The Quality of Madness: A Life of Marcelo Bielsa

Product Information

Bielsa is a meticulous, obsessive and enigmatic manager who carries a mythology with him. He is one of football's most intriguing personalities - and he has just arrived in the English Premier League. When Pochettino was 12 years old, Bielsa turned up at his family home at 2am and told his mother he was very interested in signing him up. The mother walked him to the bedroom but Pochettino was asleep. Bielsa said: 'Don't worry, I don't need to talk to him, I just need to see his legs.'" It's Bielsa's rigidity that works against him and after the first season we all thought: 'There goes Bielsa again, almost but not quite,'" says Mora y Araujo. "But now he has done it, and I think that's incredibly redeeming for him personally and for the club." In our BBC World Service documentary - Bielsa: the manager behind the myths - we've spoken to some of the people who have got closest to the 65-year-old Argentine through his well-travelled career - from Buenos Aires to Bilbao and Mexico to Marseille - to try to find out what it is really like to work with this famously idiosyncratic and demanding coach.

Despite briefly making the first team at Newell's as a player himself, he soon realised that his physical limitations but agile mind made him more suited to coaching. He quit playing at the age of 25 and after a spell in charge of the University of Buenos Aires team he took over the youth academy at Newell's, developing a forensic approach to scouting players that serves him to this day. New players have joined, but the team that currently hovers over the Premier League relegation zone still holds core members of the first game against Stoke City in August 2018. If loyalty has proved to be the undoing of Bielsa, it is surely a flaw worth celebrating. In his first season in Bilbao, Bielsa's team reached the finals of the Europa League and Copa del Rey, only to suffer 3-0 defeats at the hands of Atletico Madrid and Barcelona respectively. At Marseille in 2014-15, Bielsa's team were top of Ligue 1 at Christmas, but faded badly and finished fourth.

The book is a great read about a true sporting impresario and football fans and general readers alike will love it. Sometimes, a dozen or so will turn up at the team hotel, where they can be seen poring over laptops in reception, and some of Bielsa’s extensive support staff at Leeds have cut their teeth in this way. If they impress, they can be invited into the inner circle. Spain striker Aritz Aduriz, who spent a season under Bielsa at Athletic Bilbao, credits the Argentine's coaching for the remarkable late-career blossoming that saw him score 104 of his 158 La Liga goals after the age of 30. Throughout his 30 years as a manager, Bielsa's methods have helped players scale new heights. Leeds fans have delighted in the dramatic improvements of players such as Mateusz Klich, captain Liam Cooper and Kalvin Phillips, who made his England debut in Denmark on Tuesday. So he and his fellow youth team coach Jorge Griffa divided the country into 70 territories, driving thousands of miles in Bielsa's little Fiat. If they liked a player, they would go and see them, no matter what time it was.

Bielsa inherited a club damaged by years of failure, where symbols of the past had a haunting quality. Take the swimming pool at Thorp Arch, which summed up the excesses of the Peter Ridsdale era around the turn of the millennium. Much of the book is made up of self-congratulatory passages like "It was this quote from Roberto Martinez in a lecture I presented for the World Football Academy, at the Expert Meeting in South Africa 2014, that left Anson Dorrance with the urge to be the first to come up to me after the presentation, shake my hand and express an interest in further discussing some of the ideas in the presentation". It was a huge change for us 15- or 16-year-old boys who were used to playing mostly for fun," says Lunari. "We were used to training for an hour and a half, but with Marcelo we trained for three hours with a level of concentration and physical intensity that we were not used to. Pardo believes Bielsa's aloofness towards players may explain a modest trophy haul of three Argentine league championships, one Olympic gold medal and the Championship title with Leeds. Some players, says the Mexican, need their manager to show them some love. The 25-metre bath was exactly that. Some Premier League clubs have pools that feature adjustable currents and moveable floors that can help with injury rehabilitation but the one at Leeds was simply a pool – ideal for Olympic hopefuls; benefits less obvious for footballers. Still, it was considered a good thing to have.The best chapter is on the ‘spy gate’ controversy. Here Rich carefully details what actually happened. In 2018, Bielsa sent a young intern to Derby County’s training grounds to spy on Derby’s pre-match training sessions. Once again Bielsa bore the brunt of the controversy, but Rich makes a convincing argument that sending one intern to an opposition training ground doesn’t mean Leeds are guaranteed a victory on match day. I don't have the intensity you need to be by his side," says Lunari. "I am passionate about football, but I am not thinking about the game 24 hours a day, and I believe that to be working next to him, one needs to have a special type of dedication. The effect that he has had on Leeds United, and on the city’s environs has been extraordinary. He has transformed a team floundering in mid table mediocrity in the Championship to Premiership heavyweights and fired the imagination of a whole region.

As a man, he demands very high performances of himself and his team, so you have to be alert every second. Every moment matters in every training session - every first touch, every strike, anything that happens is scrutinised and that makes you really aware in every training session. Marcelo Bielsa, ‘El Loco’, the Godfather of modern football, arrived as the new manager of Leeds United on 25 June 2018, the same day England thrashed Panama 6-0 at the World Cup in Russia. When Bielsa was announced as the new manager of Leeds, his appointment was met with fascination. How could a manager known as much for his eccentricity as his fast-paced, frenetic style of football, possibly succeed as this then unfashionable club, not least a club which is proud of its ‘northern’ English identity. But while his brother and sister followed family tradition by pursuing careers in law and politics - his brother Rafael is Argentina's ambassador to Chile - Bielsa became a student of football, dispatching his mother to the newsagents every day to gather up all the sports papers and magazines.Marcelo Bielsa is a highly respected coach and is famous for his innovative playing style, tactics and formations. He has had a massive influence on football across the world and on other top coaches, such as Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino, Jorge Sampaoli and Gerardo Martino. The aim of the book is to use the innovative tactics of Marcelo Bielsa to provide a complete guide of how to build up play effectively against high pressing teams. Former Mexico midfielder Pavel Pardo remembers Bielsa's delight at watching his young charges push through the pain barrier at Atlas Guadalajara, where he coached after leaving Newell's in 1993. That is why, for me, he is the best coach in the world. I am looking forward to seeing him in Lille next season. I am pretty sure his influence on their team, their club and their players will be huge - amazing." In my opinion, Klopp, Guardiola and Zidane are probably friendlier with the players," he says. "Marcelo Bielsa convinces the player about the system and gives us the tools, but the relationship we have as people needs to be close. He thinks players are machines, but we are humans as well."