Failure is inevitable when no one is allowed to fail

Of all the times for Marcelo Bielsa's Uruguay to go pure Wimbledon '88. England's performances at Euro 2024 have been a tough watch for many Leeds United fans who, seeking respite from Daniel Farke's safety-first football, have been confronted by Gareth Southgate's England and their wonky under-rehearsed replica. At least we could look across the Atlantic, to where Bielsa was admonishing the entire sport for crushing the joy from football — so that, "there will be fewer footballers who deserve to be watched" — as if he, too, was begging Farke to let Georginio Rutter run riot last season, or Southgate to cut Phil Foden loose.

To the Copa America quarter-final, then, Uruguay vs Brazil, finishing 26-15. On fouls. Uruguay also won 23-20 on tackles, 10-9 on interceptions, 18-16 on clearances, and 59-52 on long balls. When Uruguay's Nahitan Nández was sent off with sixteen minutes to play Bielsa took Darwin Nunez off, shut up shop entirely to get through ninety minutes at 0-0 and, without extra time in this tournament, won 4-2 on penalties. After the match, Bielsa was seen tenderly embracing his former Leeds winger Raphinha, as if the Brazilian forward line's ankles hadn't been a major part of his teamtalk two hours earlier. "[Football] does not protect that what is looked at is pleasant," Bielsa had said before the game. But even he can't always give way to o jogo bonito.

In tournament football you go through or you die. Southgate has spent all summer on that precipice, after saying he'll probably stop managing England if they don't win Euro 2024. That made his summer a speedrun of every managerial job ever, taking all the pressure he's avoided for much of the last seven years into his last month and finally grappling with the fact that every managerial appointment starts a countdown until that manager is sacked. Every minute England spend in a losing position, every minute Southgate isn't making a substitution, every minute Kalvin Phillips and Jack Grealish are watching from home, is another minute closer to it all coming to an end. It might end with a trophy, sure, but the only way to get there is to stay here. England's games have been agony this summer, but the most important factor for Southgate now is prolongment.

But this is what you get when even being good is no longer good enough. Take Daniel Farke last season. Without rehashing all the points 'n' goals stats now, Farke produced one of United's numerically best seasons of the modern era in 2023/24, and all he ended up doing was pushing himself closer to being sacked. It's no wonder it's so hard to find a coach without a nervous tic.

I was thinking about Farkeball last week because I looked up something I half-remembered reading about Daniel Farke at Norwich and the direction he wanted passes to go:

“Horizontal passes are not allowed in my football!”

This was after Norwich had given away a goal by trying a thirty yard square pass across the penalty area. Mine and maybe yours are not the only eyebrows to have been raised by this statement, and Farke was asked to explain more at the time:

“We have several principles and one is that I don’t like horizontal passes in the game. Square passes are actually not allowed because it makes no sense in moving the ball forward..."

Joe Rodon to Illan Meslier to Joe Rodon to Glen Kamara to Joe Rodon to Archie Gray to Joe Rodon to Glen Kamara to Illan Meslier says otherwise. Often this didn't make sense and now it seems like Farke agrees. 46 games of nonsense? Cool, rip it up and we'll do something else next season.

That's not quite what he means, though:

"...and they are also unbelievably difficult to save if you lose the ball. If you play the ball on the angle and you lose it, it is possible to win the next duel, but if you play a horizontal pass then no one is there to save the ball if there is a mistake. For that, horizontal passes are never allowed in my game — only in the case that they can promise it is a 100 per cent pass that reaches your team-mate."

This diktat against playing square is not, in fact, a bulletin in favour of forward, except in the sense that you can only go forward if you have the ball. It's about keeping the ball, and the fear of losing it, and the simple idea that 90 degrees is the worst angle to work with. Think about those passes at the back last season and it's true: a lot of them go from side-to-side but hardly ever at right-angles. They're a little forward or a little back, giving the next guy ways to turn to advance or protect possession. Farke is against horizontal passing for the most cautious reason you could name.

It's about control, and all Farke's football is about control, and that goal Norwich conceded to Stoke — one square pass, one goal — is evidence of how dangerous it can be to lose control even for a moment. Years ago, Howard Wilkinson said that a big part of being a manager is eliminating the influence of chance in a game. Back then, that could mean keeping the ball as far away from your goal as possible. Nowadays, with silk pitches, more skilful players and more protection from referees, it's about keep-ball at your end, waiting for a mistake to give you space at the other. To Daniel Farke, it's the best way of being attacking:

"I always want my players to be the protagonists on the pitch. I like us to be in possession ... more like Guardiola or Tuchel or like Bayern Munich ... When it’s so difficult to create chances against a solid defence, then the difference between a good team and a really good team is you are able to do it. And that’s my philosophy. We work a lot on controlling the game, the structure of possession and controlling the ball."

The idea is, keep the ball until you either create or are given a certain chance to score, then score. And until you have a certain chance to score, don't risk it. And the result, too often, is ninety minutes of hostile paranoia: two teams, one ostensibly defending and one sort-of attacking, united by fear of risks leading to mistakes, staling each others' mate until something either does or does not happen. In the meantime, the pass completion stats say we've had something good to watch. The hedonist in our hearts cries different.

