesn’t mean to say the principles themselves are questionable.

So here I am. Mourning Bielsa again.

My personal preference was that things didn’t end this way. I would have preferred a smooth transition in the summer. But as an amateur historian of Marcelo Bielsa, I can’t say I’m surprised that things ended in ignominy.

I will dearly miss him. Like many other Leeds fans, I haven’t been able to enjoy football to the fullest in the way that I have with him in charge of my club. For that, I will be eternally grateful.

But as I mourn him a second time, he remains a complex figure for me. He is, perhaps, the most complex figure in world football. He built himself up for me. He tore himself down for me. He remains utterly compelling for me, albeit in a completely different way.

In many respects, though, this makes his leaving all the more poignant for me. It feels somehow more real. He wasn’t just a deus ex machina for me. He walked among us. He forced me to struggle with beliefs. There was as much crucifixion as there was ascension during his time at Leeds.

I expect I will never feel the same way about another Leeds United manager. Why would I? For most of them, my interest will be purely restricted to the of-field aspects. This, again, is part of his genius. For making me care about more than just the football.

So thank you, Marcelo Bielsa. You gave me more joy and more pain than anyone else in football has ever managed.