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The Bielsa disciples: Coaching icons in debt to ‘football father’

Leeds United manager Marcelo Bielsa has a legion of admirers amongst the world's leading coaches. Photo: Michael Regan/PA Wire Expand

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Leeds United manager Marcelo Bielsa has a legion of admirers amongst the world's leading coaches. Photo: Michael Regan/PA Wire

Leeds United manager Marcelo Bielsa has a legion of admirers amongst the world's leading coaches. Photo: Michael Regan/PA Wire

Leeds United manager Marcelo Bielsa has a legion of admirers amongst the world's leading coaches. Photo: Michael Regan/PA Wire

Jeremy Wilson

It was 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 judgments 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 is how many of Bielsa’s 280 retired former players are working as football managers or coaches. It is an extraordinary statistic – the result of painstaking research by Argentinian journalist Carlos Arasaki – and one which becomes yet further magnified when you add in disciples such as Pep Guardiola and Jorge Sampaoli, who never 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,” Sampaoli said.

Bielsa and Guardiola go head-to-head when Leeds face Manchester City at lunchtime, but their friendship dates back 15 years when the older man was visited at his remote ranch 50 miles outside Rosario.

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.

Following Leeds’ 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. Asked 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.

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“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. 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 job at Leeds? “I have not triumphed,” he said. “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 in which, in his early years, he would spend 14 hours a day studying videos of football . And they are not the varied training sessions, or the relentless high press which has influenced a generation of coaches. The defining characteristics are the humility of a man who prefers to walk to work in his Leeds tracksuit, allied to an infectious enthusiasm and fascination with football.

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 the most telling explanation of all. “He made us love football.” (© Telegraph Media Group Limited 2021)

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