And there's something wrong about this when even Pep Guardiola, the most praised manager in football, with the securest job in the game, is compelling some of the best players in the world to kill games with "20,000 million passes" before they even look at Jack Grealish. And if Guardiola has to play like this to win, what hope does someone like Farke have? Farke is compelled to follow the best example, who is compelled to play this way, and compelled feels like the right word, because this is an example of what Bielsa was speaking about, of more business meaning more pressure meaning more bad times.

At the Copa last week, Bielsa was actually being asked about the debates about refereeing decisions now football has video assistant referees. But his answers, about the pressure of excessive scrutiny, apply beyond just VAR:

"It hurts football a lot, [because in] football, as it is being interpreted, no one is allowed to fail. And because if someone fails you have to point it out and accuse them, that creates a series of conditions that psychologically operate on those [involved]."

Later he was asked about tactics, and how to keep taking risks and attacking:

"If the [tactical] system has few errors and produces quality in the offensive game, it will be valued. And if it has errors, it will be criticised. What happens is that there is something that is impossible. You cannot tell a player that, 'you have to go out playing, but it is impossible that you make a mistake'."

Mistakes have to be avoided because of the pressure and the scrutiny and the blame and the accusations. Or to put it another way, Lee Dixon's commentary. Another of Bielsa's points about VAR was that it reduces the game to analysing what is right and what is wrong, but that this makes the game predictable. "What we love [about football], over time it will lose its attraction," he says, and:

"I am sure that football is in a process of growth, that is, all the time football is being watched by more people. But over time it is becoming less attractive because it is not privileging the things that made this game the number one game in the world ... [Football] does not protect that what is looked at is pleasant."

The excitement of football could be protected, according to Bielsa, if the players were allowed to play without fear of scrutiny or feeling that the next mistake, the next bad result, will be disastrous:

"What we should do is ignore the scenario that they propose to us where the controversy, the discussion, the accusation, the determination of responsibility becomes an obsession. That worsens the climate in which you have to play football."

A climate worsened again, as Bielsa mentioned after the Brazil match, when you're coaching players in a short, intense tournament at the end of a year in which many of them have already played fifty or sixty games in eleven months and will do again in the next. All because, like with the scrutiny and the pressure and the blame, the organisations that profit from football are chasing as much cash as they can by putting on as many tournaments as possible and hyping them for all they're worth before anyone notices that the players are no longer mentally or physically capable of making a good product anymore.

That last part feels relevant to the Championship. Ethan Ampadu played 51 games for Leeds last season, plus seven for Wales. It's easier to understand him, then, trying to launch an attack in the 100th minute of the play-off final at Wembley, and booting the ball out of play. And it's easier to understand what Daniel Farke was trying to do, by telling the players to let the ball do the work to get them through 46 league games, to sit back when they can and not let games become too emotional, too draining. To tell them to play safe passes and not take risks, because the reaction to mistakes has become so extreme that avoiding them has become the priority. And besides, even while playing with an abundance of caution, Leeds finished with one of the best attacking records in the Championship. Perhaps because everyone who played them was terrified of the same things too? Either way, if playing safe keeps you here, it gives you a chance, in the end, of getting somewhere.

All this amounts to a few things to end on. First, everybody needs to chill out. Even Bielsa's Uruguay had to turn off the style to make sure they got through to a semi-final this weekend. That's a sign the pressure is too much. Secondly, that the sport would benefit from giving players more freedom to be players again. About his team's defending against Brazil, Bielsa tried taking himself out of the conversation, pointing out that this isn't the way he prefers to play but that the team had the benefit of players raised in Uruguayan football culture and taught how to defend at clubs around the world. This was as he said, last week, things should be: "Football is a cultural expression, a form of identification" — at least it is when the players are allowed to express themselves, to play the football they identify with. Uruguay stopping Brazil from playing is, actually, football heritage. Third, this is what Leeds United need next season — and what I'm not seeing linked, yet, in the limited transfer gossip available — a player, preferably for the midfield, who is brave enough to resist the pervading atmosphere of paranoia and play forward, to pass and run and shoot, to feel free to make mistakes, to take what should be the comfort provided by Farke's foundations and turn it into a weapon against even more fearful opposition.

A player who, in essence, can reduce the coach to what they should be: a relatively boring bystander to the action. An accusation levelled at Southgate, and Farke, is that they rely on players to bail them out of trouble. But the whole point of the game is about getting players to do stuff. Bailing coaches out is just a media problem, because they want someone to scrutinise, someone to blame, a consistent and easy to follow storyline about whether there's a good guy there or a bad guy. This is why Carlo Ancelotti seems such a mystery, as people wonder whether Real Madrid are a good team or a bad team, if he's a good coach or not. Suave and relaxed on the touchline as, quite often, his teams go full Southgate in front of him, Ancelotti's power is in helping and trusting. There's a problem? The players are good players, and well prepared, so see first if they can sort it out. If it isn't solved, move some players around or off the bench, and let them sort it out. Part of Daniel Farke's frustration with Leeds United's actually very potent attack last season was that he, a former striker, couldn't get on the pitch to finish off chances himself, and that ultimately this could cost him his job. But look at Ancelotti and see how much easier it is when you leave that stuff to the players. ⭑彡